Offer Suite vs a spreadsheet

Where a spreadsheet wins

• It is free and already open. For a first bundle or a one-off promotion, a spreadsheet is often enough.
• It models anything you can write a formula for, including costs Offer Suite has no kind for yet.
• Everyone on the team can read it, change it and argue with it.

Where it breaks

• Costs change. A spreadsheet holds one unit cost per product; when a supplier invoice changes it, last quarter's margins change with it, or they are never updated. Offer Suite keeps what each order cost at the sale and restates past orders traceably.
• Renewals, refunds and cancellations arrive after the sheet was written. Realized profit per option needs every order's own lines, refunds and renewals, not the price you planned.
• The price in the sheet is not always the price at checkout. A discount set up wrong can charge full price, or stack. Offer Suite publishes an offer only after a real Shopify cart charges what it promises.
• The sheet can't publish. Someone still has to build each discount, gift line and cart rule in Shopify by hand, and keep them in step with the sheet.

If your history is in a spreadsheet

• Past orders come from Shopify, not from the sheet. After installing, a brand imports its store's orders from a year back by default, or from any earlier date it asks for; until the store grants Shopify's read_all_orders access, only the last 60 days. Each order is costed at the costs in effect on its date, net of refunds with cancelled orders left out, and counts toward profit per item. Imported orders don't count toward any offer, because a past order carries no offer link.
• Costs come from the sheet, as a CSV, into the dated cost ledger. An import is all or nothing: one bad row refuses the file and lists what is wrong, unless it is sent with partial=1, which imports the rows that pass and lists the rest. A row can take an effective date in the past, and every write restates the past orders it affects.

Questions