Your ecommerce runs on a 35% margin. Or so you think.
For online stores: supplier prices rise, packaging gets more expensive, shipping varies. If you don't update the cost of each SKU, the margin you see in the dashboard doesn't exist.
You have your ecommerce store. You see sales in the Shopify or WooCommerce dashboard. Volume is growing. Everything looks fine.
But there's one number almost no small ecommerce updates frequently enough: the real cost of each product sold.
The three costs that change without warning in ecommerce
1. Supplier/manufacturer price
If you buy from Asian manufacturers, yuan fluctuations and sea freight costs impact your price every quarter. If you buy from European suppliers, energy and raw material increases pass through to the price list.
An 8% increase in purchase price, on a 35% margin, drops that margin to 27% overnight.
2. Packaging
Boxes, bags, kraft paper, labels, tape — packaging costs rose 12–25% over the past two years. For an ecommerce shipping 200 orders a month, a £0.30 increase per order in packaging is £720 extra per year.
3. Shipping costs
Carriers review their rates once or twice a year. Royal Mail, DPD, Hermes, DHL — all raised prices 5–10% in 2025. If you don't update shipping costs in your margin calculation, you absorb them.
The real margin calculation in ecommerce
| Item | Example |
|---|---|
| Selling price | £29.95 |
| Product cost (supplier) | −£9.80 |
| Packaging | −£1.20 |
| Shipping (if free to customer) | −£4.50 |
| Platform commission (3%) | −£0.90 |
| Estimated returns (5%) | −£1.50 |
| Real margin | £12.05 (40%) |
Now imagine the supplier raises the price to £11.20 and packaging goes up to £1.50. Margin drops to £9.85 (33%). Seven percentage points you won't see in the sales dashboard, but you'll feel it in your bank account at month end.
How Syntra centralises ecommerce costs
When the supplier invoice arrives, the packaging invoice, or the carrier's bill — you upload it to Syntra. The AI extracts unit prices from every line.
When the supplier raises prices, you update the invoice and in 30 seconds you know which products are still profitable and which need a selling price adjustment.
No spreadsheets. No chasing invoices. No discovering the problem three months later.