The best-seller that was eating you alive
Stop paying to sell your best-seller without knowing it.
Revenue was growing. Cash wasn't. And nobody knew why.
Revenue kept growing month after month and everyone was happy. Then at quarter close the accountant asked why cash didn't follow, and no one had an answer. The top-selling product, the one they pushed in ads and put on the front page, they were selling below cost without knowing it: after the marketplace fee, cost of goods, allocated ad spend and the slice eaten by returns, every unit left the account emptier than before.
But in the sales dashboard it was the best-seller, so they scaled it. They were burning cash to grow a product that was slowly killing them.
Every line subtracted drops the bar one step further: fee, product cost, allocated ad spend, returns. On the best-seller the waterfall didn't stop at zero. The real margin ended below the line, in the red.
“The dashboard showed revenue and gross ROAS. Never what actually stayed in our pocket.”▸ the wrong number was driving the decisions
They had tried the monthly Excel sheet, but with three channels, dozens of SKUs and different fee tables per marketplace, rebuilding the real margin product by product was a days-long job no one had time to do properly.
The platform dashboards showed revenue and gross ROAS, never what actually stayed in their pocket. So they decided what to push looking at the wrong number.
The real margin, SKU by SKU.
No more store average: the real P&L of every single product, on every channel, line by line.
Computed on every single product, not on the store average.
Subtracted channel by channel, with the actual tables of each marketplace.
Charged to each unit sold, not to a blanket average.
The same product is compared where it pays and where it burns.
Across thousands of rows, the wrong rounding is exactly where margin disappears.
Three best-sellers. Three different lies.
Same product, three channels, three opposite truths. One paid off, one broke even, one burned cash on every unit sold and kept getting pushed in ads.
The same product, read across the three channels together: one channel paid off, one was at break-even, one was already in negative margin and was still being pushed in ads because it was the best-seller by revenue. Three SKUs like this were uncovered and removed from the ad push in the first week.
Removed from ad push in the first week.
Only by reallocating budget to the right products.
End of scaling decisions taken on revenue instead of profit.
Stop paying to sell your best-seller without knowing it.
How many of your “top products” are burning margin under your eyes? The ROIometro puts it in euros.