Margin Intelligence
A margin leak is the gap between the profit an order was priced to earn and the profit it actually delivers, created by costs that apply after the pricing decision: stacked discounts, free-shipping subsidies, carrier surcharges, payment and currency fees, chargebacks, and stale COGS. Each loss is small per order, so leaks compound quietly across order volume, and a standard checkout runs no margin check that would catch them.
The same leak costs radically different amounts depending on where it gets caught. The ladder runs from rung 0, caught before the order confirms, to rung 3, never caught at all.
The order is evaluated against live costs before confirmation and gets blocked or adjusted. The leak never happens. This is the only rung where the cost of the leak is zero.
Someone notices the pattern in a day or two and fixes the promo, rate table, or rule. Every order between the first leak and the fix shipped below floor.
Finance sees the margin gap at close and works backward to find the cause. Weeks of orders carried the same leak before anyone knew it existed.
The leak reads as "our margins are just shrinking" and compounds with every order, every season. This is where most small per-order leaks live, because individually none of them trips an alert.
Every page below carries real cost tables built from named public sources (carrier rate cards, processor fee schedules, platform documentation), each with a retrieval date and a working calculator. Our methodology explains the sourcing rules every number follows.
What a chargeback actually costs a Shopify Plus or SHOPLINE merchant once the dispute fee, the lost payment processing, and the lost goods are all counted, not just the disputed amount.
3 pagesCarrier surcharges, peak-season fee stacking, and shipping-threshold math, synthesized from published carrier rate cards into per-package and per-order cost figures.
3 pagesWhat processors, gateways, and payment-method mixes actually cost per order, beyond the headline rate a single processor advertises.
4 pagesThe real margin cost of a discount once it's run through COGS, stacked with other offers, or combined with free shipping.
4 pagesWhat the app-store subscription stack costs relative to what it saves, synthesized from published app pricing against the margin leak it's meant to close.
3 pagesPrefer the plain-language definition? See margin leakage in the glossary.
Agentis finds margin leaks automatically.
The recurring causes are discount codes stacking with free shipping, carrier surcharges and peak-season fees, payment processing and currency conversion fees, chargebacks and their dispute fees, app subscription stacks that scale with volume, and stale COGS data that makes pricing decisions on numbers that are no longer true. Each cost is small per order, which is exactly why they compound unnoticed.
Yes. Margin leakage is the term for the aggregate slow bleed, while a margin leak usually refers to one specific cause, like a stacked discount or an unbilled surcharge. Our glossary entry on margin leakage covers the definition in depth; the hub pages here quantify individual leak types from published public sources.
Compare expected margin, based on your pricing model, against actual margin, based on realized costs, at the order level. Leaks appear as systematic gaps on specific SKU categories, freight zones, promo types, or payment methods. A standard checkout runs no such comparison, which is why most leaks are found weeks later in reports rather than at the moment they happen.
It depends on the leak type and your order volume, and any single universal figure would be invented. Each hub below carries per-leak cost data built from published public sources: what a chargeback actually costs, what a stacked discount does to gross profit, what carriers charge in peak season, and what processors take on every transaction.
Last updated 2026-08-08.