MOQ, samples, landed cost, and margins

MOQ is the smallest production quantity a supplier will accept under the quoted conditions. It can apply per order, per color, per size, per flavor, per component, or per packaging configuration, and those are very different commitments.

Ask which constraint actually creates the minimum, and whether several variants can share it. A 1,000-unit MOQ that splits across four colors is a different business from one that means 1,000 of each.

A sample validates some of the specification, not the whole production process. Confirm whether it was made with production materials and production tooling, because a hand-made approximation can hide the problems you most need to see.

Record who owns molds, dies, plates, patterns, source files, and reusable packaging components. Tooling ownership decides whether you can take the product to another factory later, and it is much easier to agree before the invoice than after a dispute.

Landed cost is what it costs to get one sellable unit to the place where fulfillment starts. Product cost, packaging, inspection, freight, insurance, duties, customs fees, and expected loss or defects all belong in it.

This is the number to price from. The factory quote is an input to it, not a substitute for it, and the difference between the two is where first-time margins disappear.

Contribution margin subtracts variable order costs from net revenue. Include discounts, payment fees, pick and pack, outbound shipping subsidies, returns, replacements, royalties, platform fees, and variable support costs.

Free shipping is the line most often forgotten, because it appears as a marketing decision rather than a cost. It is a cost, and it scales with every order.

Modeling in a spreadsheet is useful and it is not the same as pricing against an actual product. In Dough the price breakdown shows the product cost, the platform and payment fees, how shipping is treated, and the profit left at a given price, for the specific product you built.

There is also a floor: Dough rejects a selling price below the product’s viable cost, which catches the most common first-launch mistake before customers can buy at it. If you offer free shipping above a subtotal, model that threshold too, because it changes the margin on exactly the orders you were hoping to encourage.

Recalculate with a lower selling price, higher freight, a delayed shipment, a defect allowance, slower sales, and one extra sample round. Any single one of those is ordinary. Two at once is common.

Keep working capital separate from profit. Suppliers, carriers, and payment processors settle on different schedules, and a profitable product can still run you out of cash in the middle of a production run.

Model a conservative case, an expected case, and an upside case. The point is not to predict the future accurately. It is to find out which assumptions, if wrong, make the launch unviable.

Those are the assumptions to test first, and pre-orders are a cheap way to test the demand-side ones before any of the commitments become irreversible.