Costs and pricing
Part of Building a retail media budget in which every amount can be traced to a document
Retail media costs: record the quotation, billing unit and VAT position before adding anything up
Retail media cost evidence for England buyers: record dated quotations, billing units, service scope and VAT uncertainty before calculating a defensible total.
A retail media cost guide is useful only when each amount can be traced to the service it buys. For an England retailer or an advertiser buying its controlled inventory, begin by collecting evidence rather than copying a rate from an unrelated campaign. This article provides a cost-source register with unfilled monetary fields.
Research completed on 6 September 2026 did not establish current like-for-like quotations covering the required scope, term and VAT position. All price and quantity values remain UNKNOWN. No advertised benchmark, assumed discount or invented budget is used to close that gap.
Identify the document behind the cost
Request a dated quotation or contractual schedule for the precise retailer property and service. Record the buyer, supplying entity, currency, charge description and validity period. Keep an invoice in a separate evidence category because it records a particular transaction rather than a generally available offer.
Where a public price exists, retain its direct official destination and the date inspected. Check eligibility, commitments and exclusions before entering it into the model. A headline figure without a billable event or service period is incomplete evidence, even if the publisher is authoritative.
Read account-specific fee descriptions carefully
Criteo's View Your Fees page, accessed on 6 September 2026, explains fees configured for individual Commerce Max accounts and calculated against working media spend. It does not provide a universal rate that can be transferred to an England budget.
Use that record to formulate an evidence request: which fee applies, to which spend base and under what account terms? Keep campaign-buying fees separate from a retailer's cost of operating its advertising infrastructure. The same supplier name does not make those services interchangeable.
Use a complete row definition
| Evidence field | Current entry |
|---|---|
| Verified price or rate | UNKNOWN |
| Source currency and GBP conversion basis | UNKNOWN |
| Billable event and quantity | UNKNOWN |
| Service term and payment timing | UNKNOWN |
| England inventory and included work | UNKNOWN |
| VAT position and recovery assessment | UNKNOWN |
Add the source document, issue date and evidence owner when a real response arrives. Retain the source currency even if finance later converts it to GBP. Any exchange rate must have its own dated authoritative record and a clearly stated conversion date.
Match the rate to the event
An ad request asks a system to select an advert. A served impression, a viewable impression and a click describe different stages or interactions. Attributed sales allocate credit; incremental sales concern causal change. Ask the measurement owner for the adopted definitions rather than treating these labels as synonyms.
The IAB Europe measurement standards, V2.1 cover online media, attribution and incrementality. This May 2026 industry document is useful for specifying metrics; it is not evidence of a UK price or a vendor's invoicing rules.
Resolve tax and scope omissions
HMRC's place-of-supply notice explains how service circumstances affect VAT treatment. Refer cross-border arrangements to a qualified UK accountant. Leave VAT as UNKNOWN until the transaction has been assessed, rather than assuming a standard treatment from the retailer's location.
Ask whether the quotation includes implementation, operational support and reporting work. Record an excluded task as a further evidence request, not an automatic extra charge. An activity may already be covered by another agreement, and the cost guide should not double count it.
Close the register before publishing a total
Only sum compatible, evidenced entries. Label a subtotal as partial when required rows have not been resolved, and identify what would complete them. A missing figure cannot be replaced with a nominal amount just to make the spreadsheet calculate.
This method supplies neither tax advice nor a purchasing recommendation. Have named finance and privacy reviewers inspect the relevant assumptions, then refresh the source record before publication. The deliverable is a traceable cost account, with uncertainty still visible wherever evidence is absent.