--- tytul: "Profit First in E-commerce: Regain Control of Margins" opis: "Second-tier margin, returns and an AI agent wired into sales data: key takeaways from the JustIdea and Dealavo Profit-First webinar. Read the article." adres: https://justidea.agency/en/blog/ecommerce-profit-first-margin-control/ serwis: "JustIdea Agency" jezyk: pl zrodlo: automatyczny odpowiednik strony HTML, generowany przy każdym buildzie --- Article # E-commerce Profit-First: How to Take Back Control of Your Margin Second-tier margin, returns and an AI agent wired into sales data: key takeaways from the JustIdea and Dealavo Profit-First webinar. Read the article. [![Aleksandra Skotnicka](https://justidea.agency/obrazy/ola-240x300-6876e203.webp) Aleksandra Skotnicka Marketing Automation Specialist](https://justidea.agency/en/author/aleksandra-skotnicka/) 19 August 2026 12 min read 9 sections ![E-commerce Profit-First: How to Take Back Control of Your Margin](https://justidea.agency/_astro/okladka-na-bloga-3-c0064f0a.CNzUzjyL.webp) Marketing Trusted by ![LPP](https://justidea.agency/obrazy/lpp-logo-2-b64d3a02.svg) ![House](https://justidea.agency/obrazy/logo-house-c706eeae.svg) ![Toyota](https://justidea.agency/obrazy/toyota2-1-63c6570a.webp) ![Fame MMA](https://justidea.agency/obrazy/fame-ffb4e0d0.webp) ![Surf Inc.](https://justidea.agency/obrazy/surfinc-91e5b73d.webp) ![LyoFood](https://justidea.agency/obrazy/lyo-cb899d46.webp) ![ExpertSender](https://justidea.agency/obrazy/expert-ca00548d.webp) ![Purinova](https://justidea.agency/obrazy/purinova-217da6ab.webp) ![Mennica Gdańska](https://justidea.agency/obrazy/mennica-98166c12.webp) ![Group IB](https://justidea.agency/obrazy/group-ib-b711171e.webp) ![Smart Kids Planet](https://justidea.agency/obrazy/smart-kids-151311c5.webp) ![SuperSonic](https://justidea.agency/obrazy/supersonic-a35404fe.webp) ![Wierzynek](https://justidea.agency/obrazy/wierzynek-1-d027e7cc.webp) ![RegoBis](https://justidea.agency/obrazy/regobis-a8b446e3.webp) **In this article** 1. 01Profit-First in E-commerce: What Does It Actually Mean? 2. 02Three Levels of Measuring Profitability 3. 03Why Do You Need to Know Your Profit Today, Not on the 20th of the Following Month? 4. 04eTP: The Metric That Shows What Will Be Left After 30 Days 5. 05The Performance Max Audit That Recovered €10,000 a Month 6. 06From a Hundred Dashboards to a Conversation with the Data 7. 07Product Price Determines How Well Product Ads Perform 8. 08E-commerce Has Never Been More of a Tech Company 9. 09FAQ: Profit-First in E-commerce Share A shop can have a great ROAS and still lose money on every single order. All it takes is a shift in the market, the payment method, or the cost of making the product, for the number shown in the ad panel to have little to do with what actually ends up in the till. During an August webinar, Mateusz Haber showed how Surf Inc. approached this problem and started calculating real profit down to the hour. Using concrete examples, he also discussed how this kind of data changes the way advertising decisions get made. Below, we have gathered the key takeaways from the session. ## Profit-First in E-commerce: What Does It Actually Mean? **Profit-first is an approach to running e-commerce in which the effectiveness of advertising is not judged solely by ROAS or revenue. What matters most is the second-tier margin, the amount left over after subtracting all the costs tied to selling a given product: advertising, production, shipping, packaging, payment processor commissions, and handling returns.** The webinar "E-commerce Profit-First: How to Take Back Control of Your Margin" took place on 5 August 2026 and was a joint session by JustIdea Agency and [Dealavo](https://dealavo.com/pl/monitoring-cen/?utm_source=zewnetrzny_blog&utm_medium=blog_post+&utm_campaign=just-idea-2026-08-17). The first part was led by our CEO, Mateusz Haber, and the second, focused on pricing policy and [cross-selling](https://justidea.agency/en/services/e-commerce/), by Amadeusz Bathelt from Dealavo. The starting point was a case study that won first place at the [semKRK Awards 2026](https://justidea.agency/en/blog/semkrk24-big-2026-recap/) in the E-commerce category. Surf Inc. has been on the market for 10 years, and over the past three years the brand has grown sixfold. Each year it ships 150,000 products to customers and spends over €1.3 million on advertising, including around €115,000 a month on Google Ads and Meta Ads. Sales run across 8 markets, and Poland now accounts for 60% of turnover. The whole talk opened with a thesis: **ROAS is dead, profit is king.