LotCost – Purchase Lot Costs for WooCommerce

Description

If you resell second-hand or one-of-a-kind pieces (thrift and vintage, antiques, estate sales, auction lots, liquidation pallets), you buy a lot for one price and sell it piece by piece. WooCommerce can only hold a cost per product, so the margin it shows is wrong until someone works out what each piece really cost.

LotCost does that sharing for you and connects it to the Cost of Goods Sold field that comes with WooCommerce 10.3 and later.

How it works

1. Record a lot: the price you paid, the shipping, other costs (fees, taxes), where you bought it and when.
2. Pick the pieces it holds from your WooCommerce products (simple products, or the variations of a variable product). A piece can hold several identical units.
3. Choose how the cost is shared: in equal parts, in proportion to the selling prices, or by hand (LotCost tells you how much is still to give out). The shares always add up to the lot total, to the cent.
4. One click writes each piece’s cost into WooCommerce. Orders, WooCommerce reports and anything else that reads the Cost of Goods Sold field use it from then on.

What you get

• Unlimited lots and pieces, free. No quota, no trial, no paid tier.
• Three ways to share a cost: equal parts, by selling price, by hand.
• A fixed cost on a piece: it is taken out of the lot first and the rest is shared.
• Lots with costs still to come (a shipping invoice that has not arrived): marked until you confirm them.
• A status for every lot: up to date, to write, or incomplete (a piece has no cost, costs 0, or is gone from the store).
• An estimate of how much of each lot has come back, by lot and by source, read from your stock: a piece counts as sold when it has left your stock. No order is read.
• CSV export of your lots and the cost of every piece.
• Nothing is sent anywhere. All data stays in your WordPress database.

Good to know

• LotCost needs WooCommerce 10.3 or later, and the Cost of Goods Sold feature turned on (WooCommerce > Settings > Advanced > Features). LotCost tells you when it is off and links to the setting.
• Costs are written to the Cost of Goods Sold field of the product, or of each variation. The “additive” option of variations is switched off on the variations LotCost writes, so the cost WooCommerce uses is exactly the cost LotCost computed.
• A piece with a cost of 0 or without a cost is never written.
• A product (or variation) belongs to one lot only, since it has one cost in WooCommerce.
• Existing orders are never modified.
• Amounts are handled in hundredths of the store currency.

Source code

The admin page is written in TypeScript and React and built with @wordpress/scripts. The source is in the src/ folder of the plugin. To rebuild the files in build/, run npm install and then npm run build in the plugin folder.