Let's break down those numbers a bit. Revenue is how much money is coming in the door. For our purposes -- talking about selling new comics from a comics shop -- that's basically the cover price of every comic sold. If a comic has a $4.99 cover price, that's $4.99 in revenue when you sell it. (There is a little more to it than that, but for the sake of this post, that's close enough for the sake of avoiding extended explanations.) The other metric that's mentioned is unit sales. These are just the number of individual comics they sold. If you sell the latest issues of Action Comics, Superman, and Batman, your unit sales would be three. Simple, right?
The ranges provided for each of those metrics comes from different publishers. The retailer broke several of them out individually. I'm not going to get into the specific math to work out how much that comes out to as a true average, when you'd need to weight the individual publishers against the overall numbers, but for the sake of simplicity again, I'm just going to round off both the revenue range to 40% and the unit sales range to 33%.
What these numbers are telling us is that one out of every three comics sold there is a variant cover, and that variant cover costs the reader 7% more than a regular issue. What some might take this to mean is that for every person going to buy their regular issue every month, someone else is going in to buy both their regular issue AND a second copy of the same issue with a variant cover. However, that's an assumption we cannot make here.
Not every comic collector is a completist. There are no doubt more than a few readers who see an issue with one or more variant covers, and just purchase the one that is the most eye-catching to them. Or is by a favorite artist. This is how I often buy variant covers. I only want one copy of the issue and, if there are multiple cover versions available, I choose the one that is the most visually appealing to me. That might be the 'regular' cover one month, 'variant B' the following month, and 'variant D' the month after that. In looking at the comics I got just yesterday, four had 'regular' covers and four had 'variants.' One happened to be marked as 'variant J' meaning that there are at least nine other cover options to choose from for that one issue!
However (again!) not everyone is going to be buying that way. There is almost certainly some percentage of people who do indeed buy every version of each issue. And there are almost certainly some percentage of people who always buy the regular cover, but then also buy a variant if it's by a particular artist. My point here is that while not every customer is going to be buy multiples of every issue, there is a non-zero number of people who do.
The question, then, is: how many of those people who bought variant cover issues would've bought the regular cover version if that were the only one available? Those variant cover issues I got yesterday? I still would've bought all of them if there were only a regular cover available; I'm most interested in the story and my choice of alternate covers was basically just wrapping paper. The retailer would've made just as much revenue from me regardless of whether or not there were variant covers to buy. However, remember when Marvel did those Muppets variant covers several months back? My brother got all those... and he doesn't even collect comics! He's a Muppets fan. That's an additional $40 in revenue (8 issues times $4.99 each) going to retailers that normally would have not been there at all. How much of a retailers' 40% of revenue would still be there if it weren't for guys like that?
In order to properly answer that, you'd need to look at a retailer's sales on a title-by-title basis. How many copies of Amazing Spider-Man get sold every month under normal circumstances and how many more copies get sold when a variant cover is available? We don't have that data. At least not relative to this particular retailer. At a rough guess, I'd throw out half. Half of that 40% wouldn't happen if there were no variants available. That'd be 20% of a shop's overall sales explicitly from variant cover sales.
Regardless of who is buying those variant covers and why, that's an exceptionally cyncial approach to making comics. Whether they're selling to speculators or milking dry all the completionists or dragging in fans from tangental fandoms, they're selling that 20% on something other than the content the comics are ostensibly about. I wrote about this from the publisher side a couple years ago, but this cements it from the retailer side as well. These are companies trying to make as much money as they can, and they're focused at least as much on cynically extracting as much money as possible as they are about telling a good story. That is how 21st century capitalism works, but I don't think most people recognize that.
If you like the Muppets covers or you're picking up every cover by your favorite artist or whatever, that's fine. Just recognize what these companies are actually doing, and know that you're agreeing to play their game -- at least to some degree -- if you're giving them additional money you wouldn't otherwise.
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