** Why? Just compare two products from the same shop. Shoes with a high [ROAS](https://justidea.agency/en/services/marketing-agency/google-ads/) go to Germany, paid via PayPal with a commission of up to 6%, plus a higher delivery cost and a higher production cost. A T-shirt with a lower ROAS goes to Poland, paid via BLIK (Polish mobile payment system). Once you account for every expense, it can turn out that the first order made a loss and the second turned a real profit. The ad panel will show exactly the opposite picture. We cover this topic in more depth in the article "[ROAS Is a Myth: Let's Stop Telling Stories and Focus on the Data](https://justidea.agency/en/blog/roas-is-a-myth-focus-on-the-data/)". ## Three Levels of Measuring Profitability Mateusz split profitability metrics into three levels. Each one accounts for more costs and gives a fuller picture of what a shop actually earns, but also requires increasingly well-organised data. | Level | What It Shows | What It Misses | | --- | --- | --- | | ROAS | revenue to ad spend ratio within a single campaign | product costs, shipping, payment commissions and returns | | MER (marketing efficiency ratio) | all shop revenue against the total ad budget | operational costs on the product and logistics side | | Profit (second-tier margin) | how much is genuinely left after subtracting costs attributed to the sale | nothing significant, but it requires merging data from multiple systems | This does not make ROAS useless. It works well for local comparisons, within a single campaign and a single market. The problem starts when it becomes the only argument in a budget decision. ### What Gets Subtracted from Revenue? The second-tier margin starts with net revenue. From that, you subtract every cost that can be attributed to a specific sale: - returns and the cost of handling them, - advertising spend, - the cost of producing the product, - shipping and packaging, - payment processor and [marketplace](https://justidea.agency/en/services/e-commerce/) commissions, - agency costs and other expenses tied to the sale. The rule is simple: if a given cost can be attributed to a product, it should be part of the calculation. This applies even to less obvious expenses, such as influencer partnerships. In that case, the monthly budget can be spread across the number of products sold in that period, so it is factored into the cost of each individual sale. ![How to Calculate Second-Tier Margin?](https://justidea.agency/_astro/chatgpt-image-14-sie-2026-09-24-10-1024x683-fb618a9d.CDuH8Jy-_1fBua4.webp) How to Calculate Second-Tier Margin? ## Why Do You Need to Know Your Profit Today, Not on the 20th of the Following Month? Profitability information from your accountant arrives too late to react to it in real time. Spreadsheets quickly run into a similar problem. At larger sales volumes, costs change with practically every order, and discounts or different payment methods affect the margin of individual transactions. That is why, at Surf Inc., data is refreshed every hour. A daily chart shows revenue, profit and ad spend side by side. This means decisions about scaling campaigns can be made based on what is happening in the shop right now. Raising the budget from €100 to €2,000 in a single day is not a shot in the dark then, since the effect of that decision is visible on the very same day. That said, not every business will benefit from such a short analysis window. This approach works best for fast-moving products and events such as flash sales. For products with a long decision-making process, like hot tubs, a single day's result says little about campaign profitability. In that case, the analysis window needs to be extended accordingly. ### A Data Warehouse as an Entry Requirement The idea of a data warehouse is not new; it has been around for decades. It is only cheaper API integrations and the ability to use AI to work with data that have made such solutions far more accessible for e-commerce too. At Surf, data flows into BigQuery every hour from many sources: [PrestaShop](https://justidea.agency/en/services/e-commerce/prestashop-stores/), Comarch Optima, Zalando, [Google Ads](https://justidea.agency/en/services/marketing-agency/google-ads/), Meta Ads, TikTok Ads, Microsoft Advertising, affiliate and retargeting networks, Google Analytics, Google Search Console and ExpertSender. Costs that cannot be pulled in automatically, such as influencer partnership budgets, are added manually in spreadsheets. Hundreds of tables are then cleaned up, normalised and merged into a single result table that feeds the company's in-house reporting system. This means sales, advertising and cost data can all be analysed in one place, without manually piecing them together from several different systems. ### Returns That Throw Off the Whole Calculation A return has to be attributed to the day of the sale, not to the moment the parcel comes back to the warehouse. If an order from 15 November is returned on 6 December, the correction hits November's result. The calculation also has to include the cost of processing the return, the return shipping cost if the shop covers it, and re-adding the value of the product back into stock. For marketplaces, you also need to add a commission correction. This means results from the last few days are never final. They can keep changing for weeks, until the period in which customers are entitled to a return has passed. ## eTP: The Metric That Shows What Will Be Left After 30 Days The solution to the returns problem turned out to be a matrix built separately for each country and product category. The differences are large: in Germany, 56% of dresses and 26% of T-shirts get returned, while in Poland these figures are noticeably lower. Based on this, the system analyses sales every day and estimates the returns that will appear over the following 14 to 30 days. This makes it possible to predict, with an accuracy of around 5%, how much profit will actually be left after a month. The metric was named eTP, short for estimated true profit. It is eTP, not the