Compare your Business Lines (DTC/Wholesale/Marketplace/Retail)

Business Lines is the section of the Command Center that answers one question: where is your money actually coming from? Four tiles — DTC Gross Profit, Wholesale Revenue, Marketplace Revenue and Retail / Other Revenue — put your direct-to-consumer business beside every other way you sell, over a fixed 90-day window.

What the Business Lines section is

It sits on the Command Center, below DTC Customer Economics: a row of four tiles under the heading Business Lines, with a Last 90 Days badge beside the heading and the subhead “DTC shows modeled gross profit and LTGP:CAC. Wholesale, Marketplaces, and Retail show revenue only until their additional fees are modeled.”

Three things about it are deliberate, and all three catch people out.

It is a comparison, not a filter. Nothing in this section is clickable and nothing here changes the rest of the page. It exists to show you the shape of your business in one glance, not to scope the screens above and below it.

It ignores the date selector. The Yesterday / Last 7 Days / 30D / 60D / 90D buttons that drive the DTC Performance Snapshot do not touch these four tiles. They are always the last 90 days, which is exactly what the badge is there to tell you. A quarter is the shortest window in which a wholesale order or a marketplace burst shows up as a pattern rather than as noise.

Only the DTC tile talks about profit. The other three report revenue and say so on their own face — each carries the words “revenue only”. That is not an oversight, and the section explains itself rather than leaving you to discover it.

Before you start

You need a connected Shopify store with at least one completed sync. Revenue and order counts follow from that alone.

The DTC tile’s profit figures also need product costs, or there is nothing to subtract — set your store-wide cost fallbacks and check Data Trust levels to see how much of your catalogue is running on evidence rather than assumption.

The section appears only once MarginOS has prepared these figures. On a brand-new account it is absent for a sync cycle or two rather than showing you four empty tiles.

Compare your business lines in five steps

1. Check the badge before anything else. It reads Last 90 Days, and it always will. If you have just changed the date selector at the top of the page, this section did not move with it.
2. Read DTC Gross Profit. The modeled gross profit your direct-to-consumer orders produced over the quarter. Under the headline figure sits a supporting line — revenue, gross profit per order, and LTGP:CAC — so the tile gives you scale, efficiency and payback quality in one read.
3. Read the logistics line underneath it. Separate from the 90-day headline, the DTC tile carries a 30-day logistics figure: what fulfillment, storage and return shipping cost you as a share of direct-to-consumer revenue. It is the gap between “looks profitable” and “profitable after logistics”.
4. Read the three revenue tiles as shares. Each one names its order count and its share of your total revenue across all four lines. The share is the useful half: $250,000 of wholesale means something different at 8% of the business than at 40%.
5. Ask the mix question. If a revenue-only line is a large and growing share of the business, the profit picture on the rest of the Command Center is describing a shrinking slice of it. That is the decision this section exists to prompt.

The four tiles

Tile	What it answers	Worth knowing
DTC Gross Profit	What your direct-to-consumer business earned over the last 90 days.	The same modeled gross profit the rest of the Command Center reports, so the two cannot disagree. Supporting line: revenue, GP per order, LTGP:CAC.
Wholesale Revenue	What you sold wholesale over the same 90 days.	Revenue only, with order count and share of total revenue. Wholesale terms and off-platform fees are not modelled yet.
Marketplace Revenue	What you sold through marketplaces.	Revenue only, same reason — marketplace commissions and fees are not yet part of the profit model.
Retail / Other Revenue	In-person retail and every remaining channel, combined.	One tile deliberately covering point-of-sale and anything that is not DTC, wholesale or marketplace.

Every tile carries an information icon. Hovering it gives you the same definition in a sentence, which is worth doing the first time you look at a figure you intend to act on.

How MarginOS calculates what you see here

All four tiles are prepared in advance from the same ledger that produces every other money figure in MarginOS — see how MarginOS turns raw data into your margins. The practical consequence is that the DTC tile here and the profit figures elsewhere on the Command Center are the same measurement, not two estimates of it, so they cannot quietly drift apart.

