Marketplace Profitability: The Real Cost Behind Every Sale
October 7, 2026
Reading Time - 2 min
Kamelia Pusheva
Author
Marketplace Profitability: The Real Cost Behind Every Sale.
You’ve got 500 SKUs live. But how many are actually making you money?
For many marketplace sellers, the answer is far fewer than expected.
Revenue looks healthy on the surface, while returns, commissions, fulfilment costs, VAT, and peak-season surcharges quietly eat away at your ecommerce profit margins.
Lucas Bassa sits down with Mark Ligteringen, founder of Attalos — profitability management software built for marketplace sellers, and a marketplace seller himself since 2013 — to uncover the hidden costs behind ecommerce profitability that most sellers overlook.
Mark shares how to identify the SKUs quietly losing money, why returns can hurt more than ad spend, how seemingly small costs compound into major margin loss, and why smaller, niche marketplaces can sometimes deliver better margins than Amazon.
In this episode, you’ll learn how to:
- Find the SKUs that are actually profitable — and the ones quietly draining your margin
- See the real cost behind every sale, from returns and commissions to fulfilment and peak-season surcharges
- Spot opportunities to improve marketplace profitability before scaling products, spend, or sales volume
Because more marketplace sales don't necessarily mean more profit.
Sometimes, the fastest way to grow profit is to stop selling the wrong products.
Learn how to optimize, grow and scale on marketplaces with Channable
Listen to the complete episode:
Read transcript
Lucas Bassa (00:04.11)
Welcome to a new episode of Marketplace Growth Podcast. I'm joined by Mark from
Attalos, and today we're talking about profitability on marketplaces. Mark, introduce
yourself.
Mark Ligteringen - Attalos (00:04.11)
Thanks for the introduction. I'm Mark, 41 years old, and I've been in the marketplace
business since 2013. I started as a seller — I had a toy shop called Planet's Happy, and I was
actually one of the first customers of Channable. So I've got a long history there, and for
the past four years I've also worked as an agency partner. We've built our own software,
Attalos, for managing profitability across marketplaces.
Lucas Bassa (00:04.11)
So your core business is helping sellers get a grip on their margins, basically?
Mark Ligteringen - Attalos (00:04.11)
Yeah, for sure.
Lucas Bassa (00:04.11)
And why is this such an important topic to talk about?
Mark Ligteringen - Attalos (00:04.11)
It pays the bills. We see a lot of companies still not focusing on profitability — there's a lot
of talk about revenue and ACOS, but at the end of the day you really have to know what
your costs are.
Lucas Bassa (00:04.11)
Yeah — and why is this such a problem on marketplaces specifically?
Mark Ligteringen - Attalos (01:31.37)
From my own experience — I started on one marketplace with a lot of variable costs: ad
spend, returns, commissions, different categories, different countries, ex-VAT versus
including VAT, different commission structures. It's quite complicated to get a clear
overview at product level or brand level.
Lucas Bassa (01:55.16)
Yeah, you have to get your focus — where am I making money, where am I making losses?
I come from an agency background where we also ran Google Ads, and one of the big
differences is: with Google, if you advertise, you pay for clicks, people go to your webshop
and buy an item, and you know all the costs involved upfront. With a marketplace like
Amazon or bol, you also pay a percentage just to list the item — on top of what you pay for
the ads. You pay a percentage for ad spend, but also potentially for fulfillment, VAT, and so
on. That was the biggest difference for me — there are a lot of percentages, and they all
add up. But because each one looks small on its own, you're not really worried about it
until you see the bottom line.
Mark Ligteringen - Attalos (01:55.16)
There's also shipping — there are so many surcharges these days: energy surcharges,
island surcharges if you're shipping to a Spanish island near Morocco, peak surcharges
during Christmas. You expect to make money, and then there's an extra 25 cents per
package.
Lucas Bassa (03:48.37)
So you're saying sellers need to get to that level of detail in their profitability calculations —
no guesswork. Do you see that happening in the market? What's the general maturity
level around profitability in Europe, or the Netherlands specifically?
Mark Ligteringen - Attalos (03:48.37)
Europe is still behind on this, and you see it in the software that's available too. We all
know the big software providers that help Amazon sellers, but they're mostly
Amazon-only, and they connect directly to that one marketplace. We connect through an
integrator — Channable is our base, and from there we pull in data from PostNL, DHL, and
other carriers, plus Amazon and bol. Put together, that gives you the full profitability
picture.
