E-Commerce and Marketplace Data: Where Does the Margin Go?

Why Marketplace Revenue Is Hard to Trust

A sale on a marketplace such as Trendyol, Hepsiburada or Amazon, or in a web shop built on Shopify, is not one event. It is an order, then perhaps a partial return, a commission, a shipping charge, a campaign contribution, a payment term and finally a settlement that nets all of it together. Each of these comes from a different report, often with its own order number and its own dates.

Your ERP, meanwhile, records the invoice and the payment. When the two views are never brought together line by line, the CFO sees revenue growing in the sales report and margin shrinking in the income statement, with no clear explanation in between. The question is not whether the channel is growing. It is whether every sale you made actually reached your bank account at the price and cost you planned.

Returns: The Sale That Comes Back

Returns are part of online selling, and they are large. The National Retail Federation and Happy Returns projected that US retail returns would reach about 890 billion dollars in 2024, close to 17% of annual sales. Every one of those returns has to be credited, restocked or written off, and every step is a chance for the books and the goods to drift apart.

The money is lost in the quiet cases. A return is refunded to the customer but the marketplace commission on the original sale is not reclaimed. A return is credited twice, once by the marketplace and once by the team. A damaged item comes back, is counted as sellable stock and is later sold at a discount or written off. None of these shows up as a single large error. Together they turn a profitable channel into a break-even one.

Commissions, Fees and Settlements Nobody Reconciles

Marketplaces deduct their commission and fees before they pay you. The settlement you receive is a net figure, and the detail behind it sits in long statements that change format from one platform to another. When the deduction is wrong, because a category rate changed, a campaign was charged to you without agreement or a fee was applied twice, the difference is rarely noticed. The money simply never arrives.

In many companies the only control is whether the bank total looks roughly right. That is not enough when thousands of orders are netted into one payment. A small difference on each order is invisible on the bank statement and very visible on the annual margin.

When the Web Shop and the ERP Disagree

The price a customer sees online is set in one place, the price list finance approved is kept in another and the invoice is generated in a third. A campaign that was meant to end on Sunday keeps running until Wednesday. A product listed under the wrong variant is sold at the price of the cheaper one. A bundle is invoiced as separate items and the discount is applied twice.

These are not technology failures. They are the normal result of several teams, several systems and several channels moving at different speeds. Writing in MIT Sloan Management Review, Thomas Redman estimated that bad data costs most companies 15% to 25% of revenue. The cost is the same as in any pricing and discount leakage: revenue that was earned on paper and never billed in practice. It usually starts in the product master data and the price and contract master data.

A Fast-Growing Channel in Türkiye

According to the Turkish Ministry of Trade, e-commerce volume in Türkiye passed 3 trillion lira in 2024, up 61.7% on the previous year. For many manufacturers, distributors and retailers the online channel is no longer an experiment. It is a material share of revenue, sold through marketplaces whose reports and settlement cycles were not designed around your ERP.

Growth hides leakage. When volume rises every month, a margin that falls by a point or two is easy to explain away as competition or campaign pressure. Only when orders, returns, fees and settlements are tied back to the same invoice line can you see which part of the gap is the market and which part is your own data.

What korppi Delivers

korppi brings your marketplace and web shop exports together with your ERP data and shows, for every sale, what was ordered, invoiced, returned, deducted and paid. Where the money does not add up, you see the invoice line behind it, the amount at risk and the team that owns the fix. Every figure is calculated from your own lines, and AI explains the results without inventing numbers.

The korppi Data Health Report gives you that picture once, with a value on every gap. korppi Revenue Intelligence keeps it current as new exports arrive. A read-only export is enough and korppi never writes to your system. The details are agreed with your team, and the security brief is shared on request.

Start With a Data Health Report

If your online channel is growing and your margin is not, the answer is in your own order and settlement data. Request a Data Health Report to see where it goes, or request a demo to see korppi first. See also inventory and stock data and what revenue leakage is.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources

1. 2024 Consumer Returns in the Retail Industry · National Retail Federation and Happy Returns, 2024
2. Türkiye'de E-Ticaretin Görünümü Raporu (2024) · T.C. Ticaret Bakanlığı (Turkish Ministry of Trade), 2025
3. Seizing Opportunity in Data Quality · MIT Sloan Management Review, 2017