Gross margin in ecommerce: what range is healthy and why marketplaces distort it
September 19, 2026
Every seller who opens a costing sheet ends up in the same place: I buy at this, I sell at that, this is what is left. That “what is left” is gross margin, and it is the first number you learn to calculate because it is the only one you can produce without asking anyone for anything. You do not need the Amazon settlement or the MercadoLibre order detail. Cost and list price are enough.
The trouble starts when that number becomes the compass. A seller sitting at 55% gross margin feels safe, waves through a Hot Sale discount without a second thought, and approves a campaign whose ACoS “clearly fits.” Three months later the bank account looks nothing like 55%, and the diagnosis takes weeks because nobody knows exactly where the difference evaporated.
The second source of confusion comes from outside. Search for “healthy gross margin in ecommerce” and you will find figures ranging from 30% to 70%, each presented as the truth. Nobody is lying: they are measuring different universes, in different markets, with different business models. Comparing yourself against them without knowing where each number comes from is noise.
This article does three things: it defines gross margin without ambiguity, it reviews what the available public measurements report — always naming the market they come from — and it explains why, in a Mexican marketplace business, that percentage reads differently than it does for a brand with its own store.
what gross margin actually is
Gross margin is what remains of revenue after subtracting the cost of goods sold (COGS), expressed as a percentage of revenue. The formula holds no surprises:
- Gross profit = Revenue − COGS
- Gross margin = Gross profit ÷ Revenue × 100
Sell a product for $650 that cost you $260 and your gross profit is $390, a 60% gross margin. Everyone agrees so far. The real argument, and the reason two sellers running the same business report different margins, is what goes inside COGS.
The narrow version includes only what you paid the supplier. The full version — the one proper accounting uses — includes everything required to put that unit in a sellable condition: purchase price, inbound freight allocated per unit, duties, customs handling, primary packaging and, if you manufacture, direct labor. Two sellers buying the exact same item from the exact same supplier can report 60% and 48% gross margin depending on where they draw that line.
There is no single correct answer, but there is a practical rule: draw the line once and never move it. A gross margin whose definition shifts every quarter is useless for comparison, against yourself or against anyone else.
why gross margin still matters, even if it is not your profit
It is easy to swing from enthusiasm to contempt: “gross margin lies, only net margin counts.” That is not it either. Gross margin is the ceiling for everything else. It is the entire budget out of which the marketplace commission, fulfillment, shipping, advertising, returns, storage, payroll and your profit have to come.
Framed that way it becomes a very concrete decision tool. If your category charges 14% commission, fulfillment eats 10% of the price and you need 8% in advertising to move the product, you are at 32% before touching COGS. A product with a 35% gross margin arrives there with almost no air left. One at 60% has room to run promotions, absorb a supplier increase and compete on price without ending up at zero.
That is why gross margin works as an entry filter: it tells you, before you commit inventory money, whether the product has enough room to survive your channel’s cost structure. What it does not tell you is whether it survived.
Glossary: real net margin, with everything deducted →what ranges the public measurements report
This is where you have to be careful about the origin of every figure, because the two available bodies of data measure completely different universes.
The first is the most solid and the most public: the industry margin database Aswath Damodaran maintains at NYU Stern, updated as of January 2026 and covering publicly listed companies in the United States. There, the Retail (General) sector reports an aggregate gross margin of 33.18%, with an 8.15% operating margin and a 5.61% net margin, across a sample of 23 companies. Retail (Special Lines), with 94 companies, reports 35.30% gross margin and 5.19% net margin. For reference, the total market aggregate — almost 6,000 companies — sits at 37.76% gross margin. These are large, listed, US companies: nothing like a Mexican marketplace seller, but it is the most verifiable data available.
The second body of data comes from analytics platforms aggregating Shopify stores. TrueProfit, based on an analysis of more than 5,000 ecommerce stores, places typical gross margin between 55% and 65% and describes the 60% to 70% band as the one that allows comfortable scaling. These are direct-to-consumer brands, mostly in the US market, selling their own product through their own store.
It is worth naming what we did not find: no public gross margin cut for Mexican marketplace sellers. The AMVO Estudio de Venta Online 2026 publishes an open version with market and shopper behavior data, but the operational and performance cuts for sellers are reserved for its members. Polar Analytics, which does publish medians across more than 4,000 Shopify brands, covers conversion, ROAS, CAC and average order value, but not gross margin or COGS. In other words: there is no reliable public gross margin benchmark for your exact operation today, and anyone quoting a decimal-point figure for “the average Mexican seller” is making it up.
why one source says 33% and the other says 65%
The gap between those two worlds is not a measurement error. It is the difference between reselling and building a brand.
