A Meesho seller we sat with in Surat listed a rayon kurti at ₹499. Product cost ₹180, so she priced it expecting roughly ₹300 per order — a 60% margin in her head. Then we pulled one settlement cycle and traced a single order, MS-44712, from sticker to bank credit. After every real line was counted, that order earned ₹61. Not ₹300. ₹61.
Nothing about that order went wrong. It wasn't returned, wasn't penalised, wasn't lost in transit. It was a perfectly normal order — and the gap between ₹300 and ₹61 was just the cost stack she had never written down. Per order profit calculation is the discipline of writing it down. This post is the method, using illustrative numbers that are directionally honest for AJIO and Meesho sellers at 1–25 orders/day.
Sticker price is not revenue
The first correction is the simplest: the number on your listing is not the number that reaches your bank. Between the two sit the marketplace's commission and fees, the tax lines, and whatever that settlement cycle decided to deduct. On AJIO you see this in the settlement statement; on Meesho, in the payment advice against each order. Either way, the only revenue number that matters is the settled credit — what the marketplace actually paid for that order after its own maths.
On budget-price fashion — the ₹300–₹700 band where most Meesho and a lot of AJIO volume lives — the gap between sticker and settled is routinely 30–45% before your product cost is even in the conversation. The percentages vary by category, fee plan, and month, which is exactly why you compute from your own advices rather than from a generic fee table.
The full cost stack, line by line
Here is the stack for order MS-44712, the ₹499 kurti. Numbers are illustrative; the line items are not — every one of them exists in real settlements:
- Product cost — ₹180. What the unit cost you, landed at your shelf. Include inward freight if you pay it.
- Packaging and consumables — ₹12. Flyer bag, slip pouch, tape, label sheet. Small per order, never zero, and it scales with every parcel.
- Marketplace commission and fees — ₹88. Commission, collection or payment-handling fee, and fixed closing-type fees, all per the advice. The single biggest line after product cost.
- Tax lines — ₹9. GST TCS at 0.5% of taxable value and income-tax TDS under section 194-O. Recoverable in your filings if your books are clean — but cash-out today either way.
- Shipping recovery shortfall — ₹24. The gap between what the buyer or marketplace was charged for shipping and what was actually recovered to you on this order.
- Returns provision — ₹105. The big one nobody books. This SKU returns roughly 25% of the time, and a blended return event (customer return or RTO, fees plus damaged-stock risk) costs about ₹420. So every shipped unit carries 25% × ₹420 = ₹105 of expected return cost.
- Overhead allocation — ₹20. Rent, electricity, the part-timer who packs. Divide your monthly fixed ops cost by monthly orders. Imperfect, far better than zero.
₹499 minus all of that is ₹61. About 12% of sticker. Still positive — this SKU deserves to live — but a business plan built on the imagined ₹300 would have collapsed into its ad budget months ago.
The costs sellers forget to put in the stack
Beyond the seven lines above, three costs routinely go missing from per-order maths, and each one quietly flatters the number. Ad spend is the biggest: if you spent ₹3,000 on platform ads last month and they drove 60 orders, every one of those orders carries ₹50 of acquisition cost — which would have wiped out most of MS-44712's ₹61. Allocate ad spend to the SKUs it actually promoted, not across the whole store. Inventory aging is the second: the kurti that sat eight months before selling consumed shelf space, tied up cash, and probably sold at a markdown — a cost the order-level view never shows unless you add a holding charge for slow movers.
The third is your own hours. A founder spending two hours a day on panel work, document generation, and settlement checking is spending real money — either the salary you'd pay someone else to do it, or the growth work you didn't do instead. Most sellers exclude it because it feels free. It is the least free input in the business, which is the quiet argument for letting an OMS run the repeatable parts of order processing while your hours go where software can't.
Why averages lie: the hero-SKU illusion
Most sellers who do track margin track it at the store level: total settled credits minus total costs, divided by orders. That average is where loss-making SKUs go to hide.
Run the same per-order maths SKU by SKU and a familiar shape appears in almost every store we've audited. Two SKUs — usually the originals, the ones the seller knows cold — earn well. They are the heroes. Around them sit three or four SKUs added later, priced by copying competitors, each quietly losing money on every order. One has a return rate near 40% because the size chart is wrong. One sits in a fee band that eats it. One was priced off a supplier quote that has since gone up.
