17/06/2026
She Asked For a Rufus Audit I said To Bin It 🤔
Was just in a team meeting and there was about to be a sales call. The potential client asked for a Rufus audit (we offer that)
I looked at notes and it was clear a Rufus audit was the last thing she needed.
Her situation:
4,700 SKUs
11% net
£120k a month sales - busy, stressed, lost, sales declining.
Just realised her net profit was 11% (before she'd properly factored returns, staffing and freight, so it's probably worse). I took the call and told her not to bother with the Rufus audit.
This was not at all a passive £12k a month this was a manufacturing, multi person full time job.
As a manufacturer, a baseline net profit should be 20% IMO.
Why the listing audit was the wrong tool
A Rufus rewrite is the cherry on top. You put it on once the cake is baked. At a sub-10% real margin, prettier listings just send more traffic into a catalogue that loses money in places she can't yet see.
That's a pill for a problem that needs surgery.
Where the money actually is, in order
✅ Profit by SKU first: cost of goods
✅ returns and FBA fees against every one of the 4,700, not a blended average. You can't fix what you haven't segmented.
✅ Follow the ad spend: £10k a month, and she couldn't tell me which SKUs it fed. Money pointed at the wrong shelf is money gone.
✅ Cut ruthlessly: the SKUs that only make you busy come off the catalogue.
✅ Then the real levers: B2B, bundles, pack sizes, landed cost. All before you touch a single image.
The number that should sting: at 11% net, £100k a month is about £11k take-home. Get the same revenue to 20% (not a big leap on your own products) and that's £20k: £9k more a month, £108k a year, without selling one extra unit.
In fact I would hope she will sell LESS units.
And there's a clock on the cosmetic work:
Amazon announced in June it's cutting title length to 75 characters from 27 July 2026, every category bar media. That hits all 4,700 of her listings. She didn't know.
Do this if you have a lot of skus
✅ Pull a profit-by-SKU report with COGS, returns and FBA fees against each ASIN, not a blended margin.
✅ Map every advertised SKU to its contribution, not its sales; pause spend on anything you can't trace to profit.
✅ List your bottom 20% of SKUs by contribution and decide what gets cut this month or what can be price increased.
THEN look at the cool stuff.
The pattern I see most weeks: a busy, stressed seller reaching for a shiny add-on while a sub-10% margin quietly bleeds them.
The fix is never another tool.
It's knowing your numbers before you spend the next pound.
Clarity cost her one call; the alternative is another year at 11%, and 11% compounds the wrong way.
I am going to offer an audit sprint over two months.
It won't be cheap but will be guaranteed value add.
If she wants to then handle the work internally, she should do so.
But I cannot offer a Rufus audit to her and feel ok about it.