What's in your margin

Margin is what you keep per unit after the marketplace's fees, your cost, ads and returns. That is the whole definition, and it does not change from product to product.

What changes is how much of it we can actually measure yet.

The measured part

Most of the deductions are fixed by rule. Commission, transaction and service fees, campaign fees, shipping, VAT and your COGS are all known the moment you know the price — they are the same on the first order as on the thousandth.

Four are not. Ad spend, collaborative-ads (CPAS) spend, return and damage, and reverse return shipping are measured from the orders a product has actually settled. They are real costs, but you only learn them by selling.

So on a product with almost no order record, those four have no honest number behind them:

• One return on four orders reads as a 25% return rate and buries the margin.
• One week of a test campaign reads as a permanent cost of selling the unit.

Rather than print a margin built on that, DataGlass leaves those four out until the product has enough orders to measure them.

The rule

Per product, from its settled-order count:

• fewer than 15 settled orders → ads and returns are left out
• 15 or more → ads and returns are included

The count is item-wide, across the product's variants. The rows still waiting are marked in the sheet and in the product picker, so you can always see which is which.

There is no setting to change. As a product sells, it crosses the line on its own and its margin starts carrying its ad and return costs from then on.

Why price isn't the lever for those four anyway

Even once they are measured, ads and returns are a poor reason to move a list price.

• A price is durable; a campaign is not. Bake this month's ad spend into a list price and you keep charging for it long after the campaign stops.
• Both already have their own lever — the ads optimization group for spend, returns handling for the rest.

What including them buys you is an honest read, not a pricing instruction.

Reading the gap

The difference between the two — margin before those four costs, and margin after — is what ads and returns cost you on that product per unit.

• Fine before, poor after — the product is priced fine; the spend on it isn't paying back. Fix it in ads, not in price.
• Poor before — no amount of ad tuning saves it. The price, the cost, or the product itself has to change.
• A wide gap on a bestseller is normal. A wide gap on a product you're barely promoting usually means returns.

The two names

On a product's financial breakdown both readings are on screen at once, and they have names:

• Ideal Margin — before ads and returns. "Ideal" here means without those four costs, not a target to aim at.
• Realized Margin — the same figure with them included.

The Exclude ads & returns from margin toggle switches the whole table between the two, whatever the product's order count. Price Edit does not offer that switch; it follows the rule above.