Results

Does Path to Profit actually work?

The honest answer, on a page that will not flatter itself.

What is on this page

Nine findings, and every one of them is checkable.

Below is what the platforms publish about their own fees, and what sellers write on the platforms’ own boards. Grouped by where they came from, each with its source underneath, so you can go and read the original rather than take my word for it.

Not one of them is a customer of mine. Nobody has finished the thirty days and come back with a figure yet, and when somebody does it goes on this page with their name on it.

Inventing one in the meantime would take about ten minutes, and it is the fastest way to make every other page on this site worthless.

What is below is enough to judge the argument. The work itself has to wait for a result with a name on it. If you would rather test it than read about it, the entry rung is $100 with a thirty-day exit.

Start at $100 Read the plain answers first

The public record

None of this is a customer of mine, and none of it is a screenshot of your result. It is fee schedules and public forum threads. Check every line yourself.

Amazon

More than half

Marketplace Pulse read seller P&Ls and found Amazon's total take had passed half of revenue. Referral 15%, FBA 20 to 35%, advertising up to 15%.

Those three are billed on three different bases and land on three different reports. Referral comes off the sale, FBA off the unit, advertising off the click. None of them looks fatal on its own line, which is why the total is the only number worth knowing and the one the dashboard will not add up for you.

marketplacepulse.com, February 2023

Amazon

The buyer is not yours

A thread on Amazon's own seller forum is titled The Problem With Amazon Not Providing Customer Email Addresses.

That thread is not a bug report. It is sellers reading the arrangement they already agreed to. You paid the advertising that produced the buyer, and the platform kept the only way to reach them again, so the second sale has to be bought at full price like the first.

sellercentral.amazon.co.uk seller forums

Amazon

$121 billion

An ILSR report, covered by TechCrunch, said Amazon collected over a third of seller revenue. That came to $121 billion in one year.

That is the cut taken off other people's businesses in twelve months. A rate that size is not one store's bad setup or one category's bad luck. It is the design working as intended, applied evenly to everyone on it.

ILSR, December 2021

Etsy

Etsy, published

6.5% transaction. 3% plus $0.25 to process. $0.20 a listing. Offsite Ads at 12% or 15%. Around 10 to 13% of a sale, or 22 to 28% when Offsite Ads claims it.

None of this is hidden. Every rate is published and every rate is small enough to wave through on its own. What moves the total from ten percent to twenty-eight is whether an ad gets credited with the sale, which means the margin on an order can be settled after the fact by someone else's attribution.

Etsy's own published fee schedule

Etsy

On Etsy's own board

A thread on Etsy's community forum is titled: just got charged almost 25% for an offsite ad fee, but I don't have offsite ads turned on.

A seller can read the entire fee schedule, budget for all of it, and still meet a charge they did not choose. That is the part worth sitting with. The rate was published and the bill still arrived as a surprise, because knowing a rate and controlling whether it applies to you are two different things.

Thread title, Etsy community forum

Shopify

Shopify, published

Basic is $39 a month. Cards run 2.9% plus 30 cents. Use another gateway and Shopify adds 2.0%. Apps land between $50 and $300 a month.

The 2.0% is the line to sit with. It is charged for not using their payment processor, so the cheaper gateway you found has to beat two percent before it saves you anything at all. That is a fee on a decision rather than on a sale, and it is the clearest statement of who the checkout belongs to.

Shopify's published plan and gateway fees

Shopify

On Shopify's own board

Two threads on Shopify's community board. One is titled Shopify is holding my $12,661.24 for no reason. The other asks why funds are held for 120 days.

A hold is not a fee and it is worse than one. A fee is priced, predictable, and something you can plan around. A hold arrives without warning against money you have already earned and probably already committed to stock, and the release date belongs to someone else. Payroll does not wait 120 days.

Two thread titles, community.shopify.com

Shopify

$29 a customer

SimplicityDX put the loss on each newly acquired customer at $29. The same figure was $9 in 2013, a rise of 222% in eight years.

If acquiring a customer costs more than their first order returns, then the first order was never where the money was. The business is decided by whether there is a second one. On a marketplace there usually is not, because you cannot reach them to ask for it.

SimplicityDX, July 2022

The other side

Litmus puts email at $36 back for every $1 spent. That is the buyer you already paid for, coming back without a second ad.

This is the only entry here that is not a cost, and it is the reason the other eight are worth reading. A list is the one asset the fee schedules do not touch and a payout hold cannot freeze. Everything the thirty days build exists to put that list in your name instead of somebody else's.

litmus.com

What gets published here

A before figure and an after figure, both checkable.
The period they cover, so a good month cannot pass as a trend.
Where the numbers came from — a dashboard, a statement, a platform export.
The client's agreement to be named, or a clearly labelled anonymous entry.

Anything that cannot meet all four does not go up, however good it would look.