The store average says +14%. Reality says the heroes are paying the losers' bills. Every rupee of ads spent on the losers makes the business smaller. You cannot see any of this at level “store average” — which is why the audit has to be per SKU, off settled values, the way the profit-tracking surface computes it.
The four levels of margin
It helps to name the levels, because most sellers stop at the first one:
Level 1 — sticker margin. Sticker minus product cost. The number quoted at dinner. Fiction, but comfortable fiction.
Level 2 — settled margin. Actual settlement credit minus product cost. Requires reading the payment advice. Already 20–40% lower than level 1 on budget SKUs.
Level 3 — return-adjusted margin. Settled margin minus the returns provision at the SKU's real return rate. This is the level where bad SKUs turn red.
Level 4 — true contribution. Return-adjusted margin minus packaging, overhead allocation, and any claim money you failed to recover that month. This is the only number fit to drive pricing, ad spend, and kill-or-keep decisions.
The expensive mistake is making level-4 decisions with level-1 numbers — scaling ads on a SKU because its sticker margin looks fat, while its true contribution is negative.
Pricing from the stack backwards
Once the stack is written down, it also fixes how you price. Most sellers price forwards: take the product cost, add the margin they want, list it. The stack prices backwards: start from the sticker price the market will bear, subtract every line — fees at that price band, the tax lines, the shipping gap, the returns provision at the category's realistic rate — and see what is left for product cost plus profit. If the answer is less than your landed cost, the SKU does not work at that price no matter how well it sells, and discovering that before ordering 500 units is worth more than any marketing tactic.
Backwards pricing also exposes the fee-band cliffs. Marketplace fee structures often step at price thresholds, and a SKU listed just above a step can earn less per order than the same SKU listed ₹20 lower. You only see these cliffs when you compute settled value at multiple candidate prices — five minutes of arithmetic that regularly moves a SKU from loser to earner without touching the product.
Run the per-SKU audit this week
One settlement cycle, your top five SKUs, one evening. The manual version:
- Download last month's settlement statements or payment advices from the seller panel — AJIO and Meesho both expose them per cycle.
- Pick your five highest-volume SKUs. Heroes and suspects both.
- For each SKU, take 10 settled orders and average the actual credit — that's your level-2 revenue.
- Compute the SKU's real return rate from the same period: returns initiated ÷ orders shipped, customer returns and RTO counted separately.
- Build the stack: settled credit − product cost − packaging − returns provision − overhead allocation. Write the per-order number next to each SKU.
- Act on it: reprice or fix the listings that are mildly negative, kill or pause the deeply negative, and protect the heroes' stock and SLA first.
The first time takes an evening. The findings usually pay for years of evenings — in every audit we've done with sellers, at least one “good” SKU turned out to be a loser, and at least one boring SKU turned out to be the most profitable thing in the store.
A note on what “act on it” means in practice, because this is where audits stall. A SKU at −4% is usually a fix, not a funeral: a corrected size chart that pulls the return rate down five points, or a ₹30 price move, often flips it positive. A SKU at −18% with a structural cause — a fee band it can't escape, a fabric that photographs better than it feels — is a kill, and the discipline is to actually kill it rather than hoping volume will save it. Volume never saves a negative-contribution SKU; it just makes the hole deeper, faster.
Where Robnu fits
The manual audit works; it just doesn't keep working. By the third month the spreadsheet is stale, the return rates have drifted, and a new SKU has joined unpriced. Robnu is an agentic OMS for AJIO and Meesho sellers, and its Understand pillar runs this exact calculation continuously: every settlement line read, matched to its order, layered with your costs, margins shown per order and per SKU at level 4 — with reconciliation flagging the lines that don't match what was promised. (Robnu is independent software built for marketplace sellers, not affiliated with AJIO or Meesho.)
And the free promise is simple: Robnu is free for everyone right now — every feature, every order, no card. When paid pricing eventually launches, sellers under 25 orders/day stay free forever, and early users get grandfathered locked rates. Run the audit by hand once so you believe the numbers; then let the software keep them honest.