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Online retail now requires more than a good offering and efficient dispatch. Rising advertising costs, marketplace price pressure and expensive logistics mean many stores sell more but earn less. Sales grow on paper while account funds shrink. We examine six areas for profitability improvement: tools, settlement automation, margins and an outsourced CFO.
1. Automate and integrate sales channels
Low profitability often comes from operational chaos rather than weak sales: manually copying orders between Allegro, your store and marketplaces, stock errors, overpriced shipping and repetitive staff work. Small problems can cost more monthly than an advertising campaign.
More channels make manual work harder. A multichannel store soon reaches a point where staff spend hours switching panels instead of helping clients or developing products. This signals a need for a sales management system.
Which system should you choose?
Growing stores eventually face this question. A suitable system can:
- Synchronise orders and stock between channels so the last unit is not sold twice.
- Reduce picking and dispatch errors.
- Compare courier costs in real time and choose the cheapest or fastest shipment option.
- Generate sales and shipping documents without manual copying.
- Free the team for work that increases sales rather than panel clicking.
From our e-commerce client experience, Base, formerly BaseLinker, is one of the solutions working best in Poland. It offers over 2,000 integrations with Allegro, Amazon, eMAG, hundreds of marketplaces, couriers and accounting systems. It automates orders, returns, inventory, shipping and foreign sales and serves over 30,000 companies. We particularly recommend it to multichannel stores where manual order management is beginning to cost more than the tool.
Before investing, calculate current error costs and staff hours spent on automatable work. Monthly order-processing hours multiplied by hourly rates show how quickly the investment pays back.
2. Organised accounting and an outsourced CFO
Profitability is rarely obvious. Sales may increase while cash declines as advertising, commissions, returns, logistics and storage become more expensive. Without current accounting and regular analysis, the problem may go unnoticed until action is too late.
Tax-focused accounting often does not answer owners’ main questions: is a channel profitable, can we afford another campaign, and will cash cover seasonal stock? An outsourced CFO helps.
This gives financial director expertise without full-time employment. The CFO focuses on profitability and liquidity, usually:
- Analysing product, category and channel margins to show actual earnings.
- Monitoring liquidity and planning cash for Black Friday and Christmas.
- Preparing management reports showing profitable and subsidised sales.
- Supporting pricing, new-channel investment and foreign-market decisions.
- Working with accounting so data is useful for management as well as tax-correct.
This is often cheaper and more flexible than a full-time CFO and more practical than transactional accounting ending with tax filings.
3. Product-level margin control
A common mistake is assessing the whole store instead of individual products or categories. Some assortment generates impressive sales volumes but loses money after advertising, commission and returns.
Standard reports show revenue and quantities but rarely all product costs. Add acquisition, platform, shipping and estimated return handling costs to reveal the real picture.
Regularly analyse:
- Net margin after commissions, online payment and shipping costs.
- Advertising efficiency by product, not only campaign.
- High-return products that may be cheaper to withdraw than sell at a loss.
- Category seasonality to avoid tying up capital for six months.
Financial and sales data must meet here, linking the tools in point one with analysis in point two. Without both, decisions use an incomplete picture.
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4. Optimise logistics and returns
Logistics costs grow quickly but are rarely optimised because owners treat them as fixed. Several extra margin percentage points may be hidden here.
First review courier rates: growing volume warrants renegotiation because rates agreed one or two years ago at lower volume are rarely competitive. Second, select carriers automatically by weight, size and destination, using the systems in point one.
Third, calculate free delivery’s real cost. Many stores introduce a threshold without checking whether basket value rises enough to cover shipping or merely reduces every order’s margin.
Fourth, analyse return causes. Sizing, inaccurate descriptions or poor photos may create expectations that the parcel does not meet. Fixing causes is usually cheaper than repeated returns and reshipping.
A few percentage points saved in logistics may improve results more than another campaign, requiring one analytical effort rather than recurring spending.
5. Data-based decisions
Regular reporting and decisions based on numbers, rather than intuition or habit, are crucial. Many owners price, promote or invest based on what “always worked” instead of current economics.
A store knowing true margin, profitable channels, loss-making activity and upcoming cash flow makes better decisions and responds to advertising or commission changes before quarter-end reveals trouble.
All previous points connect here. Tools provide operational data, accounting and the CFO interpret it, and product margins and logistics complete the profitability picture. Weekly or monthly reviews, rather than quarterly tax-time checks, address problems before liquidity is threatened.
6. Automate sales settlements in accounting
Even with Base and careful accounting, settlement can remain a bottleneck: hundreds or thousands of payments, intermediaries, marketplace commissions, corrections and returns must be matched to sales documents and entered.
This often consumes the most accounting hours despite automated sales and logistics. Manual invoice matching, bank statement counterparties and corrections are tedious, error-prone and difficult to scale without more staff.
Ecomrail addresses this directly in Comarch ERP Optima. It retrieves transactions from Allegro, Amazon, Shopify, WooCommerce and PrestaShop, multichannel systems including Base, and PayU, Przelewy24 or Stripe. It creates accounting entries, matches payments and settles operations in Optima without copying.
Distinctive features:
- Cloud operation without a server or extra software installation.
- Automatic bank statement counterparty identification and document matching.
- Corrections as well as normal sales.
- Small volumes and large databases of tens of thousands or 100,000 monthly operations.
- One-business-day implementation without client resource involvement.
Stores gain accounting capacity for growing sales without expanding teams. Accounting firms can take more e-commerce clients without proportionally increasing staff.
Interested in this article? Explore our financial management services and see how we can help:
Summary
Sales growth alone does not guarantee profit. Connect channel automation with product-level margins, logistics costs and current financial reporting. Automating transaction settlements addresses a further accounting bottleneck, while an outsourced CFO helps turn integrated data into commercial decisions.
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