The hidden e-commerce costs in Argentina that destroy your margin without you noticing

The e-commerce iceberg: what you see versus what's there

When people think about the costs of their online store, they usually think about product cost and advertising. The problem is that below the waterline there's a long list of costs that together can add up to between 25% and 45% of your revenue.

Layer 1: Platform costs

If you use Tiendanube, you pay a monthly plan plus a transaction fee that can range from 0.5% to 2% of every sale. If you sell $1,000,000 on a plan with a 1% fee, that's $10,000 going out automatically.

If you use Shopify with external payment processors, the extra fee can be 0.5% to 2% on every sale — in dollars, which in Argentina turns into a variable cost that's hard to forecast.

Layer 2: The Mercado Pago black hole

This is where the real problem starts. Mercado Pago charges:

• Interest-free installments: 11% extra for 3 installments. 20% for 6 installments. For 12 installments, up to 40% of the sale value. You absorb that cost.
• Instant payout: if you need the money today (not in 30 days), you pay an extra charge of around 6.5%.
• Base fee: around 4.49% + VAT on every transaction processed.
• Gross receipts tax (IIBB) withholdings: an extra 1% to 5% depending on your province.

If you sell a $50,000 product in 6 interest-free installments and want the money the same day, the processor can be taking between $15,000 and $17,000 of that sale. That's 30-34% in payment costs alone.

Layer 3: Shipping costs

With Andreani, OCA or a private courier, a standard shipment can cost between $3,000 and $8,000 ARS. If your average ticket is $30,000 and you offer free shipping, you're giving up between 10% and 27% of the sale value on logistics alone.

In apparel e-commerce, the return rate can reach 15-25% of orders. Every return means a round-trip logistics cost that the store usually absorbs.

Layer 4: Mercado Libre fees

Mercado Libre charges between 11.80% and 17.14% of the product's value depending on the category, plus a fixed charge per unit sold. A $20,000 product can leave you between $14,000 and $16,000 after fees and shipping, before subtracting product cost and advertising.

Layer 5: Your real ad spend

Not just what you spend on Meta and Google. Also: your agency's fee (between $80,000 and $300,000 ARS/month or a percentage of spend), content production, influencers, marketing tools and affiliate commissions.

Many stores calculate their ROAS on platform spend without including the agency fee. That completely distorts the profitability analysis.

The result: what's your real margin?

Add product cost + platform + payment processor + logistics + advertising (agency included) + operations, and many stores that believe they have a 30-40% margin find out their real margin is between 5% and 15%.

The Eternos Laureles case: when they started measuring all their costs properly with Escalafy, they found campaigns losing money and hidden costs nobody had accounted for. Their margin went from 8% to 27% in four months.

How Escalafy adds it all up automatically

The manual fix is a spreadsheet. The problem is that the data lives in five or six different systems: Tiendanube, Mercado Libre, Meta Ads Manager, logistics, payment processor. Exporting, crossing and updating it all takes 2 to 4 hours a day.

Somos Fans had a full-time employee dedicated to consolidating Tiendanube and Mercado Libre data. When they connected Escalafy, the system did it automatically in 5 minutes.

Escalafy automatically connects all your sales and cost channels and shows you real margin by product, by SKU, by channel and by campaign — updated in real time, no spreadsheets, no waiting for month-end close.