Marketplace commission and real profit: working it out order by order

The number on the marketplace panel is not your profit

A marketplace panel shows what you sold. Your bank shows what you were paid, later, after deductions. Between them sit commission, a service fee, shipping, returns, sometimes advertising, and the one cost the marketplace cannot see: what the product cost you. Averaging these across a month hides the products and the orders that lose money.

The formula, with one illustrative order

Net per order = sale price − commission − fees − shipping − product cost − returned value. Here is one order with made-up numbers. The 15 percent is an assumption for the example, not a rate of any marketplace, and VAT is left out because its treatment depends on your accountant (mali müşavir).

Change one line and the picture changes. A 5 point higher commission costs 20 lira on this order; a return can cost you the whole sale plus shipping, twice if you pay both ways. That is why a margin per order is more useful than a monthly average.

What Crossell calculates for you

• Product cost, entered once per product with its history. A new cost applies from its date forward and does not rewrite past orders. Costs can be imported from a spreadsheet; the import shows a preview before anything is saved.
• Commission and fees from the marketplace's own payout data where Crossell reads it (Trendyol, Pazarama, and N11), order by order. Where there is no payout data, commission is an estimate and is labelled as one.
• Returns deducted from sales once the payout data shows them, and shown as returns rather than hidden inside a lower total.
• One definition for each word. Net sales, units and rates mean the same thing on every page, so the dashboard and a report do not disagree.
• Rates that show their sample. A return rate says how many orders it is based on. If too few orders have the data, it is marked partial or withheld rather than shown as confident.
• A free listing economics calculator you can try before connecting anything.

Unknown is not zero

The most common error in a profit sheet is a missing cost treated as zero, which makes the product look like your best seller. In Crossell a product with no cost has an unknown margin, and no net profit is shown for its orders until you enter one. If a cost is in a different currency than the order, the order is flagged instead of mixing them.

Where you will see an estimate

• Shipping before the carrier invoice arrives.
• Commission on a channel where Crossell does not read payout data. Fee and margin figures on US channels are estimates, not reconciled profit.
• Currency conversion: if you ask for a converted figure it is shown with its source and date, never stored, and never added to amounts in other currencies.
• Anything on Çiçeksepeti and PttAVM that the marketplace's public API does not provide: the page says so instead of showing zero.

A weekly routine that works

1. Enter costs for your top sellers first. Coverage matters more than precision on a long tail.
2. Sort orders by margin ascending and look at the bottom ten. Usually one product, one shipping size or one campaign explains most of them.
3. Check payouts against the orders they should cover, once a week.
4. Reprice or drop the products that lose money after commission and shipping. Do not guess; use the numbers.