How Much Revenue Are You Losing to Marketplace Overcharges?

Every seller has heard some version of the claim that marketplaces overcharge sellers by 2–5% of revenue. It’s a real, commonly cited range from firms specializing in marketplace reconciliation — but it’s also a range, not a fact about your specific account, and the only way to know your actual number is to check.

Overcharges cluster in a few predictable places: shipping fees calculated on the wrong weight or zone (common when a warehouse routes an order incorrectly), commission applied at the wrong category rate, F-Assured or premium fulfillment fees charged on orders that don’t qualify for them, and returns where the original commission was never reversed.

None of these show up as a single large, obviously-wrong number. They’re small, per-order variances — often ₹20–100 per affected order — that only become visible in aggregate once you’re looking at hundreds or thousands of orders side by side.

A useful gut-check: pull one month of settlement data, pick 20 random orders, and manually verify the commission and shipping charged against what you’d expect for that category and weight. If more than one or two are off, it’s worth reconciling the full month rather than assuming it’s an isolated error.

For sellers moving real volume, spot-checking 20 orders a month isn’t enough coverage to catch a systemic issue — a wrong weight-slab assignment affects every order from that warehouse until it’s fixed. Full order-level reconciliation across every settlement, not just a sample, is what actually surfaces that pattern early enough to matter.