The costs that decide whether you are actually profitable.
Commission is the one every seller plans for. Return freight, weight charges, penalties, unclaimed tax credit and trapped working capital are the ones that quietly determine whether the business works.
- Commission is visible and planned for. The costs that hurt are variable and arrive as deductions.
- RTO is the big one for most sellers: forward freight + reverse freight + lost margin + a week of dead stock.
- Working capital trapped in settlement cycles grows with volume — profitable sellers still run out of cash.
- Unclaimed TCS is your own money behaving like a cost. Most small sellers never claim it.
- Robnu surfaces per-order cost and reclaims the wrong charges. Free while we figure out pricing.
Almost every seller who has been at this a year has had the same realisation: the spreadsheet said the margin was fine, and the bank account disagreed. The gap between those two is made of the costs below.
You cost per delivered order, you pay per dispatched order
This is the single most consequential error in small-seller pricing. Margin is typically calculated on an order that reaches the customer and stays there. But you incur freight, packaging and handling on every dispatch — including the ones that come straight back.
At a low return rate the difference is a rounding error. At a high one it is the whole business. A catalogue can show a healthy per-unit margin and lose money overall purely through this arithmetic.
Six costs sellers underestimate
Each is individually explicable. Together they are usually larger than commission.
Return to origin
Freight both ways, no revenue, stock in limbo. See the full RTO cost breakdown.
Weight discrepancies
Small per shipment, substantial per year, and frequently wrong. See weight discrepancy.
Penalties
SLA misses and cancellations. The one category you can drive close to zero with dispatch discipline alone.
Packaging + handling
Materials, labour, printer, tape. Rarely modelled per order, and it scales linearly with volume rather than disappearing.
Working capital
Your cash trapped inside the settlement cycle. Grows with volume and is why growth can feel like a cash crisis.
Unclaimed TCS
Your money, held against your GSTIN, claimable at filing. Behaves as a cost only because it goes unclaimed.
Seeing the cost stack, then shrinking it
Two of these costs are not costs at all — they are errors and unclaimed credit. Wrong weights, duplicate deductions and returns billed but never received are money you are entitled to have back, and TCS is money you are entitled to claim. Neither requires you to change how you operate.
Robnu is an agentic OMS. It attributes every cost to the order that caused it so you can see which category is actually eating your margin, then reconciles each settlement and reclaims the charges that should not be there — a rare approval click while fully-autonomous filing rolls out.
You sell. Robnu runs the rest — and makes sure every rupee is paid correctly.
Hidden costs, answered
The ones sellers consistently underestimate are return-to-origin freight, weight discrepancy charges, SLA and cancellation penalties, packaging and handling, unclaimed TCS credit, and the working capital tied up inside settlement cycles. Commission is visible and planned for; these are variable, arrive as deductions rather than invoices, and rarely appear in a seller's pricing model.
Usually because your unit economics are calculated on delivered orders while your costs are incurred on all orders. If a meaningful share of dispatches return, you are paying freight both ways on those without any revenue, and that cost is spread across the orders that did sell. A catalogue can be profitable per delivered unit and unprofitable in aggregate.
More than the reverse freight line suggests. The full cost is forward freight already spent, reverse freight charged, the margin you never earned, and roughly a week of stock unavailable to sell. Sellers who only count the reverse charge typically understate the true cost of a return by a wide margin.
It is the money of yours sitting inside the settlement cycle at any moment. You have paid for stock, packaging and shipping now; you are paid for the sale later. As volume grows, the amount permanently trapped in that gap grows with it — which is how sellers run out of cash while being profitable on paper.
Functionally, yes. TCS is not a charge — it is your money held against your GSTIN and claimable as credit when you file. But an amount you are entitled to and never claim behaves exactly like a cost. A large share of small sellers never claim it, converting a temporary deduction into a permanent loss.
It depends on your category, which is the actual answer worth internalising. High-return fashion catalogues usually bleed most through RTO and returns. Bulky low-value goods bleed through weight and volumetric charges. Without per-order cost visibility you cannot know which applies to you, and you will optimise the wrong thing.
Reconcile a full settlement cycle order by order and total each deduction category separately. It is tedious and it is the only way to see the real shape of your cost stack. Most sellers doing this for the first time find that at least one category is several times larger than they assumed.
Two kinds. Genuine costs you can lower operationally — RTO through prepaid conversion and address quality, weight charges through packaging discipline, penalties through dispatch reliability. And wrong charges you can simply reclaim: inflated weights, duplicate deductions, returns billed but never received. The second kind requires no operational change at all, only that somebody checks.