Lucas Bassa (03:48.37)
Can you say something about average catalog size?
Mark Ligteringen - Attalos (05:03.76)
I've been in this industry for a while, and early on we had a client selling 500 items. We ran
a proper profitability calculation and found that only about 20–30% of those items were
actually sold at a profit — but the profit on those was really good. On the surface it looked
like we were doing fine, but by excluding the other 400-plus items, total profitability
increased significantly. That's actually the funniest part.
Lucas Bassa (05:03.76)
So if you cut the loss-making orders, you end up making more profit by doing less.
Mark Ligteringen - Attalos (05:03.76)
Exactly — that's the funniest part. The sweet spot for catalog size really ranges from about
40 products up to 100,000, depending on whether it's your own brand, your margin, your
return rate, and so on.
Lucas Bassa (05:03.76)
So you can see where the sweet spots are — fewer returns, higher margins, sometimes
higher competition too. For the people listening, what's the biggest profit killer you're
seeing?
Mark Ligteringen - Attalos (05:50.32)
Returns.
Lucas Bassa (05:50.32)
You also see people spending more on ads on bol.com and Amazon — CPCs are rising. bol
opened this market up for European sellers, so there's more competition, and new sellers
often start by spending heavily on ads. From an advertising angle, if you do a deep dive on
ad spend, you're often paying for clicks you'd have gotten organically anyway. If you're the
top-ranked result for "socks" and you're still bidding on the keyword "socks," it's worth
checking your organic ranking regularly — if you're in position one, two, or three, it might
be smarter not to spend there at all and let those sales come in organically. But you
mentioned returns — is that still...?
Mark Ligteringen - Attalos (06:54.74)
For example, here's what we do: we export your profitability data from our software, and
say you want to cap ad spend at 20% of profit — we build an automated loop with
Channable back to the marketplace that pauses spend the moment profitability on that
item drops. So you use your data to automate ad spend, not just report on it. The same
applies to organic rankings — if you're already in the top three or five for a keyword, you
might want to pause spend there. Having that system in place means you're not running
this calculation manually every day or every week.
Lucas Bassa (06:54.74)
Automation is basically the name of the game, especially once you're across multiple
marketplaces.
Mark Ligteringen - Attalos (06:54.74)
For sure — especially with multiple marketplaces.
Lucas Bassa (06:54.74)
You mentioned returns — do you think it's still possible to sell clothing profitably these
days on marketplaces?
Mark Ligteringen - Attalos (06:54.74)
Sizing tables and consistency are the most important part. Return rates vary a lot by
marketplace and by country — I've worked with clothing companies with return rates of
30–40%, which was already a nightmare, and we've seen rates as high as 60–70%.
Lucas Bassa (08:49.74)
But you're also seeing marketplaces like Zalando doing more to prevent returns — using
AI for sizing recommendations based on past purchases, for example. Do you see returns
improving, or is it still a problem?
Mark Ligteringen - Attalos (09:39.38)
I think it's moving in the right direction. There are two sides to it — Zalando wants to avoid
returns by using better data, but they also make returns as easy as possible, with labels
included and pickup available. So it's genuinely a two-directional problem.
Lucas Bassa (09:39.38)
Okay, but returns are clearly the biggest profit killer. If you look at categories like
electronics or DIY — big marketplace categories — would you still say returns is the first
thing to map out, or are there other important cost factors? We've covered ad spend, or
total cost of sale — what's sometimes called TACOS — and returns. Is there another one?
Mark Ligteringen - Attalos (09:43.44)
Related to that, there's also conversion — and that ties back to something we do a lot with
Channable's creative software. Adding sizing information to your images, adding your
USPs directly onto the images — that's genuinely fun to do in the creative module. If you
have your sizing data, you can automatically add it to your product images, similar to the
classic Amazon photo that shows a hand next to the product for scale.
Lucas Bassa (09:43.44)
The photo that shows the actual size of the product — the Amazon hand trick?
Mark Ligteringen - Attalos (09:43.44)
Exactly, everyone knows that one. It's an important image for preventing returns, because
people are reading less and less — they scroll through the images instead of the text. A tip
I always give: check your listing on your mobile phone, because on mobile it's essentially
all visuals. Amazon used to be very text-heavy, but that's collapsing — they're even
reducing title length from 200 characters down to 75, more than half. That's better for
consumers, but it means you have far less room to communicate information in the most
important spot on the listing — so that information has to live in the images instead.