The profit in the DTC tile is Gross Profit (CM1): revenue after product cost, fulfillment, payment fees and refunds, before advertising. LTGP:CAC in the supporting line is the lifetime gross profit a customer produces measured against what it cost to acquire them — the same ratio reported in DTC Customer Economics just above, not a second calculation of it. Many brands aim for at least 3:1, though the right target depends on your margins and how long you can wait to be paid back; how MarginOS calculates LTGP:CAC has the detail.

Share is measured against total revenue across the four lines, not against profit. That is the only denominator all four tiles can honestly share while three of them have no profit figure.

The logistics line has three honest states and never a fabricated zero. Measured means real warehouse invoices — connected shipping and fulfillment data. Estimated means MarginOS modelled it from your store-default fulfillment, storage and return-shipping settings because no invoices have arrived yet, and the line says “Estimated” on its face. When there is nothing at all, the line shows a dash and tells you what to connect. The same principle governs the rest of the section: where a figure has no basis, GP per order and LTGP:CAC read N/A rather than a zero, on purpose.

Example

Illustrative numbers, not a real store. Over 90 days a brand does $1,000,000 in revenue across all four lines:

• DTC Gross Profit — $180,000, with the supporting line “Rev $600,000 · GP/Order $24.00 · LTGP:CAC 3.4:1”
• Wholesale Revenue — $250,000 · 310 orders · 25% of total revenue · revenue only
• Marketplace Revenue — $120,000 · 1,480 orders · 12% of total revenue · revenue only
• Retail / Other Revenue — $30,000 · 190 orders · 3% of total revenue · revenue only

Direct-to-consumer is 60% of revenue, and it is the only 60% you currently have a profit number for. The 40% sitting in wholesale, marketplace and retail is real money whose margin is not yet modelled — so a strong DTC quarter is a true statement about most of the business, and an incomplete one about all of it. That is the honest reading, and it is the reading this section is built to give you.

Now look at the logistics line. At 11% of direct-to-consumer revenue, fulfillment, storage and returns are consuming roughly a third of the gross profit the DTC tile reports. If it reads “Estimated”, that third is a model rather than a measurement, and connecting your warehouse data is the highest-value thing you can do next.

Common questions

Why don’t Wholesale, Marketplace and Retail show profit?

Because their costs are not all inside MarginOS yet. A wholesale order carries terms and a marketplace order carries commissions and platform fees that arrive outside your store data. Reporting a profit figure without them would overstate those lines, so MarginOS reports what it can evidence — revenue — and says “revenue only” on the tile rather than letting you assume otherwise.

Why doesn’t the date selector change these four tiles?

They are fixed to the last 90 days by design, and the badge beside the heading says so. Wholesale and marketplace volume arrives in bursts; on a one-day or seven-day window a line that is genuinely 25% of your business can look like zero. A quarter is the shortest window where the mix is stable enough to compare.

What counts as “Retail / Other”?

In-person and point-of-sale selling, plus any remaining channel that is not direct-to-consumer, wholesale or marketplace, combined into a single tile. Which orders land in which line comes from where the order originated — the same groundwork behind how MarginOS assigns each order to a channel.

Why does GP/Order or LTGP:CAC read N/A?

Because the figure is undefined rather than zero. GP per order needs orders in the window to divide by; LTGP:CAC needs both a lifetime profit figure and an acquisition cost. When either is missing, MarginOS prints N/A, because a printed zero would claim a measurement nobody took.

The whole section is missing. Where is it?

It renders only once MarginOS has business-line figures ready for your account, so on a new connection it can be absent for a sync cycle or two. If it is still missing after your first full sync has completed and orders are showing elsewhere on the Command Center, that is worth raising rather than waiting out.

Related

• Read the Command Center
• Read the DTC Performance Snapshot
• How MarginOS calculates Gross Profit (CM1)
• How MarginOS calculates LTGP:CAC
• Why MarginOS shows “N/A” instead of a made-up number