One definition of profit. Applied consistently.
Revenue is immediate. Profit usually isn’t.
CM6 creates a single operating definition of contribution profit — calculated at order level, built from the real costs of trade, and available while there is still time to act.
No blended assumptions hiding bad orders. No marketing metrics disconnected from commercial reality. No competing versions of the truth across Finance, Marketing and Operations.
One financial reality, built from the transaction up.
Profit should be operational.
Contribution margin has traditionally been used to understand what remains after the costs required to generate a sale.
CM6 takes that principle to the operating level.
Instead of waiting for aggregated financial reporting, CM6 calculates contribution profit from the individual transaction up — connecting revenue to the costs, customers, products and acquisition activity behind it.
CM6 isn’t another accounting layer. It’s the operating view of contribution profit.
Behind the name: the traditional CM1–CM5 ladder is calculated after the fact. CM6 is the same contribution-profit principle, applied live, at the operating level.
Why contribution profit — not ROAS, not gross margin.
Every metric tells you something. Very few tell you whether an order was actually worth generating.
Gross margin
Revenue minus product cost. Useful, but incomplete. It does not reflect the full variable cost of delivering the sale.
ROAS
Revenue attributed to advertising, divided by the spend behind it. Useful for media performance, but disconnected from the underlying economics of the transaction.
Net profit
The ultimate measure of company performance. Essential — but too aggregated and too delayed to steer individual products, campaigns and orders in real time.
Contribution profit
Revenue less the direct and attributable costs required to generate and fulfil the transaction.
Close enough to financial reality to matter. Granular enough to act on.
Calculate first. Aggregate second.
A healthy blended margin can hide a large number of unprofitable orders.
That is why CM6 does not begin with averages.
Every order is calculated on its own economics first. Those orders can then be rolled up across products, customers, channels, geographies, cohorts or the entire business.
The aggregate remains useful.
But the individual transactions that created it never disappear.
Costs should reflect how the business actually operates.
Not every cost behaves in the same way.
CM6 separates costs that can be attached directly to a transaction from costs that need to be allocated across multiple transactions.
Attach what can be observed.
Where a cost belongs directly to an order, CM6 applies it there.
That can include variant-level COGS, payment fees, taxes, refunds, fulfilment and other transaction-specific costs.
Allocate what must be shared.
Some real costs span many orders.
Where direct attribution is not possible, CM6 applies a defined allocation methodology designed around the economics of the underlying operation rather than simply applying arbitrary blended percentages.
Direct when possible. Allocated when necessary. Clear about the difference.
Your economics, not somebody else’s benchmark.
Two brands selling the same product can have completely different economics.
Different carrier agreements. Different payment mixes. Different fulfilment models. Different return rates. Different acquisition costs.
CM6 is configured around the commercial reality of the individual business.
Where more specific data becomes available, the model can become more specific with it.
The objective is not a plausible margin. It is your margin.
Order-grain by design.
CM6 begins at the smallest commercially useful unit: the individual order.
That means storewide performance can always be decomposed back into the transactions underneath it.
A change in margin can be investigated:
Every aggregate has an underlying explanation.
Financial truth should arrive at the speed of the business.
E-commerce does not operate monthly.
Prices change. Campaigns scale. Stock moves. Customers reorder. Acquisition costs shift.
The financial view used to steer those decisions should move with them.
CM6 applies the contribution-profit methodology continuously as new orders and operating data arrive.
Not financial reporting after the event. Financial intelligence inside the operation.
What the CM6 Standard insists on.
No black boxes.
Every contribution-profit calculation should be explainable from its underlying inputs and methodology.
If a number cannot be traced back to how it was created, it should not be trusted as an operating metric.
No false precision.
Not every cost can always be observed directly.
CM6 distinguishes between costs that can be directly attributed and costs that require assumptions, fallbacks or allocation.
A number should never imply greater certainty than the underlying data supports.
No averages where the grain exists.
Blended averages have their place in reporting.
They should not replace transaction-level economics where transaction-level data is available.
CM6 calculates at the lowest useful grain first and aggregates afterwards.
No competing definitions of profit.
Finance, Marketing and Operations should not make decisions using different economic realities.
CM6 gives each function a different view of the business while keeping the underlying contribution-profit methodology consistent.
Different questions. Same financial truth.
No data lock-in.
Your operating data belongs to you.
CM6 holds your data in a dedicated dataset isolated to your store, and your underlying data remains accessible and exportable.
The value should come from the methodology and intelligence CM6 provides — not from making it difficult to leave.
From transaction to decision.
The principle is simple:
- Start with the order.
- Attach the costs that belong to it.
- Allocate shared costs deliberately.
- Build upwards rather than averaging downwards.
- Make every number explainable.
- Then put that financial reality in front of the people making decisions while those decisions can still change the outcome.
That is the CM6 Standard.
Steer the business on the economics underneath it.
See the CM6 Standard applied to your own orders, cost structure and acquisition activity.