Lucas Bassa (09:43.44)
Do you have other tips for using images to help with conversion or return prevention?
Mark Ligteringen - Attalos (11:56.85)
Yes — showing your other variants, like different colorways, helps you stand out from
competitors. And of course, showing your USPs clearly.
Lucas Bassa (11:56.85)
I had an experience a few years back selling bicycle pannier bags — everyone was selling
black ones. We also had a yellow one, and we used that as the variation in our ads. No one
actually bought the yellow bag, but it got people to click on the listing, and then they
bought the black one.
Mark Ligteringen - Attalos (11:56.85)
That's a good tip.
Lucas Bassa (11:56.85)
Aside from returns and ad spend, you mentioned shipping — it's become a lot more
complex. Can you elaborate on why, and why it's so important to map out in detail?
Mark Ligteringen - Attalos (11:56.85)
From my own experience — I thought I was making a healthy profit, and then at the end
of the month I'd get hit with a peak surcharge or an energy surcharge calculation. This
happened a lot. In 2023 there was a particularly big one — around 15%, plus a peak
surcharge of about 5%, so on a five-euro shipment in the Netherlands that's an extra 25
cents. You really have to manage that closely, and carriers aren't transparent about the
real costs. We're in ongoing talks with PostNL, DHL, and other carriers to get API access to
that data — nobody has it, and that's by design.
Lucas Bassa (11:56.85)
Can you even calculate that upfront, or is it always retroactive?
Mark Ligteringen - Attalos (14:08.39)
You can estimate it upfront, but if a package ends up a few centimeters bigger than
expected — a mistake made somewhere in the warehouse — you're already hit with the
surcharge. Small mistakes add up to real cost over a year. What we do now is download
the CSV data from the invoice and match it against the orders, so after a month you can
review everything and see exactly where a mistake happened — a product you thought
cost five euros to ship actually cost twelve.
Lucas Bassa (14:56.14)
So you still have to check that retroactively, but based on that you can adjust pricing or
remove certain products. How would you advise approaching Q4, when peak surcharges
hit and everything else is in play? You're prepping for what should be your biggest profit
quarter of the year, spending a lot of money — do you recommend building in a buffer,
say 2–5%, to avoid surprises?
Mark Ligteringen - Attalos (14:56.14)
It starts with having real insight into your costs, and putting peak surcharges on your
calendar. A lot of people only realize in January why their profit wasn't as big as expected. I
don't hear people talking about peak or energy surcharges much at marketplace events,
but they're significant during peak season — so put it on the agenda. We can also
calculate more accurately upfront now with commissions — we were at Kaufland's office
in Cologne last week, and they've just opened up an API endpoint for commission data, so
we can calculate that upfront instead of guessing.
Lucas Bassa (14:56.14)
There's quite a difference between a 10% and a 15% referral fee.
Mark Ligteringen - Attalos (14:56.14)
Exactly — and I've seen companies check a handful of items, see it's 12%, and assume that
rate applies across the board. Again, all those percentages add up, and that's actually one
of the most interesting things about marketplace profitability right now — there are so
many marketplaces these days, and every major retailer is becoming one, often with lower
commission rates. They're curated, so there's less competition and less repricing pressure.
We see significantly higher profitability on smaller marketplaces — sometimes 50% higher
than on Amazon.
Lucas Bassa (14:56.14)
How niche are we talking? We have Amazon and bol as the very big ones, and I'd call
Kaufland big too...
Mark Ligteringen - Attalos (16:43.57)
Kaufland is also opening up further.
Lucas Bassa (16:43.57)
Would you say Decathlon still counts as niche?
Mark Ligteringen - Attalos (17:21.17)
Yes, it's still niche — it's one specific vertical.
Lucas Bassa (17:21.17)
We're seeing a lot of new marketplaces pop up, but also some very small ones that just
aren't getting much adoption. Is there a cutoff point — should sellers explore every new
marketplace, or be more selective?
Mark Ligteringen - Attalos (17:21.17)
I think you want to try almost every marketplace, even the curated ones, because right
now many of them are accepting new sellers, but in a year or two they might close off to
new partners — you don't know in advance which ones will succeed. It might cost you 50
euros a month, but try it — that's my advice.
