Support
Questions, problems and how the numbers are worked out.
Getting help
Email support@costsonar.com. You will get a reply within one business day.
If something looks wrong with a specific product, include its SKU or product title. That is usually enough to find it straight away.
What the app does
Shopify stores one cost per inventory item. When you change it, the previous value is gone — and every margin you calculated before that change is quietly wrong, with nothing to tell you. CostSonar records each change as it happens, so the history survives, and it flags products you are currently selling for less than they cost you.
How the numbers are worked out
Below cost
The variant’s selling price is lower than its unit cost. The figure shown is the loss on a single unit sold: cost minus price. The list is sorted by the biggest loss first.
Thin margin
The variant still makes money, but the margin is under 15% of the selling price. Margin percentage is (price − cost) ÷ price.
No cost set
No unit cost has been entered for the item. These are worth attention because a product with no cost is invisible in every profit report — it silently looks like pure profit. A cost of zero is treated as “not filled in” rather than “free”, because in practice that is what it means.
What is left out on purpose
Archived and draft products are skipped. They cannot be bought, so warning you about them is noise — and noise is what makes people stop opening an app.
Common questions
Does the app change anything in my store?
No. It asks for two read-only permissions and has no ability to write. It cannot alter a price, a cost, a product or an order.
Why does a product show a cost I did not set?
Costs come straight from Shopify’s inventory item unit cost — the same field you see under a variant in the admin. If it looks wrong there, it will look wrong here.
My catalogue changed. When does the app notice?
Cost changes reach the app through Shopify’s webhooks, usually within seconds, and are recorded when they arrive. The overview screen shows the result of the last full scan. It tells you when a price or a product’s status has changed since then, and if you open it more than ten minutes after that scan it repeats the scan by itself; you can also press Check again at any time. Large catalogues scan in the background, so the screen stays usable while it runs.
When do I get an email?
Only when a product that was making money stops making money because its cost went up or its price went down. The catalogue is also checked once a day, so a change Shopify did not announce is still caught. Stores that Shopify marks as development stores do not receive alert emails; the same information is shown inside the app. A product that has been selling below cost for months already appears on the overview screen; repeating it by email every day would turn the alerts into noise. The same item will not trigger another email for 7 days.
Can I send alerts to a different address?
No. They go to your store owner address as Shopify holds it. Change it in Shopify and the alerts follow. This limit exists so the app cannot be used to send mail to people who never asked for it.
What is the difference between the plans?
CostSonar is free for now. It checks your first 100 variants, and cost history and email alerts are included. Pro, for catalogues up to 50,000 variants, is not on sale yet: if you want it, press I want Pro under Plans in the app. That charges nothing. If Pro goes on sale, cost history and email alerts may become part of it, and nothing is ever charged unless you approve a subscription in Shopify.
What happens to my data if I uninstall?
Everything belonging to your store is deleted starting 48 hours after you uninstall, when Shopify sends us the deletion notice. See the privacy policy for the detail.