Here are four channels as your dashboard reports them. Turn one over.
Your dashboard is showing you the top row.
Brands using platform-reported ROAS instead of true ROAS systematically overspend on acquisition by this much.
Largest line item, worst dataAgainst a global benchmark of 8–12%. At a 30% rate, RTO alone consumes roughly 12% of total revenue.
GoKwik, across 180M shoppersCommission, fixed fee, shipping, collection fee, and GST on all of it. Rate cards were rewritten three times last year.
Flipkart, Amazon, Myntra rate cardsDown from 35% in 2021. Most brands under $10M run at 0–5% or negative, and 78% lose money on a first order.
What's left after everything aboveThe sale posts the day it happens. The refund lands weeks later, in a different report, unlinked to it. So the month you closed and the money you kept are two different figures, and only one of them is on the dashboard.
ROAS is measured against revenue, and revenue isn't what you keep. A campaign at 4x can lose money once commission, reverse logistics, and that SKU's return rate are counted — and the tile stays green the whole time.
Commission slabs moved three times last year across the major platforms. Weight bands get recalculated, shipping gets reclassified. Anything priced before those changes is now priced against arithmetic that no longer exists.
Forward shipping, reverse shipping, packaging, a COD amount never collected, ten days of stock in transit. The cost of losing that sale is paid twice — and it still sits in the revenue line looking like a win.
Some of it is committed to inventory landing next week. Some is a supplier payment due Friday. Some hasn't arrived yet and is sitting inside a settlement cycle. The number you can actually deploy is smaller, and it's nowhere on a screen.
Stock reports show what's on the shelf, not which shelves are holding cash hostage. The slow SKUs sit there funding themselves while the bestseller runs out in ten days and the money to reorder it is already spent.
Marketplaces report what they intended to settle. The bank records what actually arrived. Month-end runs on the first number, three weeks late, and everything decided afterwards inherits the difference.
Between the founder, the accountant, and whoever runs ops, all the pieces exist somewhere. What doesn't exist is a role whose whole purpose is putting them together daily — so it happens monthly, backwards, when there's a gap in the week.
Every channel you added made the business bigger and the picture blurrier. That's what happens when the number of places money moves exceeds the number of places anyone can look — and then somebody still has to decide where next month's budget goes.
We're working on it with ten businesses at a time, personally. If any of those cards described your week, we'd like to talk to you before we build the next part.
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