ACU (Average Cost per Unit)
ACU (Average Cost per Unit) is your true landed cost per item: everything spent to produce, prep, and transport one saleable unit to a warehouse, divided by the units received. Manufacturing, inbound freight, customs duties, inspection, and prep fees — all in the denominator, none forgotten.
What is ACU?
ACU (Average Cost per Unit) is your true landed cost per item: everything spent to produce, prep, and transport one saleable unit to a warehouse, divided by the units received. Manufacturing, inbound freight, customs duties, inspection, and prep fees — all in the denominator, none forgotten.
It’s the floor of your entire pricing strategy. Below ACU, every sale is a loss whatever the dashboard says. Sellers who compute it partially — factory price only — walk around believing in margins that don’t exist, and then discover them missing at the worst moments.
The two formulas you need
The direct calculation, per purchase batch:
Why partial ACU is the most expensive accounting error
The fees people forget are predictable: ocean freight allocation, duty at the HTS rate, inspection, poly-bagging and labelling, the units damaged in transit and never sellable. Individually small; together often 20–35% on top of the factory price. A repricing floor built on factory price alone lets algorithms and price wars walk you straight into selling at a genuine loss — volume rising while the business bleeds. Recompute ACU every time freight rates, tariffs, or supplier prices move; last year’s number is this year’s fiction.
In practice
A seller imports 2,000 units: factory price $6.20, freight allocation $1.10, duty $0.48, prep $0.22 — and 60 units arrive crushed. ACU = $15,600 ÷ 1,940 usable = $8.04, not the $6.20 their repricer assumed. At a $19.99 price with 15% referral and $5.10 fulfilment, the real margin is $3.65 — enough to work with. Priced off $6.20, they’d have “won” a price war straight into the ground.
How Harpy Media helps
We build per-SKU unit economics as the foundation of every engagement — because every strategy we run (PPC, pricing, launches) is only as good as the ACU number underneath it.
ACU FAQ
What is Average Cost per Unit on Amazon?
Your fully landed cost per saleable unit — production, freight, duties, and prep divided by usable units received — the true floor for pricing.
How do I calculate ACU across multiple shipments?
Use the weighted average: total cost of all inventory on hand divided by total units on hand — it blends batches bought at different prices honestly.
Why does my real margin differ from my calculated margin?
Almost always forgotten costs: freight allocation, duties, prep fees, and transit damage. Full ACU accounting closes that gap.
Related terms
Landed CostCOGS (Cost of Goods Sold)PPPU (Pure Profit per Unit)CPPU (Cost per Purchased Unit)Want these numbers watched for you, every week?
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