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Key Concepts
The most damaging mistakes aren't visible immediately — they're the ones that erode margin slowly. Underpricing to compete on visibility without accounting for marketplace commission and shipping costs is the most common; a seller can be "winning" on order volume while actually losing money per unit. The second is treating each marketplace's return policy as identical to their own, when Meesho, Flipkart, and Amazon each have different return windows and cost-absorption rules. The third is failing to track payment reconciliation from day one, which means discrepancies pile up before a seller even knows to look for them.
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Best Practices
Calculate true landed cost per order (product cost + marketplace commission + shipping + expected return rate) before setting prices, not after. Read each marketplace's specific return and RTO policy rather than assuming they're the same — Meesho's return handling, for example, differs meaningfully from Flipkart's. Start reconciling payments against orders from your very first sale, even manually, so discrepancies are caught in week one, not month three.
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Implementation
Pull your last 30 days of orders across all marketplaces you sell on and calculate actual margin per order after all fees and returns — many first-time sellers are surprised by what this reveals. From there, an OMS with built-in reconciliation flags mismatches automatically as they happen, rather than requiring a manual audit after the fact.
Pro Tip
The sellers who avoid these mistakes aren't the ones with better products — they're the ones who checked their true per-order margin before scaling volume, not after.
Key Takeaways
- Calculate true landed cost (including commission, shipping, expected returns) before pricing
- Learn each marketplace's specific return/RTO policy — they are not interchangeable
- Start payment reconciliation from your first sale, not after volume grows
- Check actual margin per order regularly, not just total revenue
- Catch discrepancies early — they compound and become harder to trace over time
