Real Takealot profit = selling price − all Takealot fees − VAT − cost of goods. The mistake almost every seller makes is stopping at "selling price − success fee − cost." Fulfilment, storage, returns and VAT quietly remove the rest, which is why a sale that looks like R150 profit can land closer to R60.
Ask a struggling Takealot seller what their profit per product is and you'll usually get one of two answers: a confident number that's wrong, or an honest "I'm not totally sure." Both are dangerous. You cannot price, discount or scale a product whose true margin you don't know.
The good news: the formula isn't complicated. You just have to include everything — not the two or three line items that are easy to remember. Let's build it up properly.
The real profit formula
Here it is, in plain terms. Work top to bottom and don't skip a line:
- Start with the selling price — what the customer pays.
- Subtract the success fee — Takealot's category commission.
- Subtract the fulfilment fee — per-unit pick, pack and ship (if FBT).
- Subtract a share of storage — what this unit's warehouse space costs while it waits.
- Subtract a returns provision — your category's return rate, averaged across all units.
- Subtract VAT — if you're VAT-registered, the VAT portion was never yours.
- Subtract your cost of goods — what you paid for the item, landed.
Whatever survives all seven lines is your real profit. Everything above the cost-of-goods line is money that leaves your hands before you ever see it.
A worked example: a R299 product
Let's run a realistic mid-range product. The numbers below are illustrative — your category's success fee, fulfilment and storage will differ — but the shape is what matters.
| Line | Amount | Running total |
|---|---|---|
| Selling price | R299.00 | R299.00 |
| Success fee (~12%) | −R35.88 | R263.12 |
| Fulfilment fee | −R30.00 | R233.12 |
| Storage (per-unit share) | −R6.00 | R227.12 |
| Returns provision (~5%) | −R15.00 | R212.12 |
| VAT portion (15%) | −R39.00 | R173.12 |
| Cost of goods | −R120.00 | R53.12 |
| Real profit | R53.12 | ~18% |
Notice what happened. A seller eyeballing "R299 sells, R120 cost" would mentally bank R179 profit. The real number is R53 — less than a third of the assumption. And that's a healthy example. Swap in a bulkier product, a higher-fee category, or a 20% return rate, and the same exercise can land at zero or below.
You don't have a pricing problem. You have a measurement problem. Fix the measurement and the pricing fixes itself.
The four lines sellers forget
Fulfilment
Easy to ignore because it doesn't feel like "commission," but on smaller-ticket items the fulfilment fee can rival the success fee. Bulky and heavy products are where this quietly kills margin.
Storage
It's not per-sale, it's per-day-of-shelf-space, so it doesn't show up neatly against a single order. Slow movers accumulate storage cost whether they sell or not — which is why ageing stock is a margin emergency, not just a cash-flow one.
Returns
You don't pay returns on every unit, but you pay them on enough that they must be averaged into every unit's price. A 5% return rate means every sale carries 5% of a return's cost.
VAT
If you're registered, the VAT inside your selling price belongs to SARS, not you. Sellers who forget this feel "profitable" right up until the VAT return lands.
Lucci Connect runs this exact calculation automatically for every product in your catalogue, and reconciles each Takealot payout to the cent so the numbers are real, not estimated. Your cost of goods stays private and is never sent to Takealot. See your real profit per product →