Not every action needs the same certainty about cost. Cost confidence tiers match the reversibility of an action to the confidence you have in its economics. Every unit cost Magistry holds carries a tier, and the catalog engine reads that tier before it decides what it may do with a product.
The three tiers
- Tier A, verified: a cost from Shopify's Cost per item field, a supplier spreadsheet or quote you upload on the Costs page, or a cost you enter yourself. Margin-based actions are allowed.
- Tier B, estimated: a cost that came from a lookup rather than from you or your supplier. It waits on the Costs page until you approve or reject it, and price actions wait with it.
- Tier C, unknown: no cost on record. The product is flagged as having no cost data, and nothing margin-sensitive happens to it.
What a price move needs
The only price action the catalog engine takes on its own is a discount test. It is proposed only when all of these hold:
- The product has a Tier A cost.
- The margin is known and at or above the store's margin floor, which starts at 35%. For a mid performer, the margin must be at least 15 points above the floor.
- The cost is in the same currency as the price. Magistry does not invent an exchange rate to compute a margin; a cost in another currency leaves the margin unknown.
- A lawful reference price exists under the EU Omnibus rules. Without one, no discount test runs.
A losing product that has already had its copy rewritten, and still fails these checks, is drafted instead of discounted. The decision records the reason: cost tier B or C, margin unknown, or margin too thin. Copy rewrites do not depend on cost, so they can run at any tier.
Tiers also decide what reaches your feed. Tier A and B costs in the feed's currency are sent to Google Merchant Center as cost of goods sold.
Why the tier lives on the row
The tier is stamped on each catalog decision at the moment it is made. When someone reads the decision later, they see the confidence the engine actually had, not what is known now after costs were updated.
Match the reversibility of an action to your confidence in its cost. Soft and reversible can move on estimates; expensive and sticky waits for facts.
Keep costs fresh
Costs drift. The Costs page warns when a Tier A cost is older than 60 days or a Tier B cost is older than 90, because margin rules degrade as supplier prices move. Re-upload the sheet, or edit the cost on the product's row, and the new cost is synced back to Shopify.
Policy that can't drift
Because the tier gate is enforced in the decision engine's code path, a discount test will not be proposed without Tier A and the margin floor. Your margin policy is enforced at decision time rather than living in a Notion doc nobody reads, and what the engine is allowed to do cannot quietly drift away from what you intended.