The short version
- A pricing sheet and a supplier log cover almost everything a brand new dropshipping shop actually needs to track, before any dedicated software is worth paying for.
- The pricing sheet exists to stop a guessed price - it forces every real cost onto the page before a sell price is chosen, not after.
- The supplier log exists to catch drift - a price creeping up, a dispatch time slipping - the kind of change that is invisible from memory but obvious once written down and checked against.
- Neither needs to be sophisticated. A handful of columns, checked regularly, beats an elaborate spreadsheet nobody actually keeps up to date.
Why two, and why these two specifically
It is tempting to build one all-purpose spreadsheet trying to track everything at once, and it is also usually why people stop updating it within a fortnight. Two separate, narrower sheets, each answering one specific question, tend to actually survive contact with a busy week. The pricing sheet answers "what should this sell for, and does it still make sense." The supplier log answers "is this supplier still behaving the way they were when I first checked them." Between them, they cover the two things that most reliably go wrong in a new shop - a price that was never actually worked out properly, and a supplier that quietly changes without anyone noticing until a margin disappears or a delivery runs late. Both problems share the same underlying cause worth naming plainly: neither a bad price nor a drifting supplier tends to announce itself clearly. Each one is discovered by looking, deliberately, at a number that was written down - never by simply feeling like something might be off.
The pricing sheet: forcing every cost onto the page
The columns that actually matter here are the ones that make a guessed price impossible to hide behind: the supplier's cost, eBay's final value fee for that category, the fixed per-order fee, postage cost, and only then the sell price and what is actually left once every one of those has been subtracted - see the fee calculator for the exact current rates to build this against. The point of laying it out this way, rather than jumping straight to "what feels like a fair price," is that it makes an unrealistic margin visible immediately, in the sheet, before a single listing goes live - not three weeks later when the bank balance does not match what felt like a healthy run of sales.
A spreadsheet cannot stop you pricing something badly. It can make it very hard to do so without noticing.
Worth adding one more column many first-timers skip: a rough return-rate assumption for the category, even a guessed 2-5%, deducted from the expected margin rather than treated as a surprise if and when it happens. A category that looks like it clears 25% on paper but regularly sees a chunk of orders returned is not actually a 25% category in practice, and the sheet is the place to be honest about that before real money is committed to stock decisions built on the optimistic number. A simple way to build this in without overcomplicating the sheet is a single "adjusted margin" column that multiplies the raw margin by an estimated fulfillment rate - a 25% margin at an assumed 95% fulfillment rate (accounting for a rough 5% return allowance) becomes a more honest 23.75% on the page, small enough to feel pedantic on one product and large enough to matter across a whole month's volume.
The supplier log: catching drift before it becomes a pattern
The second sheet is simpler in structure but arguably more valuable over time: a running log, one row per check, of a supplier's price, stock status, and stated dispatch time, dated each time it is actually looked at. Vetting a supplier once, at the start, tells you almost nothing about whether they are still the same supplier three months later - and a log is the only reliable way to notice a price that has crept up in small, easy-to-miss steps, or a dispatch time that has quietly slipped from "next day" to "two to three days" without ever being announced as a change.
The habit that actually makes this sheet worth keeping is not the columns, it is the discipline of updating it at the same time every week - a recurring ten-minute slot on a fixed day works better in practice than a vague intention to "check suppliers regularly," which tends to quietly stop happening the first time a busy week gets in the way rather than only when something has already gone wrong. A log with one entry per supplier from three months ago is not a log, it is a single stale data point - the value comes specifically from being able to look back across several checks and see a trend, not from having captured a number once. This is worth treating as seriously as the pricing sheet itself, even though it feels like the less urgent of the two at first - a wrong price is discovered quickly, once real sales start, where a slowly drifting supplier can run for months producing numbers that still look broadly fine, right up until the trend has already done real, cumulative damage to a margin nobody was watching closely enough to notice moving. A genuinely useful addition, once the habit is established, is a simple color rule - a cost cell that turns amber once it has risen more than 5% from where it started, or a dispatch-time cell that turns red once it has slipped beyond the postage policy built on it - so a scan down the sheet catches the trend at a glance, rather than requiring a mental calculation against several weeks of numbers every single time it is checked.