Lucas Bassa (17:21.17)
Otto is open again for new sellers, right? But still curated?
Mark Ligteringen - Attalos (18:47.76)
Yes, still curated. In terms of profitability, the results we're seeing there are actually quite
low. They're the second-biggest horizontal marketplace in Germany behind Amazon, and
they take a distinctive approach — staying curated and only accepting a limited number
of sellers that fit what they're looking for. But it's an interesting one. We're also seeing
marketplaces like Temu, which launch with very low fees to attract sellers and then raise
costs over time — the same pattern you see with social media platforms: get people in
first.
Lucas Bassa (19:03.47)
Amazon also changes its costs quite often — FBA fees especially have shifted a lot over the
years. Are sellers keeping up with that?
Mark Ligteringen - Attalos (19:03.47)
No. If you haven't reviewed your FBA or shipping costs in a while, now's a good time to do
it.
Lucas Bassa (19:03.47)
On pricing thresholds — above a certain price point you end up paying a higher
commission percentage. Is that true?
Mark Ligteringen - Attalos (19:03.47)
I didn't even know that one — there's a gap around the 100-euro mark, so it's actually
cheaper to price something at 99 euros than at 110, for example.
Lucas Bassa (19:03.47)
That's an interesting point, because bol, for example, offers commission discounts — a
lower commission rate if you price below a certain threshold. We factor that in as an
option in Channable. Do you see that being used commonly, or is it mostly overlooked?
Mark Ligteringen - Attalos (19:03.47)
On bol, I'd say almost everyone using an integrator applies it. Where it gets missed is with
sellers who aren't using an integrator — they simply forget about it.
Lucas Bassa (19:03.47)
Is it a meaningful profit booster, or too small to really matter?
Mark Ligteringen - Attalos (20:39.47)
No, it can be a genuine profit booster.
Lucas Bassa (20:39.47)
Are there other marketplaces that offer that kind of discount?
Mark Ligteringen - Attalos (21:11.54)
I don't think Amazon does — not that I'm aware of.
Lucas Bassa (21:42.12)
Okay, so we've covered a lot of the important metrics — returns, ad spend, shipping costs.
If someone isn't using an integrator or any profitability software at all, what should they do
right now to get a grip on their profit?
Mark Ligteringen - Attalos (21:42.12)
Start by pulling your costs together — open your carrier invoice and check it line by line,
since that's usually your biggest cost point, and look for leaks. Then put everything into a
Google Sheet, or into an AI model.
Lucas Bassa (21:42.12)
See where the bleeders are, and where the winners are.
Mark Ligteringen - Attalos (21:42.12)
Exactly. And ideally do this before you launch on a new marketplace — as we discussed,
sometimes it's better to sell fewer items. If you do the profitability work upfront, you avoid
setting up products that were never going to be profitable — you take your winners, your
profit-makers, and start there.
Lucas Bassa (21:42.12)
On the reseller side — there can be several reasons to sell more of something, like a bigger
discount from your supplier, but it's still worth knowing exactly what that volume costs
you, so you can weigh it against the discounted buying price. As a reseller, there's always a
concern about being cut out eventually, as more brands sell direct on marketplaces — bol
and Amazon are increasingly buying straight from brands instead of distributors. That's a
real challenge for resellers, but I think there are also opportunities.
Mark Ligteringen - Attalos (21:42.12)
That's actually one of the things I like about marketplace events — you get to know
people, including your suppliers and brands directly. We have customers who've secured
exclusive contracts with brands to be the sole seller on bol, or across several marketplaces,
for that brand. That gives you exclusivity, so you know you'll have good margins and a
stable business for years to come, because you're not competing on the same listing with
other resellers.
Lucas Bassa (21:42.12)
Is that even legally allowed?
Mark Ligteringen - Attalos (23:57.70)
I believe so — there have been court decisions in Germany on this. If you're a brand, you
can protect your distribution by saying only certain sellers or platforms can list your
products, because otherwise everyone starts repricing each other down. Court rulings
have confirmed that's allowed.
Lucas Bassa (23:57.70)
I imagine you need a certain size, or a strong relationship, to get deals like that.
Mark Ligteringen - Attalos (24:49.72)
Yes — size, or your relationship with the supplier.
