My question for anyone doing real volume (5k+ orders/mo):

What's your net profit per order after ALL costs — including returns, chargebacks, ad spend, VA costs, software, taxes? Not ROAS. Not gross margin. The actual dollars that hit your personal bank account per order.I'm tracking 5 stores right now and the range is wild: $1.20 to $8.50 net/order. The $8.50 store isn't even the highest revenue one.Curious if BHW folks are seeing similar spreads or if I'm missing something obvious in my cost structure.

that spread sounds about right honestly, revenue store almost never correlates with net. usually the higher rev stores are the ones bleeding on returns and heavy ad spend to keep the volume up.

the thing most people miss when they do this math is amortizing the stuff that doesnt hit per order... like your software stack, the VA retainer, chargeback fees that come 60 days later. people calc net on todays orders using todays costs but the chargebacks from last month havent even landed yet. so your real net is always a bit lower than what the sheet says in real time.

that $8.50 store, id look at what makes it different. probably lower return rate product or better AOV with same fulfillment cost. thats where the money actually is, not in cutting ad spend. return rate is the silent killer imo, a 4% vs 12% return rate completely changes the picture and it barely shows up in roas.

also worth checking your tax provisioning, if youre not setting aside per order then your "net" is inflated and you feel it in april. i just bake a flat % off the top so the number im looking at is closer to real.

$1.20 net isnt worth running tbh unless the volume is huge or its a front end for something with backend value.

It varies on the niche, I guess. What products or services are you selling, BTW?

theo_callahan said:

What's your net profit per order after ALL costs — including returns, chargebacks, ad spend, VA costs, software, taxes? Not ROAS. Not gross margin. The actual dollars that hit your personal bank account per order.I'm tracking 5 stores right now and the range is wild: $1.20 to $8.50 net/order. The $8.50 store isn't even the highest revenue one.Curious if BHW folks are seeing similar spreads or if I'm missing something obvious in my cost structure.

Click to expand...

What are you selling? I'm in the pest control business so I sell services. Our net profit from a 40€ pest control is about 30€ just to give you some metrics.

@theo_callahan that $1.20 store is a ticking time bomb. one bad week of chargebacks or a shipping delay and you are deep in the red. @Voxlane made a good point about delayed costs but forgot about rolling reserves. if stripe or your gateway is holding 10% for 90 days, your cash flow is choked even if the spreadsheet says you made a profit. honestly for physical products i dont even bother if the net is under $5. carrier adjustments always bite you a month later too when they re-weigh packages and bill your account retroactively. what's the average order value on the $8.50 store? if it's a $30 item that's a solid margin but if it's $100+ it's still kinda tight.

@Rankings Daily is right about those carrier adjustments, they always hit like a truck weeks later. if youre making $1.20 net on a physical product store youre basically just trading money with ads and suppliers for free. the only way to make those low margin stores viable is sticking some aggressive post-purchase upsell flows or monetizing the customer list on the backend with affiliate offers. otherwise one wave of bad reviews or a shipping delay wipes out months of profit in a week. the $8.50 one is probably using digital add-ons or order bumps with zero fulfillment cost. physical-only ecom with no upsells is just a massive headache nowadays because of the ad costs.

The largest sources of leakage are customer service and returns rather than advertising budgets. I track contribution profit per SKU on a monthly basis since averaging numbers could mask a killer product line