True profit and break-even price: counting commission, COD and returns
How the true-profit fee profile works, the exact formula behind break-even price, and how repricing uses it.
A selling price can look comfortable and still lose money once the costs that are easy to forget are counted: the marketplace’s commission, the fee for cash on delivery, and the shipping you burn on orders that are never delivered or come back. The fee profile lets you enter those once, so profit is computed the way you actually experience it.
What you enter
- Marketplace commission — a percentage of the selling price.
- COD fee (effective) — the COD fee percentage multiplied by the share of your orders paid by cash on delivery (a 1% fee on 70% COD orders is 0.7).
- Failed delivery / return rate — the share of orders that never get delivered or come back.
- Return shipping cost — what a returned parcel costs you to send back.
These are company-wide defaults under Settings, and any product can override them on its edit form. Every field is optional and none is pre-filled: commission and fee levels differ per marketplace and category, so the right numbers come from your own seller statements, not from us.
The formulas
True profit = price − cost − shipping − price × (commission + payment fee + COD fee) − return rate × (shipping + return shipping). The last term is the expected shipping lost on failed or returned orders; the item itself goes back to stock, so only the shipping is counted.
Break-even price = (cost + shipping + expected return loss) ÷ (1 − total fee percentage) — the lowest price at which a sale still earns exactly zero.
Where it shows up
The Profit & Margin page gains True Profit and Break-even columns, with a warning on any product priced below break-even. Automated Repricing adds break-even as one more floor: a rule never proposes a price below it, on top of the floor price and margin you set. The fee columns also travel with the product CSV, so you can set them in bulk.
See True profit and the free margin calculator.