Product
Supplier
Sourcing terms, observed listing prices, margin basis and expected unit economics.
What the surface does
Supplier is the sourcing desk for the product you claimed. It states the price you will sell at, the lowest listing actually observed for the same product, the basis of the undercut, the margin and the basis of the margin, the expected unit cost and profit, and the listings the comparison was drawn from.
The mechanism
Pricing works from observed listings. The engine gathers listings for the same product, establishes the lowest one it can stand behind, and sets your price below it. The undercut is a measured quantity and is stated flatly. The margin is computed against a supplier cost that is declared by the owner, and it carries that provenance wherever it appears — it is never dressed as a retrieved figure.
Every comparison also states what it is matched on. A listing whose capacity, size or rating differs from your unit is not a price for your unit, so the basis is written out rather than left to be inferred. Prices carry the date they were checked, through one resolver shared by the offer screen, the store and the support agent, so the three cannot disagree about how fresh a number is.
When the offer is withheld
There is no default price and no placeholder. Each refusal is a named state with a diagnosis in three parts — what happened, why, and what happens next — and the next line names who acts.
| State | What it means |
|---|---|
| Not enough listings to price against | Too few matching listings to observe a range. The offer appears when enough of the same product is on sale. |
| Retail sources did not answer | Our retrieval failed, not the market. Named as ours. |
| Observed set spans markets | The prices found are for different variants we cannot separate. Withheld rather than priced against the wrong one. |
| Observation stale | The last check has aged past what we will assert and could not be refreshed. |
Floors, bundles and disclosed exceptions
Base pricing holds a fifty per cent margin floor. Because prices sit exactly at that floor, a two-unit bundle discount necessarily lands beneath it — which the product states rather than hides. Where a discount breaks the floor, the resulting margin travels with the deal and is shown to you, along with the arithmetic to recompute it. A discount whose margin is not stated is precisely the silent breach this rule exists to prevent.
Costs excluded from the margin are enumerated on the offer itself. The offer states what it does not include; it does not quietly fold an estimate in.
Honest limits
- Supplier cost is owner-declared, not retrieved. That is the single largest caveat on any margin figure shown.
- Where a pre-shortage baseline price has not been established, the undercut is measured against today’s elevated price only, and says so.
- Landed-cost, customs and duty figures are never asserted anywhere in the product, including in support replies.
- Listing observations decay. A price too old to stand behind is withdrawn, not shown with a caveat.
The price this surface produces is the number the storefront and the ad are built on. See the store engine next, or pricing for what FlowFinds itself costs.