Reading a CNFans Spreadsheet: What Each Column Commits You To
1,091 words · about 5 minutes · note 1 of 40 · Step 2
A link table looks like a shopping list and behaves like a contract. Every column quietly commits you to something — a seller, an option set, a price basis, a check date — and the failures that cost money later are almost always failures of reading rather than failures of the service. This is a glossary of the fourteen terms that decide how a row behaves once you paste it into an order form.
Row, listing and catalogue
A row is a line in a table; a listing is the seller’s page that the row points at; the catalogue is the collection of rows. The three age differently, which is the whole problem: the catalogue is updated on someone else’s schedule, the row is frozen when it is written, and the listing changes whenever the seller feels like it.
Common misuse: treating the row as the source of truth for price and stock. Correct usage: treat the row as a pointer, and the listing as the current state. Re-open the listing before you order, and record the date you did.
The scale of that drift is measurable on this site. Across the 218 catalogue listings collected on 2026-09-29, the recorded prices run from $3.62 to $190.88 with a median of $36.18, and the twenty-fifth and seventy-fifth percentiles sit at $22.53 and $53.32. Those figures describe one afternoon of one catalogue, which is the point: a row copied in a different month carries a price that belonged to a different snapshot, and nothing on the row itself announces the difference.
Option string and variant
The option string is the seller’s own wording for the colour, style or size you want — often numbered rather than named. A variant is one selectable combination inside a listing; a listing with forty styles has forty variants and one price range.
Common misuse: paraphrasing. "Black hoodie, large" is not an option string when the seller offers "Style 3 / Size L". Correct usage: copy the string verbatim, symbols included, because the buyer reading your order is matching characters, not intentions.
Price basis, quantity and set
Price basis answers "per what". A listing may price per item, per pair, per set of three, or per bundle with a discount. Quantity is expressed in the seller’s units, which are not always your units.
Common misuse: ordering one unit of a set-priced listing and expecting three items. Correct usage: state the basis on the row itself (per pair, per set) so the quantity field cannot quietly disagree with your expectation.
Agent, warehouse intake and stock
The agent is the service that buys on your behalf; warehouse intake is the moment the seller’s parcel becomes your inventory, usually with a measured weight attached; stock is the list of what the warehouse is holding for you.
Common misuse: assuming a delivered domestic parcel is already in stock. Correct usage: an item exists for you only when it appears in the stock list with a weight — that weight is also the first real number in your cost estimate.
QC set, verdict and reshoot
A QC set is the photo series taken at intake. A verdict is your written decision on it: approve, request more photos, or return. A reshoot is a second set requested for a named angle or measurement.
Common misuse: approving on an overall impression, then discovering the defect at home with nothing dated to cite. Correct usage: score the same dimensions every time and keep the dated verdict with the photos. This site’s scorecard exists for exactly that record.
Chargeable weight, volumetric weight and divisor
Volumetric weight converts the space a parcel occupies into a billable number: length × width × height ÷ divisor, with 5000 and 6000 g/L being the common divisors. Chargeable weight is the greater of actual weight, volumetric weight and any route minimum.
Common misuse: budgeting postage from the product’s shipping weight in the listing. Correct usage: estimate the packed volume first, compare both divisors, and only then price a line.
A worked scale makes the gap concrete. At a divisor of 6000 g/L, a box of 40 × 30 × 20 cm carries a volumetric weight of 4,000 g; at 5000 g/L the same box reaches 4,800 g. If the contents actually weigh 1,200 g, the chargeable figure is three to four times the mass anybody would quote from a listing, and the divisor alone accounts for 800 g of the difference. That is why the divisor is entered per route rather than assumed.
Declared value, consolidation and rehearsal
The declared value is what the parcel is stated to be worth on the customs paperwork; consolidation joins several items into one parcel; rehearsal is a trial pack that reports the resulting weight and measurements before you commit to a line.
Common misuse: consolidating everything by default. Correct usage: merge when it removes repeated minimum charges, and rehearse when the packed parcel is bulky enough that volume may take over the billing.
Line, cut-off and tracking handover
A line is a transport product with its own rate structure, divisor and restricted-goods list. A cut-off is the time by which an action must happen — a warehouse dispatch, a flight, a customs reply. A tracking handover is a change of custody: dispatched, departed, arrived, cleared, out for delivery.
Common misuse: reading tracking as a progress bar and escalating during a queue. Correct usage: compare the silence against the line’s published slowest day, and treat a customs letter as the one event that genuinely requires a reply from you.
Quick index
If you remember nothing else: rows point, listings change, option strings are copied, price basis is written down, stock begins with a weight, verdicts are dated, postage follows chargeable weight, merges are arithmetic rather than instinct, and tracking is a sequence of handovers.
The four terms that cause the most expensive mistakes are option string, price basis, chargeable weight and declared value. Each has its own worked example in the notes that follow.
Two habits bind the list together. The first is to date every reading: a price, a window or a storage rule without a date cannot be compared with anything, and the comparison is usually the reason the reading was taken. The second is to keep the artefact you worked from — the row, the option string, the photo set, the verdict — because the record is the only thing that survives a change of catalogue, a change of service or a dispute that arrives three weeks later.
Nothing in this glossary depends on a particular service staying open, which is deliberate. The terms belong to the structure of agent ordering: somebody buys, somebody holds, somebody forwards, somebody clears. Learn the structure and a change of vendor becomes a migration rather than a restart.