Revenue is the start of the profit calculation.

Start with the order, not the dashboard headline

Record merchandise sales after discounts, then subtract the costs you actually know. Product cost is one layer. Payment fees, affiliate commission and shipping subsidy are additional layers. Keep collected tax separate from money earned by the business.

Define the metric before comparing it with last month. A gross-margin view and a contribution view can both be useful, but they answer different questions.

Work one order all the way through

Consider an illustrative $160 merchandise order. Subtract $60 product cost, $4.94 processing, $16 affiliate commission and an $8 shipping subsidy. The remainder is $71.06 before labor, overhead and any other expenses. Calling the original $160 “profit” would hide most of the decision.

If the product cost is unknown, show it as missing rather than zero. A report that silently assumes zero cost can make the least-understood products look like the best performers.

• Use the actual discount and refunded amounts.
• Distinguish estimated from reconciled processor fees.
• Keep order-level and company-level costs separate.
• Record when later adjustments change the result.

Use the view to ask a better question

Instead of “Which campaign has the most revenue?”, ask which has the strongest contribution among orders with complete cost data. Review incomplete data before shifting spend.

Command includes Torva’s deeper profit and attribution tools. Their value depends on the inputs your business supplies; no reporting interface can recover a product cost that has never been recorded.