Your best-converting product can still be your worst one.
Ad platforms report conversions. Your store reports revenue. Your carrier reports cost, and returns arrive three weeks later on a different screen. Aptic reads all four together, which is where an ecommerce margin problem actually lives.
Three questions an online store rarely gets a straight answer to.
Not because the data is missing - because it sits in four systems that never compare notes.
What does this SKU actually earn after everything?
Contribution per order after discount, shipping, payment fees and the returns that land weeks later. Platform reports stop at revenue.
Which of my channels is buying customers I already had?
Paid, email and organic each claim the same order. Nobody nets it out, so the channel with the best attribution wins the budget.
Why did repeat purchase slow down?
It usually starts with a delivery time or a return experience, months before it shows in revenue.
Revenue up 18%. Contribution down.
Three systems, three readings, each of them defensible on its own.
Illustrative example
- Ad platform
Spend up 40%, reported ROAS steady
Looks like a channel that scales.
- Storefront
Revenue up 18%, average order value down 9%
Looks like a busy month.
- Fulfilment and returns
Return rate on one variant up from 6% to 21%
Looks like a sizing complaint.
The scaling campaign is pushing one variant that comes back one time in five. After the refund, the return shipping and the payment fee, that variant now loses money on every third order - and it is the one absorbing the extra spend. Pause it at the ad set, not the account, and the same budget goes back to earning.
Not one of those three systems could have reached that on its own. The ad platform never sees a return; the returns tool never sees the spend.
What Aptic reads in an online store.
Read-only by default, and nothing changes in any of them without your approval.
- Your storefront: orders, products, discounts, customers
- Advertising and email platforms: spend, campaigns, sends
- Fulfilment, shipping and returns: cost per order, delivery time, return reasons
- Accounting: fees, cost of goods, the numbers that turn revenue into contribution
Who looks at what first.
All six offices read your business. In ecommerce, these three set the agenda.
Marketing
Channel-level contribution, not platform-reported return. What each channel earns after everything it caused.
Operations
Delivery time, return reasons and the fulfilment cost per order that quietly sets your floor price.
Finance
Contribution per SKU and per channel, and where the discount stack has eaten the margin.
What the first thirty days produce.
- 01
A contribution read on every SKU
Revenue minus discount, shipping, fees and returns, per product. For most stores this is the first time the bottom of that list has been visible.
- 02
A netted view of your channels
What each channel earned after the orders it was double-counting, so budget decisions stop being made on the most generous attribution.
- 03
The first two decisions with a verdict attached
Two changes, made and measured, with a comparison two weeks later that says whether either of them worked.
Find out what your catalogue actually earns.
Aptic is in private beta. Tell us what you sell and what you have connected, and we will tell you honestly whether it is a fit.