What do you actually earn per order?
Not the margin on a delivered order — the margin after your returns are carried by the orders that worked. That second number is the one your bank balance follows.
Your unit economics
Use your real RTO rate from settlement reports. Estimating it low is the most common way this calculation goes wrong.
Two versions of the truth
Above this return rate, this SKU loses money on every order you dispatch. You are currently at 18%.
Across a month
The gap is ₹16,416 a month — the cost of returns, carried by the orders that succeeded. Part of that gap is recoverable: wrong weights, duplicate reverse charges and returns billed but never received.
- Margin calculated per delivered order overstates what you earn, often substantially.
- Returns must be carried by the orders that succeeded — that is the RTO load.
- Break-even RTO rate is the return rate at which a SKU stops making money at all.
- Commission rarely breaks unit economics. Variable costs — returns, weight, penalties — do.
- Part of the gap is wrong charges, not real cost. Robnu reclaims those. Free while we figure out pricing.
You cost per delivered order, you pay per dispatch
This is the arithmetic that catches almost every seller. Margin gets modelled on an order that reaches the customer and stays there. But freight, packaging and handling are incurred on every dispatch — including the ones that come straight back.
At a 2% return rate the difference is negligible. At 20% it is the whole business. A catalogue can show a strong per-unit margin and still lose money overall entirely through this effect, which is why the break-even return rate is worth knowing for every SKU you sell.
Per-order economics you do not have to calculate
This calculator uses one set of assumptions across your whole catalogue. In reality every SKU has its own return rate, its own freight profile and its own break-even point — and the aggregate figure hides the specific products that are losing money.
Robnu is an agentic OMS. It attributes every cost to the order that caused it, so you see real margin per SKU rather than a blended estimate. It also reconciles each settlement and reclaims the charges that should not be there — because part of what looks like thin margin is simply money you were wrongly billed.
You sell. Robnu runs the rest — and makes sure every rupee is paid correctly.
Profit per order, answered
Because most margin calculations assume every dispatched order reaches a customer and stays there. In reality a share of them return, and the cost of those returns has to be carried by the orders that succeeded. The larger your return rate, the wider the gap between the two numbers.
It is the cost of your returns, spread across the orders that actually delivered. If roughly one in five orders comes back, every four successful orders must absorb the cost of one failure. That redistribution is what turns a healthy-looking per-unit margin into a much thinner real one.
The return rate at which a SKU stops making money entirely. Below it you profit, above it every dispatch loses money. It is the most useful single number for deciding whether to keep, reprice or delist a product — and most sellers have never calculated it.
Packaging yes, always — it is a direct per-order cost that scales linearly with volume. Labour is harder because it is largely fixed at small scale, but if you are paying someone per order or per hour to pack, including it gives you a more honest picture of what a marginal order is worth.
Three levers, in order of speed. Reduce the return rate through prepaid conversion and listing accuracy. Reduce per-order cost through packaging and freight discipline. Reprice, if the market allows it. And separately, verify the charges — some of what is making the number negative may simply be wrong.
Because it is predictable and priced in. Sellers plan for commission and are rarely surprised by it. The costs that break unit economics are the variable ones — returns, weight discrepancies, penalties — precisely because they are not modelled at the point of pricing.