If that's where you got the base price per plaque, you should know that the link shows $13, whereas your spreadsheets show $12.65. At 881 chips total, you've missed $308.35 in costs. Is there another source?
If that's where you got the p5woody figure, then your spreadsheet is mistaken, showing $150 instead of $300 for him. This implies your $20 Plaque tab is short $150 in costs, and the $100 Plaque tab is short by $150.
With just these two sets corrections, there's already $608.35 less profit.
Regarding packaging and time:
True, but there is both fact (the vendor has disclosed expenses and costs for the first transaction and clearly did not have a line item for his time), and a reasonable extrapolation that time shouldn't be included (the vendor didn't change the price in the subsequent sales so there was no reason to add a line item for time).
It's one thing to donate your time to a first Group Buy which enables you to get something you otherwise couldn't. It's another to run another two group buys for things you may not personally need... why should that time be donated, necessarily?
If he's a vendor, none of this applies. He just said $18, it's $18. But we're talking about your spreadsheets, which are really made from the question of how much it's profiting/costing him if it's a Group Buy, and which was made before he was declared a vendor.
For reference, I just did a tiny GOCC group buy for a Nine Dragons add-on. I only had to ship to three people. It took me just over an an hour to pack them, and I f*cked up the shipping, anyway. I don't want to think about how much time I spent managing the order thread, following up on the payments with everyone, running the questions and the order with GOCC... and I didn't need to talk to anyone about art or revisions. I still f*cked up the order. And then I spent an hour to pack the stuff tightly into SFRBs, trying to save people a few dollars in shipping... which I then sent to the wrong addresses, so I refunded them double the shipping. In the end, I paid for double shipping their chips, and I paid hugely in my time.
If everybody lost a a comparable amount of time and money on regular group buy as I did on my tiny one, nobody would run a second group buy.
Still it's a $15,000+ venture (based on his $18 per unit price), which some could believe is venturing into "true vendor" landia. I don't have an opinion either way. Importantly, the board moderators have concluded that he's a vendor and that's all that really matters.
If the mods have concluded he's a vendor and that's all that matters, then the spreadsheet doesn't matter; but you posted the spreadsheet in this thread, anyway. So maybe you do think it matters.
You projected a $1,819.00, or 13.33%, profit on $15,473.00 in sales. Although you labelled it a "Minimum Profit," it was apparently overstated by at least $608.35, so it's only 7.8% profit - and that's before accounting for materials (minor) and labor (in my mind, major) or settling discrepancies, damage, loss (hopefully, those will be minor for him, unlike my f*ck ups.) And there may still be other fees we're not aware of. He wasn't posting any invoices, that I saw.
Or maybe your assumptions are actually right, and he's been cagey with his posts on the details. I can't truly tell.
To be clear - I'm not actually defending him. I don't agree with several of the calls he made. And I'm not complaint-free on the outcome. But I know that it's all too easy to make a few wrong assumptions in a spreadsheet, and come out making some erroneously inflated claims... I can also make some only-slightly-silly assumptions and make it look like he has a loss. The margin here is fairly thin.
Meanwhile, he has done a ton of work and will do a ton more. And people are happily lining up to pay $18 per for the plaques. I was offered plaques at $18 per, I was one of the first to sign on to make for a group big enough to hit the minimum, I paid $18 per, and I got them. Without him running this buy for the group, I would not have a set of very, very lovely plaques.
I'd rather this thread had stayed on the subject you opened it with, but I guess it was inevitable that people would end up asking why the question... Now I'm feeling guilty about taking it further down the road. Sigh. I feel post-committed, though.