Lucas Bassa (24:49.72)
So the idea is: a good relationship with your supplier over ten years, you're a reseller, and
you think, "maybe I should focus on this brand" — but then you'd need an exclusivity
agreement to make that happen on bol. Does that kind of relationship extend to carriers
too, like PostNL or DHL?
Mark Ligteringen - Attalos (25:52.40)
I think that's harder to achieve, but it can't hurt to try — a good relationship helps.
Lucas Bassa (26:03.54)
So, to summarize for anyone listening who's starting out on one or two marketplaces
without any software: download all your cost data directly from the marketplace — your
invoices — get everything into an LLM or a spreadsheet, and structure it there. Start with
the basic breakdown: am I actually making a profit? And if you find you are making a
healthy profit, my advice would be to invest more into ad spend to grow revenue further,
because eventually you'll want to take that next step.
Mark Ligteringen - Attalos (26:03.54)
I think a really important step sellers can take right now is around operational excellence
— specifically compliance. There's so much documentation required on Amazon; if you're
in the toy business, or many other categories, there's a lot of compliance work involved —
Lucid registration, WEEE in Germany, the eco-tax in France. Tools like Claude or ChatGPT
can help a lot with that, and save teams a significant number of hours.
Lucas Bassa (26:03.54)
That's a good segue into the Golden Nuggets segment — we've covered a lot of concrete
things to check. If you had to share three golden nuggets with a seller listening, related to
profitability, what would they be?
Mark Ligteringen - Attalos (27:21.54)
The first is the power of niche: there are a lot of niche marketplaces out there. Channable
doesn't support all of them, but we support quite a few, and often the smaller ones are
easy to get onto simply by connecting a feed. You can make a higher profit there because
there's less competition, so get in while they're still niche. The second is operational
excellence — leverage AI for the less exciting parts of selling on marketplaces, like
compliance. Interns are great, but let them focus on more valuable work instead. And the
third is data insight — make decisions based on data, get all your data in, not just the big
three percentages, and steer the business on that.
Lucas Bassa (27:21.54)
For sellers connecting to niche marketplaces through Channable, is that easy to
integrate?
Mark Ligteringen - Attalos (27:21.54)
Yes, I think it's easy — a lot of them are Mirakl-based, so if you're already exporting a feed
from Channable, you can plug in without much extra work. Plenty of sellers are already on
Shopify or Magento, so once your data is flowing there, adding a niche marketplace is
straightforward — you just route your orders through.
Lucas Bassa (27:21.54)
And it can't hurt to try.
Mark Ligteringen - Attalos (27:21.54)
Right — I'd still say Amazon has a lot of room for profit too, but you need to stay on top of
your business.
Lucas Bassa (27:21.54)
That's a lot of great insight. I think we should also mention conversion — it's easy to forget
it's a major factor in profitability. I've seen listings for items priced at two or three euros —
very simple products — with a 45% conversion rate. So you can make a real profit even on
low-priced items if your listing and product are both excellent.
Mark Ligteringen - Attalos (27:21.54)
Absolutely.
Lucas Bassa (27:21.54)
I think that wraps it up — great conversation. I do think it's important to keep this topic on
the agenda, because as we discussed before recording, a lot of companies still aren't
treating profitability with the urgency it deserves. It's a bit like the classic dropshipping
pitch — "I'm making so much money on bol" — without ever showing the actual profit,
because in the end it's a percentage game.
Lucas Bassa (27:21.54)
If I were to ask what would make an interesting guest for the show next — big name or
not — what topic or guest would you suggest?
Mark Ligteringen - Attalos (29:26.22)
Something around a new marketplace and a different approach to how they operate. That
would be a good one — maybe someone from that team.
Lucas Bassa (29:26.22)
That's a really good one — that marketplace is actually our fastest-growing integration at
Channable right now, so it'd be a timely, relevant conversation. I've been reading a lot
about them lately, so that's a great tip. Mark, thanks for your time and for the conversation
— let's talk again sometime.
Mark Ligteringen - Attalos (29:52.94)
Thank you, thank you.
Kamelia Pusheva
Author
Kamelia Pusheva is a Demand Generation Manager at Channable, passionate about building marketing that balances strategy, creativity, and impact. She focuses on demand generation initiatives that educate and engage B2B SaaS audiences, collaborating closely with brand, product marketing, and sales to turn ideas into campaigns that drive measurable growth.
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