A worked example: the pricing sheet catching a bad idea early
Take a bookcase costing £45 from the supplier, in a category with a 12.8% final value fee plus a 30p per-order fee, and £8 postage. Priced with a gut feeling at £69.99 because "that sounds about right," the sheet shows the real position immediately: £45 cost, roughly £9.86 in fees, £8 postage, leaving £7.13 - a margin of just over 10%, not the comfortable-feeling number the price itself implied. Seeing that laid out in a sheet before the listing goes live is the difference between discovering it in month three, once fifty of these have already sold at a thinner margin than assumed, and adjusting the price - or finding a better supplier cost - before the first one ever ships. The sheet did not make the decision. It just refused to let the real number stay hidden behind a price that felt fine.
A worked example: the supplier log catching drift
Take a supplier checked weekly for two months, with a cost logged each time: £45.00, £45.00, £46.50, £47.20, £48.00, £48.90, £49.75, £51.10. No single week's rise looks alarming - each is a small, easily-dismissed increase. Looked at only from memory, a seller might describe this supplier as "roughly the same as when I started." Looked at in the log, the cost has actually risen by over 13% across two months, which - if the sell price was never revisited alongside it - has quietly eaten more than half the margin from the worked example above without a single dramatic moment that would have prompted a seller to notice and react. The log's value is entirely in making that slow trend visible, since it is genuinely invisible from memory alone.
What these two sheets deliberately do not try to cover
Neither is meant to replace proper bookkeeping, tax records, or tracking individual returns and cases - those need their own, more formal record for genuinely different reasons, not a column bolted onto a pricing sheet as an afterthought. The two sheets here are deliberately narrow: they exist to answer two specific, recurring questions well, not to become a single sprawling document trying to be the whole business's record-keeping system at once. A sheet that tries to do everything usually ends up doing nothing particularly well, and abandoned within a month. Keeping the two deliberately separate also makes each one easier to actually finish building in the first place - a pricing sheet with five columns done properly is genuinely useful from the first product entered, where an ambitious all-in-one tracker half-built across several sittings often never gets used at all.
When a spreadsheet genuinely stops being enough
For a handful of products from one or two suppliers, checked once a week, a spreadsheet is completely adequate, and there is no need to reach for anything more sophisticated before that is actually true. The point it starts to strain is not a fixed number of products, it is when checking and updating both sheets by hand starts taking real, noticeable time out of a week rather than a few minutes - at that point, the manual version of exactly what these two sheets were already trying to do is worth automating, rather than trying harder to keep a growing manual sheet current. Sellhelm's own product and supplier tracking is, functionally, this same pricing-and-supplier-log idea, kept current automatically rather than by hand - the underlying questions being answered do not change, just how much of the checking still needs doing manually. There is no failure in reaching that point either, and no need to feel behind for having started with a spreadsheet in the first place - the two sheets described here are not a lesser version of proper tools, they are the same discipline those tools eventually automate, learned by hand first, which tends to make the move to software a genuine time-saving upgrade rather than a leap of faith into a system nobody yet understands the reasoning behind.
Questions people ask
What two spreadsheets should a new dropshipper build first?
A pricing sheet that lays out every real cost - supplier price, eBay fees, postage - against the sell price, and a supplier log tracking price, stock and dispatch time at each check. Together they cover the two most common early mistakes: a guessed price and an unnoticed supplier change.
What columns actually matter on a dropshipping pricing sheet?
Supplier cost, eBay’s final value fee for that category, the fixed per-order fee, postage cost, sell price, and what is actually left once everything is subtracted - plus a rough return-rate assumption for the category, so the margin is realistic rather than optimistic.
How often should a supplier log actually be updated?
On a fixed weekly schedule, not only when something already looks wrong. The value of the log comes from comparing several checks over time to spot a trend, not from a single snapshot taken once and left unchecked.
When should I stop using a spreadsheet and use software instead?
When keeping both sheets current by hand starts taking real, noticeable time out of your week, not at a fixed number of products. At that point, the same two questions the sheets were already answering are worth automating rather than manually maintained for longer.
Can one spreadsheet cover pricing, suppliers and bookkeeping together?
It is usually better not to. A single sheet trying to do everything tends to get abandoned within weeks - two narrow sheets, each answering one specific question, are far more likely to actually stay updated.