Open Shopify on the first of the month. The big number says EGP 100,000. You feel good for about ten seconds. Then you open your bank. The number there is EGP 10,000. Sometimes less. Sometimes zero.
This post is the line-by-line story of where the other EGP 90,000 went. The numbers are real, taken from a Cairo brand we worked with during pilot — mid-ticket fashion, average order value around EGP 750, mostly COD.
If you only read one paragraph: Shopify shows you the sale. The bank shows you the survival. Everything in between — ads, courier fees, returns, COGS, payment fees, the cost of cash sitting with the courier — is a leak you can’t see unless you draw it.
The starting point: EGP 100,000 in Shopify sales
133 orders. Average order value EGP 752. Everything looked clean on the dashboard. The founder told their cofounder over WhatsApp: "We hit 100K." That message is the most expensive sentence in Egyptian DTC. It feels like a milestone. It is not yet a milestone.
Shopify reports gross sales. Not collected. Not delivered. Not paid. Gross. That is the first trap.
Leak 1 — RTO at 28% kills 37 orders before they ship
Egypt is a cash-on-delivery market. The buyer pays at the door. If the buyer doesn’t pick up, the order comes back. The industry calls this RTO — Return To Origin. For Egyptian DTC, RTO sits between 20% and 35% depending on city, product, and how the brand confirms orders.
This brand was at 28%. That means out of 133 orders:
- 96 delivered and collected
- 37 came back
The 37 returned orders still cost money. The courier picks them up, holds them, drives them out, drives them back, sometimes once, sometimes twice. Bosta charges roughly EGP 70–85 per attempt depending on city tier. Many brands pay the round-trip fee on returns too — call it EGP 60 per RTO on average for this brand.
37 returns × EGP 60 = EGP 2,220 in shipping you eat for orders you never got paid for.
Revenue you actually collected after RTO: 96 orders × EGP 752 = EGP 72,192.
We just lost EGP 27,808 of revenue and gained EGP 2,220 of cost. Net change: −EGP 30,028.
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Leak 2 — COGS at 35% on the orders that did deliver
Most Egyptian DTC fashion brands import or source local. Either way, cost of goods sold lands somewhere between 25% and 45% of the sale price. This brand was at 35%, which is healthy for mid-ticket apparel.
COGS on 96 delivered orders × EGP 752 × 35% = EGP 25,267.
Notice we only paid COGS on delivered orders — the 37 RTO orders came back as inventory (assuming the package wasn’t damaged, which it sometimes is, but let’s be kind).
Leak 3 — Ad spend that doesn’t care about RTO
The Meta dashboard said they spent EGP 35,000 and brought in 133 orders. Meta’s ROAS reading: EGP 100,000 / EGP 35,000 = 2.86x. Looks fine. Looks healthy. Looks scalable.
The real picture: they spent EGP 35,000 to deliver 96 orders worth EGP 72,192. Real ROAS = 2.06x. Still positive, but the truth is closer to break-even than it looked.
This is the single biggest reason "Profit Today" is the only number that matters. Platform ROAS lies in a COD market. It lies politely. It lies with a smile. But it lies.
Leak 4 — Shipping on delivered orders
The 96 delivered orders also cost shipping. Roughly EGP 55 per delivered order in Greater Cairo, more for governorates. Call it EGP 58 average across the country.
96 × EGP 58 = EGP 5,568.
So the total shipping bill is EGP 5,568 (delivered) + EGP 2,220 (RTO) = EGP 7,788. That is roughly EGP 81 per delivered order — not EGP 55. Always look at shipping cost per delivered order. The per-order number on the courier invoice is a lie because it doesn’t include the orders you don’t get paid for.
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Start freeLeak 5 — Payment + cash cycle drag
When the courier collects EGP 752 at the door, you don’t get it that day. You get it on a settlement cycle. Bosta’s standard cycle is around 7–10 days for COD payouts. Some couriers stretch to 14.
That means at any given moment, the brand has about two weeks of revenue sitting with the courier. For a EGP 72,192 collected month, that’s roughly EGP 24,000–36,000 of cash trapped outside the bank. It doesn’t show up as a leak — but it does show up as: "I have to pay Meta tomorrow and there’s no money in the account."
This isn’t lost money. It’s lost timing. But timing is what kills brands.
There are also small payment/transfer fees on payout. Roughly 1–1.5% on COD. Call it 1% for this brand: EGP 722 lost to payment fees.
Leak 6 — Refunds and the quiet ones
Not every collected order stays collected. Some refund a week later. Some get charged back. For this brand, 4 of the 96 delivered orders refunded inside 14 days. They lost the shipping cost on those (EGP 232) and the merchant fee.
Roughly EGP 3,200 in refunded revenue — partly recoverable inventory, but the time and cost is gone.
The full receipt
Here is the full math on the EGP 100,000 month:
| Line | Amount (EGP) |
|---|---|
| Gross sales (Shopify) | +100,000 |
| Lost revenue from RTO | −27,808 |
| Collected revenue | +72,192 |
| Refunds (14-day) | −3,200 |
| Net collected revenue | +68,992 |
| Ad spend (Meta + TikTok) | −35,000 |
| Shipping (delivered + RTO) | −7,788 |
| COGS on delivered | −25,267 |
| Payment / transfer fees | −722 |
| Profit Today | ≈0 |
Yes. Zero. Roughly EGP 215 in the green on a month that looked like EGP 100K on Shopify.
We haven’t even counted SaaS subscriptions, the agency retainer, the founder’s coffee at the office in Maadi, or the EGP 2,000 the photographer charged for the new collection. With those: this month was a loss.
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Start freeWhat changed when we drew this on one screen
The founder sat with this picture for about three minutes. Then he said one thing: "The Maadi orders are the problem."
He was right. We pulled RTO by district. Maadi was 35%. Heliopolis was 18%. New Cairo was 16%. Maadi was eating the entire profit pool.
He paused COD for Maadi for two weeks. Switched it to prepaid-only with a small Instapay discount. Lost some volume. Kept more margin. Net profit went from EGP 215 to EGP 18,400 the next month on the same gross sales number.
This is the entire job. Find the leak. Close the leak. Don’t scale anything until the leak is closed.
Why we built Analify AI around this exact picture
Analify AI runs this math live, every time you open it. We pull Shopify gross sales, Meta and TikTok ad spend, Bosta delivery and RTO data, your COGS per SKU, and your payment cycle. We line them up against each other. The number at the top is Profit Today. The number underneath is "where the money went."
You don’t have to build the spreadsheet. You don’t have to maintain the spreadsheet. You don’t have to argue with the agency about which ROAS is real.
You open the app. You see Profit Today. You see the leak. You see the city or the product or the creative driving it. You see what to do next — in your own words, not a banned consultant verb in sight.
That’s the whole point. Run your store with confidence. Find leaks. Scale winners. Repeat.
A note on the numbers
Every number above is from a real Egyptian DTC brand during our pilot. We rounded for readability — nothing was inflated to make a point. If your store sits in a different category (electronics, beauty, home decor), the proportions shift but the leak pattern is the same. The leak is almost never one giant problem. It’s usually three medium problems hiding behind a "ROAS 2.8x" smile.
Open your Shopify dashboard right now. Write down gross sales for the month. Subtract ad spend. Subtract shipping × 1.3 (the RTO multiplier). Subtract COGS on delivered only. Subtract 1% for payment fees. That number is much closer to Profit Today than what Shopify shows you.
If you want it done for you, live, on every refresh — that’s what we built.