first-tier margin alone, that can change how products are ranked. A bestseller with a high margin but a high number of returns can turn out to be less profitable than a product that sells more slowly but comes back far less often. ## The Performance Max Audit That Recovered €10,000 a Month Google now lets you check which search queries [Performance Max](https://justidea.agency/en/services/marketing-agency/google-ads/) campaigns actually show up for. For Surf, this report revealed a costly dependency. When scaling their best campaign, which had a ROAS of 670%, it turned out that for every €1 spent on non-brand traffic, as much as €20 was spent on branded queries. The result looked great mainly because the campaign was capturing traffic from people who would have searched for the brand by name anyway. In Poland, branded ads were switched off as a result. In foreign markets, some were kept running, because the same phrases do not always refer unambiguously to the brand. ROAS dropped from 670% to 289%, but the shop started saving €10,000 a month. Of the 24,000 lost paid clicks, as many as 20,000 came back through organic results, so the real loss was around 4,000 clicks. ![Performance Max Audit](https://justidea.agency/_astro/chatgpt-image-14-sie-2026-09-28-33-1024x683-5315a614.Mkl-cSG1_Z2uhjJ3.webp) Performance Max Audit If you are running Performance Max campaigns, it is worth checking the share of branded queries in your spend. We write more about how they work in the [complete guide to Performance Max](https://justidea.agency/en/blog/performance-max-complete-guide-2026/). ## From a Hundred Dashboards to a Conversation with the Data The road to the current model had several stages, and it did not start with AI. First came more than 100 dashboards in [Looker Studio](https://justidea.agency/en/services/marketing-agency/web-analytics/). Most of them, though, were too elaborate for the team to use regularly. The most useful one turned out to be a report showing the sales pace and the projected time to running out of stock. The next step was an ordering system for the knitwear workshop, which sets production priorities based on sales, returns, turnover and stock levels. After that, the ERP was connected to the data warehouse, bringing financial, warehouse and advertising data into one place. The final stage is SurfBot, an AI agent connected to selected BigQuery tables and to systems including Google Ads, Meta Ads, PrestaShop and Comarch Optima. It does not just analyse data; it can also change bids, exclude products or update prices. The team uses it on Slack, in the task system and directly in the terminal. ### An Agent That Analyses and Makes Changes The daily review is triggered with a single query and takes about 5 minutes. The agent recalculates eTP for every combination of category, country and platform, analysing around 2 million rows from 10 data sources. The result is a list of concrete recommendations: which campaign to scale, where to cut budget, and which products to exclude. A human approves them, and the agent handles implementation. Automation also runs outside this review. Items with a negative eTP are removed from product feeds, and price change proposals appear on Slack along with a forecast of their impact on sales pace. Once approved, the price can be updated in the shop and the ERP at the same time. The agent also supports the team operationally. Support staff can ask about an order's status on Slack and get an answer within a dozen or so seconds. If the system detects a problem it cannot solve on its own, it creates a task for the right specialist; this is how it caught, among other things, an ad running in the wrong language on the Italian market. ## Product Price Determines How Well Product Ads Perform The second part of the webinar looked at the same problem from the pricing side. Price monitoring data points to a simple pattern: if a product is the cheapest on the market, or at most 5% more expensive, it converts well. At a difference of 5 to 10%, performance drops noticeably, and above 10% the drop becomes very steep. In product campaigns, it is worth prioritising items that are price-competitive, and shifting budget from the rest to where it can actually drive sales. Splitting your range into roles also matters. Usually, 10-20% of products account for most of the turnover. Traffic builders are meant to attract visits through volume and price, complementary products stay close to market level, and the long tail can sell at a higher price without extra advertising support. ## E-commerce Has Never Been More of a Tech Company One main conclusion stood out from the webinar: control over your margin starts with getting your data in order, not with yet another campaign optimisation. The order of operations is fairly simple. First, it is worth checking what your ad budget is actually being spent on. Next, calculate all the costs attributed to a product and make them available wherever marketing decisions are made. Only on that basis can you build a data warehouse, account for future returns, and roll out an AI agent that will put this information to use. [![Running Shopping campaigns and want to know how much of your budget actually earns you margin? Contact us](https://justidea.agency/obrazy/banery-en/frame-511-3-1024x401-5d3bf4b2-en.webp)](https://justidea.agency/en/contact/) **Also Check Out** [ROAS Is a Myth: Let's Stop Telling Stories and Focus on the Data](https://justidea.agency/en/blog/roas-is-a-myth-focus-on-the-data/) [Performance Max: The Complete 2026 Guide](https://justidea.agency/en/blog/performance-max-complete-guide-2026/) [SemKRK#24 BIG 2026: What Is the Industry Saying About AI, E-commerce and the Future of SEO?](https://justidea.agency/en/blog/semkrk24-big-2026-recap/) ## FAQ: Profit-First in E-commerce **Does a Profit-First Approach Require Your Own Data Warehouse?