Ask a struggling reseller what they paid for a pallet and they'll quote you the invoice price. Ask a profitable one and they'll quote you landed cost — the invoice plus everything it took to turn that pallet into sellable, listed inventory. The gap between those two numbers is where margins quietly disappear.
Freight is not a footnote. Shipping a pallet across the country can add real per-unit cost, and it varies by weight, zone, and season. A load that pencils out at the invoice price can go underwater once freight lands. Get the shipping number before you commit, not after.
Prep labor is a cost even when you do it yourself. Testing, cleaning, repackaging, labeling, catalog-matching — every one of those is time, and time is money whether you're paying an employee or eating it yourself. Returns-heavy manifests carry more of it. Price it in.
Marketplace and fulfillment fees come off the top. Referral fees, FBA/WFS fees, and returns all shrink your realized revenue. Your real margin is sale price minus fees minus landed cost — not sale price minus invoice.
Dead stock has a carrying cost. The units that don't sell aren't break-even — they're a loss that eats into the winners. A realistic landed-cost model assumes some percentage never moves and prices the winners to cover it.
Run the full number: invoice + freight + prep + fees + a dead-stock allowance. If the load still clears your margin threshold after all of that, it's a real deal. If it only works at the invoice price, it was never a deal — just an invoice.
NPP shows you MOQ and live pricing on every item up front, so you can run landed cost before you buy. Do the full math. The good loads survive it.