Checkout Margin Erosion

Checkout margin erosion is the systematic, often invisible, degradation of gross margin that is locked in when an order is priced at checkout. It happens when discount codes stack in ways that weren’t anticipated, when freight zone costs exceed what was modeled, when FX rates shift between pricing and fulfillment, or when the COGS figure behind a price is stale relative to actual supplier costs. For mid-market merchants processing thousands of orders monthly, even a small erosion per order compounds into significant lost profit. The erosion happens at checkout, but it does not have to be discovered at month-end. Traditional analytics tools only detect it after orders have shipped, which makes it a reporting problem. The window between order placed and order shipped is where it can still be caught: Agentis computes each order's true net margin within 60 seconds of the order being placed, and flags or automatically holds below-floor orders before fulfillment, turning erosion from a month-end finding into a decision your team makes while the order can still be stopped.