This is an anatomy of one store's order book: 137.947 orders over fourteen months, from July 2025 to August 2026, priced line by line by the same engine the product runs. It is the example store the calculators on this site use, generated rather than borrowed from a customer, because merchant data cannot be published and invented benchmarks are worse than none. What it can show honestly is the shape: which stage of a business takes the most, in what order, and how far a euro of ticket price actually travels. On this store, €15.749.775 of ticket value ends as €2.381.884 of operating profit, and every step of that journey is worth looking at.
- Ticket value €15.749.775 becomes net revenue €12.400.115 once discounts, returns and VAT are out: 78,7% survives the top block.
- Goods take €4.866.067, leaving CM1 of €7.534.047, or 60,8% of net revenue.
- Fulfilment and payment fees take €1.473.144 together, leaving CM2 at 48,9%.
- Advertising is the single largest cost below the goods at €3.144.072, taking CM3 down to 23,5%, and overhead leaves 19,2% as operating profit.
The top block: what never was revenue
Three deductions stand between the ticket value and anything a margin can be computed on. Discount codes take €568.169. Returns take €730.522, booked on the days the refunds were issued rather than against the orders they reverse. And VAT takes €2.064.286, which was never the store's money at any point.
What survives is €12.400.115 of net revenue, which is 78,7% of where we started. That single number is worth sitting with: before a single cost of doing business, roughly a fifth of the headline has already gone, and a store measuring its costs against the top line is understating every one of them by that much.
| Line | Amount | Share of net revenue |
|---|---|---|
| Ticket value of everything ordered | €15.749.775 | 127,0% |
| Discount codes | −€568.169 | 4,6% |
| Gross revenue | €15.194.923 | 122,5% |
| Returns | −€730.522 | 5,9% |
| VAT | −€2.064.286 | 16,6% |
| Net revenue | €12.400.115 | 100% |
| Cost of goods | −€4.866.067 | 39,2% |
| CM1 | €7.534.047 | 60,8% |
| Logistics | −€1.046.422 | 8,4% |
| Payment fees | −€426.722 | 3,4% |
| CM2 | €6.060.903 | 48,9% |
| Marketing | −€3.144.072 | 25,4% |
| CM3 | €2.916.831 | 23,5% |
| Overhead | −€534.947 | 4,3% |
| Operating profit | €2.381.884 | 19,2% |
The goods are the biggest single cost, and not the biggest surprise
At €4.866.067, the cost of goods is the largest line below revenue and the one every merchant already watches. It leaves CM1 at 60,8%, which sounds comfortable and is where most stores stop looking. Everything interesting happens after it.
Note what a percentage hides here. The same 39,2% cost share on a smaller basket would leave far less in absolute terms per order, which is why the ladder in the P&L statement block by block matters more than any single ratio: the question is not what share the goods take but what survives each subsequent stage.
Fulfilment and fees: the quiet twelve percent
Logistics takes €1.046.422 and payment fees €426.722, which together are 11,9% of net revenue and 19,6% of what CM1 left. Neither is a headline number and both are charged per order rather than per euro, which is why they punish small baskets and why they are the first place a falling average order value shows up.
This is the stage where a statement earns its keep. A store watching only its goods margin sees a stable 60,8% while a shifting basket mix quietly moves the twelve percent underneath it, and the first visible symptom is a bank balance rather than a report.
Advertising is the largest cost after the goods
At €3.144.072, marketing takes more than logistics and payment fees combined, and it takes CM2 of 48,9% down to CM3 of 23,5%. More than half of everything the orders contributed after their own costs goes to winning the customers who placed them.
That is not a criticism of the spend, it is the shape of paid acquisition in this category. It is also the reason the efficiency floor matters so much: at these economics an ad euro must return roughly two euros of net revenue before it has done anything at all, and the ladder is easy to reproduce for your own store in a contribution margin calculator.
What overhead does, and does not, decide
Overhead is €534.947 over fourteen months, 4,3% of net revenue, and it takes the store from 23,5% to 19,2%. On a business this size the fixed block is the smallest of the major cost groups, which surprises people who spend a lot of management attention on subscriptions.
The lesson is proportion. Cutting a tenth of overhead adds 0,4 points of margin; moving the marketing line by a tenth adds 2,5. Both are worth doing and only one of them is where the attention usually goes.
What this study is and is not
It is an example store, generated to be realistic and priced by the real engine, not a survey of merchants and not a benchmark to measure yourself against. The shapes are honest arithmetic on a plausible catalogue; your own store will differ, sometimes sharply, and that is the point of computing your own version rather than adopting these figures.
Everything here comes from one engine run over the whole window, with refunds recognised on their issue days, costs priced by the rule effective on each order's own date, and overhead spread across the days it covers. The full method, including which recognition rules apply where, is set out in how every figure is computed.