How to Price Perfume Decants

Most decant prices are set by looking at what other shops charge. That tells you what buyers will pay. It doesn't tell you whether you make money at that price, and on small sizes the answer is often no. This guide builds a price from the bottom up, so you know your floor before you look at the market.

Start with cost per ml

Divide what you paid for the bottle by the ml in it. Use what you actually paid to get it to your bench: the price, shipping to you, and any tax or duty you can't claim back. A 100 ml bottle at $108 plus $6 shipping is $114, or $1.14 per ml.

When you buy the same fragrance again at a different price, average the two by volume instead of replacing the old cost. Ten ml left at $1.14 and a new 100 ml at $1.30 per ml average to $1.29 per ml for the 110 ml now on the shelf.

Count the ml you can't sell

Not every ml in the bottle ends up in a vial. Some goes to test sprays, some stays in the syringe or funnel, and a spray bottle keeps a little under the dip tube that you only get out by decapping. Measure it once: decant a whole bottle, add up what went into vials, and compare. If 100 ml gives you 95 ml in vials, your real cost is $114 ÷ 95 = $1.20 per ml, not $1.14.

That gap looks small, but it applies to every ml you sell. Leave it out and every price you set is about 5% too hopeful on the liquid.

Add the vial, the label and your time

Every decant carries costs that don't shrink with the size:

• The vial or atomizer. Bigger atomizers cost more, but not in proportion to the ml. Use your supplier's price per piece, including shipping to you.
• Label and seal. A few cents each, but on a 2 ml sample they are a real share of the cost.
• Your time. Filling, capping, labeling and wiping a vial takes a couple of minutes. At $18 an hour, two minutes is $0.60. If you don't pay yourself for it yet, price it anyway, so the price still works the day you hire help.

Costs per order, like the mailer, padding and the free sample you tuck in, belong to the order, not the size. Cover them with your shipping charge or a minimum order rather than raising every decant.

Build a price ladder by size

Because the vial and your time cost about the same for 2 ml as for 10 ml, small sizes cost more per ml to make. A ladder that charges the same per ml for every size loses money on samples and overcharges on the 10 ml. A healthy ladder has two properties:

• Each bigger size costs less per ml than the one below it.
• The same ml in smaller sizes always costs more: two 5 ml should cost more than one 10 ml.

To get from cost to price, pick a target margin and divide: price = cost ÷ (1 − margin). At a 50% margin the price is twice the cost; at 60% it is two and a half times.

A worked example

One 100 ml bottle at $114 delivered, 95 ml usable, so $1.20 per ml. Atomizers cost $0.35, $0.55 and $0.75 for 2, 5 and 10 ml, labels $0.05, and two minutes of work at $18 an hour is $0.60. The target margin is 50%.

Check the ladder: the price per ml falls from $3.50 to $3.00 to $2.70, and two 5 ml ($30.00) cost more than one 10 ml ($27.00). It passes. Margins land at 51%, 52% and 50%.

Now look at the whole bottle. Sold entirely as 5 ml decants, 95 ml makes 19 of them: $285.00 in sales against $136.80 in cost, or $148.20 for the bottle before payment fees and shipping. If that number doesn't make the work worth it, the bottle cost or the margin has to change.

Discovery sets

A set of five 2 ml samples is five vials, five labels and five fills, plus a box. Price it from those costs, not from the 2 ml price minus a discount. With the numbers above, five 2 ml cost $17.00 before the box. At a 50% margin that is $34.00, with the box on top, while five single 2 ml sell for $35.00. Priced from cost, the set comes out about the same as buying the five one by one.

If you want the set to be a real deal, make it from fragrances with a lower cost per ml, or accept a lower margin on it and treat the difference as what it costs you to find customers who come back for a 10 ml.

Round up, and on purpose

Round prices up, not down. Rounding $6.80 down to $6.50 cuts the 2 ml margin from 50% to 48%, and samples are where you sell the most units. Pick one rule and use it everywhere: whole dollars, or prices ending in .50 and .99. Whole dollars make a size chart easier to compare at a glance.

Then look at the market. If shops you respect sell the 5 ml at $18, you have room to move up. If they sell it at $11, your bottle cost is the problem, not your price: buy better, or skip that fragrance.

Keep the numbers current

Costs move: a new bottle at a higher price, a new vial supplier, a raise for whoever does the pouring. Run the numbers again when any of them changes. The decant price calculator does the arithmetic above for any bottle, size and margin.

Carboy does it inside Shopify. Tell it what a bottle cost and what each size's vial and label cost, and every size shows its cost and margin at today's price. Sizes earning less than your target margin, 60% unless you change it, are marked with the price that would keep it. Carboy averages the cost as you receive new bottles, so the margin stays right when bottle prices change. The decant shops page shows how it fits a decant business, and Cost and margin explains each number.