** Not at the start. With a few dozen orders a month, you can run the second-tier margin calculation in a spreadsheet and treat it as a test of your assumptions. A data warehouse becomes necessary once more markets, currencies, discount codes and marketplaces come into play, because at that point costs change faster than anyone could enter them by hand. **How Often Should You Check Profit in an Online Shop?** The frequency depends on how quickly your range turns over. For fast-moving products and promotional campaigns, a daily or hourly view changes budget decisions while the campaign is still running. For products with a long buying process, a weekly or monthly window makes more sense, because a single day says nothing about profitability. **Does Turning Off a Branded Campaign Always Pay Off?** No. The decision depends on how unambiguous the brand name is in a given language and who else is bidding on those queries. Before switching it off, check the share of branded queries in your campaign spend and your organic rankings for your own name, since they will pick up part of that traffic. **Where Do You Get Production Costs for Calculating Margin?** They are usually already in the ERP system or the production records, just not shared beyond the finance department. To calculate profit, they need to sit in the same place as the advertising and sales data, updated whenever raw material costs change. **Is PrestaShop Suitable for Running a Large Shop?** Yes, with the right implementation and infrastructure. Surf runs on PrestaShop on dedicated cloud infrastructure, with caching, bot traffic control and unnecessary modules disabled. ![Aleksandra Skotnicka](https://justidea.agency/obrazy/ola-240x300-6876e203.webp) Written by [Aleksandra Skotnicka](https://justidea.agency/en/author/aleksandra-skotnicka/) Marketing Automation Specialist Have a question about this article? Write to us. Want this in your business ## Let's turn this knowledge into results in your store 30 minutes about your numbers. The call starts with someone from sales, and we bring in the channel specialist once we get into the details. The call is free of charge. Book a call about your numbers [See what we do in marketing](https://justidea.agency/en/services/digital-marketing-agency/) Client reviews ## Ratings of the agency that runs this blog Clients gave them after working with us, and you can read each one on the site where it was posted. They cover the work of the whole agency, not this one article. 4.96 / 5 weighted average of 224 reviews across three platforms [Read the reviews](https://justidea.agency/en/justidea-reviews/) [![Google](https://justidea.agency/assets/logo-google.svg) 4.97 / 5 156 reviews on our Google Business Profile](https://www.google.com/search?q=JustIdea+Agency+Krak%C3%B3w+opinie)[![Facebook](https://justidea.agency/assets/logo-facebook.svg) 5.0 / 5 33 reviews on our Facebook page](https://www.facebook.com/justidea.agency/reviews)[![Clutch](https://justidea.agency/assets/logo-clutch.svg) 4.9 / 5 35 B2B reviews, each verified in a call with the client](https://clutch.co/profile/justidea-agency) Statuses awarded by the platforms: PrestaShop Expert ★★★, Google Premier Partner 2025, Meta Business Partner, Microsoft Advertising Elite Partner 2025. [All certificates and awards](https://justidea.agency/en/our-awards/) Read on ## See also [SEO 18 May 2026 TikTok Shop in Poland: how will it change e-commerce in 2026? Małgorzata Walo](https://justidea.agency/en/blog/tiktok-shop-poland-ecommerce-2026/)[SEO 5 August 2026 E-commerce Seasonality: How to Plan SEO in Advance Małgorzata Walo](https://justidea.agency/en/blog/ecommerce-seasonality-seo-planning/)[Marketing 8 July 2025 ROAS Is Dead: How to Measure Real E-commerce Profitability Mateusz Haber](https://justidea.agency/en/blog/roas-is-dead-real-ecommerce-profit/) Contact ## A conversation about your numbers: 30 minutes The call is led by a new business specialist. When we get into the details of an account, the specialist for that channel joins in. We reply within one business day. A quick review of your tracking and campaignsThree priorities for the next quarterA written summary that stays with you Before the meeting we review your website, your visibility and what your campaigns show from the outside. We will not open with “so, what does your company do?”. [4.96 224 reviews](https://justidea.agency/en/justidea-reviews/) What happens after you send it 01 within 1 business day ### We reply to your email The reply comes from the same new business specialist who will run the call. No qualification form and no call from an unknown number. 02 this week ### A 30-minute conversation We go through your numbers and your questions. If it turns out we are not the right fit, we will tell you straight away.