For online stores doing $1M–$50M
Your store is busy.
Is it profitable?
Margin works out which sales actually make you money after product cost, shipping and returns — then moves your ad spend toward those. And it turns the returns pile back into cash instead of trash.
Two weeks of watching before it changes anything. You approve the rules.
Last month you sold $340,000.
Your ad dashboard said you made money.
Your bank account said otherwise.
It isn't a mystery. It's arithmetic that nobody has time to do. Your ad platform counts a sale as a win the second it happens. It doesn't know what the product cost you, what the freight cost, or that one in six of those orders is coming back.
So the budget keeps flowing to whatever sells the most — which is often the heavy, discounted, easy-to-return stuff that loses money on every single order.
Then the returns land. Most of them are perfectly fine. Most of them get stacked on a pallet and sold off for pennies, because sorting them one by one is somebody's worst afternoon.
Where $100 of sales actually goes
- Product cost−$42
- Shipping & packaging−$14
- Ad spend−$22
- Returns & refunds−$13
Illustrative numbers. Nine dollars on a hundred is a good day. Some of your orders are below zero — and right now nothing tells you which ones.
What Margin does
Two jobs. Both of them about money you already earned.
Job one: send the ad money where it pays
Margin adds up every real cost behind each product and each ad — cost of goods, freight, packaging, payment fees, discounts, returns. Then it shifts budget away from the ads that lose money and toward the ones that don't.
One month, one store
Before
$412,000
sales
−$3,100
profit after everything
After 90 days
$398,000
sales
+$0
profit after everything
Slightly fewer sales. Fifty thousand dollars more in the bank. Illustrative numbers.
Job two: stop throwing returns away
Roughly one in six online orders comes back. Margin looks at each item on its own — what it is, what condition it's in, what it would sell for — and picks: put it back on the shelf, tidy it up and resell it, or clear it out.
On $8M of sales with a 16% return rate, that's about
$0
a year that used to leave on a pallet. Illustrative.
Margin Signal · optional add-on
Add the outside world.
Margin normally works with what's inside your business — your orders, your costs, your ads, your returns. Signal adds the outside world: weather, shopping trends, shipping delays, and what's happening in your category. So Margin makes smarter calls about timing and stock.
A cold snap is coming to the Midwest. Signal sees it ten days out, so Margin leans ad spend into your fleece blankets before demand hits, not after.
A port backup is building on the West Coast. Signal flags it, so Margin suggests ordering your bestseller three weeks early.
Searches for “linen bedding” are climbing in your category. Margin shifts budget toward it while it's still cheap.
A hurricane is heading for Florida. Margin pauses your Florida ads — nobody's shopping for throw pillows in an evacuation.
Signal is an optional add-on, from $99 a month. Outside signals improve timing and planning — they're a helpful edge, not a crystal ball.
How it works
Four steps. Nothing changes until you say so.
- Step 1
Connect your tools
Takes about 20 minutes. Click through, no developer needed.
- Step 2
It watches for two weeks
No changes. Just a report of what it would have done.
- Step 3
You set the rules
Plain sentences, like "ask me before any price change over 20%."
- Step 4
It starts working
Small moves first. More freedom only once it earns it.
You stay in charge
Margin works for you. It doesn't get to freelance.
You write a rulebook in plain sentences. Margin cannot step outside it — not once, not by accident. Here are real rules merchants write:
“Don't spend more than $2,500 on any one decision.”
“Ask me before changing a price by more than 20%.”
“Never email more than 5,000 people without checking.”
It starts with almost no freedom. It has to earn the rest.
Margin doesn't arrive with the keys. It begins by watching, then asking, then handling small routine calls. Every step up has to be earned by being right — and if it starts being wrong, it drops back down on its own.
Level 1 — Watching
Weeks 1–2
Margin changes nothing. It shows you the moves it would have made, and what they would have been worth.
Level 2 — Asking
Weeks 3–6
It suggests moves and waits for your yes. Small budget shifts under your limit go through on their own.
Level 3 — Working
Month 2+
It handles the routine calls inside the limits you wrote. Anything bigger still comes to you first.
Automatic step back
Any time
If its calls stop working out, Margin drops back a level by itself and tells you why. You can also pull it back with one click.
One pause button
Stops everything, instantly, mid-decision.
Everything has an undo
Any single move can be rolled back.
Plain-language log
What it did, why, and what it was worth.
What it looks like
Three stores, three leaks, three fixes.
Example scenario
Alder & Oak
Home goods · $14M a year
- What was going wrong
- Their bestselling oak side table sold like crazy. It was also quietly losing money on every order.
- What Margin found
- After the freight cost, the oversized box, and a 9% damage-return rate, each table lost $18. Ads pushed harder because it converted well.
- What changed
- Margin moved the budget to three smaller items that made $41 each, and flagged the table for a price and packaging fix.
$0
Ad spend moved
$0
Extra profit in 90 days
0%
Revenue change
Same sales. Very different bank balance.
Example scenario
Fieldnote Skin
Skincare · $6M a year
- What was going wrong
- One in five orders came back. Almost all of it went into a pallet and left the building for pennies.
- What Margin found
- 62% of returned items were unopened and perfectly sellable. They were being liquidated at 8 cents on the dollar out of habit.
- What changed
- Margin now sorts every return the day it lands: back to the shelf, into a bundle, or cleared out. Only the truly unsellable goes to liquidation.
0%
Returned items resold
$0
Recovered in a year
$0.00
Recovery per return
The money was already in the building.
Example scenario
Rowan Pet Co.
Pet supplies · $22M a year
- What was going wrong
- Their biggest ad campaign had the best return on ad spend in the dashboard. It was their worst campaign by far.
- What Margin found
- It sold heavy, discounted bags of food to buyers who never came back. After shipping, each order lost $6.20.
- What changed
- Margin cut that campaign to a test budget and pushed spend into toys and beds, which made $23 an order and brought people back.
$0
Losing spend cut
$0
Profit per order
$0
Extra profit in 6 months
The dashboard was right about sales and wrong about money.
These are modeled examples built from typical store economics, not named customers. Want to see the math on your own numbers? Book a demo.
What it costs
A flat fee, plus a share of the profit it actually makes you.
No tiers, no seats, no surprise line items. If Margin doesn't make you money, it barely costs you anything.
The base fee
$2,000a month
Covers the connection to your tools, the daily work, and a real person you can email. Same price whether you do $2M or $40M.
- All your stores and ad accounts
- Two-week watching period included
- Cancel any month, no lock-in
The share of what it makes you
15%of the extra profit
We measure against your own numbers from before Margin started, plus a holdout group we leave alone so you can compare. If profit doesn't go up, this part is $0.
- Measured against a real holdout, not our own math
- You get the full workings every month
- No profit gain means no share
Optional add-on
Margin Signal — from $99/month
Adds outside-world data — weather, trends, shipping conditions — to Margin's decisions.
If Margin doesn't make you money, it costs you the base fee and nothing else. If it makes you $500,000, it costs $75,000 and you keep the rest.
Book a demoThe questions everybody asks
Find out what your store actually keeps.
Thirty minutes. We'll walk through your numbers and show you where the money is leaking. No commitment, and nothing gets connected on the call.