Question 1

What does MarginMap actually do?

Accepted Answer

It resolves marketplace listings to canonical product variants, normalises each offer to landed cost, compares that cost against recency-weighted completed sales, and scores the result for buyers or resellers — with the underlying evidence attached to every figure.

Question 2

Where does the data come from?

Accepted Answer

Registered data sources with attribution and a refresh policy, visible in the workspace settings. Each offer, completed sale and market snapshot records its source and observation time, and the interface surfaces staleness rather than hiding it.

Question 3

Is the AI making up prices?

Accepted Answer

No. All scoring, medians, landed cost and margin arithmetic is deterministic and auditable. The analyst layer reads those computed numbers plus the evidence rows and writes an explanation — it cannot originate a price.

Question 4

Do I need an account?

Accepted Answer

The marketing pages are public. The workspace requires an account because watchlists, deal evaluations, pipeline items and research reports are private to you.

Question 5

Can I use it outside the seeded categories?

Accepted Answer

The current catalog covers cameras, laptops, consoles, collectibles and guitars. The identity, landed-cost and comparables machinery is category-agnostic; coverage expands as sources are added.

Question 6

What happens when a listing cannot be matched?

Accepted Answer

It is stored and viewable as raw evidence, flagged unresolved, and excluded from every statistic. MarginMap prefers a smaller honest comp set over a larger contaminated one.

Question 7

Does landed cost include marketplace fees?

Accepted Answer

No. Fees are a sell-side cost and belong to the reseller evaluation, not the purchase price. Mixing them produces double-counting.

Question 8

Why 90 days?

Accepted Answer

It is long enough to gather a usable sample in most categories and short enough that a price trend is not averaged away. Recency weighting means recent sales dominate regardless.

Question 9

Can I export the evidence?

Accepted Answer

The evidence set behind every saved research report is persisted with the report, so the record set is reproducible after the fact.

Question 10

Are fee schedules editable?

Accepted Answer

Yes. The evaluator ships with per-marketplace defaults and every rate is overridable for your own negotiated or store-subscription rates.

Question 11

Are fee schedules kept current?

Accepted Answer

Defaults are versioned with an effective date shown in the evaluator. Because rates change without much notice, overrides always win over defaults.

Question 12

Where do photos fit?

Accepted Answer

Photo count and resolution feed listing-quality signals that affect trust scoring. They do not automatically set a grade.

Question 13

Is the pipeline shared across a team?

Accepted Answer

Workspace data is private to your account today. Multi-seat sharing is not enabled.

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