Test a Product, Price It, Keep the Margin

The routine to run before every product: demand, landed cost, VAT mode, margin floor, small test.

Launch basics

Most new Egyptian stores do not fail because of a bad ad. They fail because the owner spent real money on a product that could never make money once cash on delivery, courier trips and returns took their cut.

Run this before every new product: read the demand, work out your real cost, set a floor you will not sell below, then buy a small piece of evidence.

Step 1: Read the demand before you spend

Test a product only when people are already looking for it.

Search in all three scripts. Egyptians search in Arabic, English and Franco — Arabic typed in Latin letters. The same buyer may type "فستان سواريه", "soiree dress" and "fostan". Our lesson on search keywords shows how.
What moves on social. A product people screenshot to a friend has demand built in.
Will they buy it twice? A refill gives you a second sale with no second ad cost.
Competitors who are winning, not just present. A crowded field all cutting prices means the margin is gone.

Step 2: Put your real cost in the admin

Storix keeps a Cost field next to Price and Sale price in Pricing & Inventory, and on every variant row. Fill it in, and your margin lives in the admin, not a spreadsheet you forget to update.

Cost means landed cost, not the invoice: add shipping to your door, customs if you import, and any dollar swing. Divide by the units that arrive sellable, not the units you ordered.

Step 3: Decide whether your prices include VAT

This one line changes every number below it. Open Accounting → Tax & Invoices and look at VAT calculation. Default VAT rate (%) is 14 on a new store. Pricing mode is either Tax-exclusive — shelf price is net, VAT added at checkout — or Tax-inclusive, where the shelf price already contains it.

If you are tax-inclusive and calculate margin on the shelf price, you are counting the government's money as profit. The arithmetic is in pricing with VAT and margin.

Step 4: Set a margin floor that survives Egypt

Price is not what you wish to charge. It is what survives what the market takes. Build the floor from four real costs.

Landed cost. The number from step 2.
The cash-on-delivery round trip. Some COD orders get refused at the door, and you pay the courier both ways. As a rule of thumb, price as if 15 to 25 percent never collect a piastre. Our guide to reducing COD returns explains how to shrink that.
What one customer costs to win. Ad money comes straight out of margin, so a product that only sells near cost has no room to advertise.
A cushion worth your time. As a rule of thumb, anything left under roughly 30 percent after all of that is punishing to scale here.

Those two percentages come from the market, not from a setting in your admin. Replace them with your own once you have thirty real orders.

Step 5: Buy a small piece of evidence

Once a product clears the demand check and the floor, prove it cheaply. You are buying information, not sales.

Cap the spend. A few hundred to a couple of thousand EGP, an amount you can be wrong about.
Sell the real thing at the real price. Test a discount and you learn nothing about what people will pay.
Count deliveries, not clicks. Strong clicks with high COD refusal is a failed test.
Decide in days. If the test brings paying customers and your floor holds, scale it.

Keep four numbers for every product: landed cost, refusal rate, ad cost per order, and what is left. Review them monthly. Storix keeps a cost against every variant, so your real margin stays in the admin. Start free.