Why a voucher can lose you money: reading your margin after fees
A voucher looks like a small discount on the price. On your income statement it is a large cut in your margin. Here is the sum to run before the next campaign, worked through step by step.
Most sellers judge a voucher by the orders it brings in. The better question is what each of those orders leaves you once the Shopee fees, the product and the voucher itself have been paid for. The voucher comes out of your margin, not out of your price, and your margin is much smaller than your price. A discount that sounds modest against the price can take half of what you keep.
Start from what you actually keep
Take one order and follow the money. The buyer pays the price less the voucher. Shopee then takes its fees as a share of the order: an admin fee that depends on the category, and service fees for any programmes you have joined, such as free shipping or cashback. What is left pays for the product, its packing and any ad that brought the buyer in. Seller Centre shows this split for every order under My Income, and that is the number to work from, not the price on the listing.
| Per order | No voucher | IDR 15.000 voucher |
|---|---|---|
| The buyer pays | IDR 100.000 | IDR 85.000 |
| Shopee fees at 12% | −IDR 12.000 | −IDR 10.200 |
| Cost of the product | −IDR 60.000 | −IDR 60.000 |
| Packing | −IDR 2.000 | −IDR 2.000 |
| What you keep | IDR 26.000 | IDR 12.800 |
Here the fees are 12% of what the buyer pays; your own rates are on your income statement, and they change with the category and the programmes you join.
The voucher took 15% off the price and more than half of the profit: IDR 26.000 an order became IDR 12.800. To earn the same in total, it has to roughly double the orders of that product, since 26.000 divided by 12.800 is just over two. If it brings 30% more orders, the product earns less than it did without the voucher, while the sales report shows growth. On a product that keeps IDR 45.000 an order, the same voucher leaves IDR 31.800 and needs about 42% more orders to break even. That is why the sum is done product by product, not for the shop as a whole.
A voucher comes out of your margin, not out of your price.
When a voucher is worth it
- A minimum spend above your average order, so the voucher buys a bigger basket instead of discounting an order you would have had anyway.
- A new product that needs its first sales and reviews, with a fixed budget and an end date.
- Old stock that costs more to keep than to sell at a thinner margin.
- A voucher for followers or past buyers, which brings back people who already trust the shop.
Whichever it is, write the sum down before the campaign starts: the margin per order with the voucher, the extra orders it needs to break even, and the date you will check. Do it again when mechanics stack. A product that keeps IDR 14.000 an order keeps only IDR 800 after the same IDR 15.000 voucher, and any campaign discount on top takes it below zero. Sales still go up, so nobody notices until the profit of the month comes in.