The price a customer pays is not the margin you keep. Before any of it reaches you, the marketplace applies commission, fees, taxes and deductions — and the split only appears in the settlement report, days after the sale.
Profitability that ignores these deductions is inventory-level gross margin, not ecommerce profit.
The charges that decide the margin
Most marketplaces deduct a set of charges per order:
| Charge | What it is |
|---|---|
| Commission | A percentage of the selling price for using the marketplace. |
| Fixed / referral fee | Flat fee per successful order. |
| Shipping and logistics | Fulfilment performed or arranged by the marketplace. |
| Collection / payment handling | Fee for collecting and remitting payment. |
| Advertising (optional) | Ad spend tied to the order. |
| Returns-related charges | Fees for reversals and return logistics. |
Each appears at a different place and time, and frequently as part of a pooled settlement.
The timing problem
You will see the selling price on order day. You will see the charges on settlement day. In between, the dashboard your team looks at usually shows sales that have not yet paid their true cost.
Unless charges are linked back to orders, profitability is systematically overstated until months later — and then corrected by a single scary settlement.
Per-order = true margin
The fix is to decompose the settlement and attach every charge line to the order that generated it:
- Selling price per order.
- Minus product cost (COGS).
- Minus the order’s specific commission, fees, logistics and ad costs.
- Minus the GST impact where it matters to margins.
- Plus or minus returns and refund reversals.
The result is order-level and product-level profitability that actually predicts the cash that will arrive.
Categories of the profit story
Useful profitability numbers come from the same data with different cuts:
- Product / SKU level. Which listings earn their space, after platform cost.
- Marketplace level. Which channel is genuinely cheapest to sell on.
- Warehouse level. Where fulfilment cost and stock transfers hurt margin.
- Period level. Margin trend and settlement lags.
What DeepEcom does with these numbers
DeepEcom puts the marketplace’s own data structure to work: charges are recognised per order, settlements are tied to orders, and profitability is computed from the reconciled view — sales, fees, GST, refunds and payouts — instead of from sales alone.
Platform cost stops being a mystery that appears in settlements. It becomes part of every product, marketplace and warehouse decision.