A retailer buys finished goods and resells them. Its COGS is essentially the purchase price, and its gross margin reflects the markup the market allows it to charge for assortment, availability and convenience. Thirty-something percent is normal there, and it is not a failure: the model defends itself with volume and turnover.
A DTC brand manufactures or contracts its own design and sells direct. Its unit COGS is low relative to price, so gross margin comes out high — but out of that margin has to come the entire cost of acquiring the customer, which in DTC is brutal. A 65% gross margin with a CAC that eats 35 points leaves the same as a 35% margin with zero acquisition cost.
The takeaway for you is direct: the healthy range depends on your model, not on an industry average. If you resell third-party brands on Amazon and MercadoLibre, comparing yourself against a DTC brand’s 65% will make you feel like you are doing everything wrong when you are probably in line with your category. If you own the brand and you are sitting at 35%, the problem is real and it is not a matter of perception.
why marketplaces distort gross margin more
In your own store, the costs sitting between gross margin and profit are largely under your control: traffic, shipping, platform. On a marketplace, much of what eats the gross margin is not negotiable and does not appear in the list price.
There are four layers, and they stack up fast:
- Category commission. A fixed percentage of every sale the channel deducts before paying you, different on Amazon than on MercadoLibre and different across categories.
- Fulfillment. FBA on Amazon, Full or Flex on MercadoLibre, or your 3PL fee. It is a per-unit cost that does not scale with price: it weighs far more on a $400 item than on a $4,000 one.
- Advertising. In crowded marketplaces, no spend means no visibility. That spend comes out of the same gross margin.
- Returns. A returned unit already consumed commission and fulfillment, and sometimes comes back unsellable. If your return rate is 6%, your real gross margin per unit sold is not the one you calculated.
Add that the same SKU at the same price leaves different margins on each channel, and that VAT changes the revenue you actually keep — a topic to review with your accountant, not with a blog calculator. A 60% gross margin on the costing sheet can end up as 23% contribution before fixed costs.
Run the numbers with the example above. You sell at $650, your COGS is $260, gross margin 60%. Subtract a 14% category commission ($91), $75 of fulfillment, 8% of allocated advertising ($52) and a $20 reserve for returns. Those $238 come straight out of your $390 gross profit. You are left with $152, or 23.4% of the price, and storage, software, payroll and taxes still have to come out of that. The 60% was never a lie. It was simply never your profit.
how to set your own baseline
Since no Mexican marketplace benchmark is usable, the productive move is building your own. It is an afternoon of work and it gives you a reference a thousand times better than someone else’s average.
- Freeze the COGS definition. Write down what goes in: supplier price, allocated freight, duties, packaging. Put it in writing so it does not drift between quarters.
- Calculate gross margin per SKU, not for the business. The company average hides the fact that you have products at 70% and products at 18% subsidizing each other.
- Segment by family and by channel. Electronics and accessories do not play the same game, and neither do Amazon and MercadoLibre.
- Measure the spread, not just the average. Sort your SKUs from highest to lowest gross margin and look at the tail: that is where the products costing you money live.
- Repeat monthly and compare against yourself. Your own time series is the only benchmark that accounts for your supplier, your exchange rate and your category.
From there the question stops being “is 35% good?” and becomes “why did this SKU fall from 41% to 33% in two months?” That second question is actionable.
Glossary: inventory valuation, how much capital is tied up →how gross margin reads in iqseller
In iqseller gross margin does not stand alone: it is the first line of a waterfall. The Profitability module starts from the COGS you load per SKU and subtracts, on the same row, the commissions coming from the Amazon settlement and from MercadoLibre orders, the FBA and Full fees, shipping, advertising, and the VAT and withholding breakdown. You see the same product at every step and can point at exactly where each percentage point went.
Because the catalog is organized in a Parent → Model → SKU tree, you can read gross margin at whatever level is useful: the whole family to decide whether it is worth restocking, the model to compare variants, or the individual SKU to find the one dragging the average down. The Inventory module supplies the other half of the story through valuation: how much capital is parked in your low-margin products. And Alerts tell you when a margin moves out of range, instead of you finding out at month-end close.
what to do with the number
Gross margin is the mandatory starting point, not the conclusion. Use it for three concrete things: filtering which products are worth listing, calculating how much air you have before accepting a discount, and detecting when a supplier cost moved without anyone telling you.
For everything else — setting prices, deciding an advertising budget, choosing which channel to scale — you need to go down to contribution and net margin. And if you are going to compare yourself against someone, make it your own previous month. It is the only benchmark that knows your supplier, your category and your exchange rate.