Open the WooCommerce sales screen and the number that greets you is gross revenue — the total of what customers were charged. It’s a real number, and it’s the wrong one to run the business on, because it hasn’t had the money you gave back or never kept taken out of it yet.
What sits between gross and net
- Refunds — full and partial, which a gross figure ignores entirely until you go looking.
- Discounts and coupons — the gap between list price and what was actually paid.
- Payment gateway fees — a percentage plus a fixed amount on every order, quietly.
- Chargebacks and failed captures — smaller, but real.
On a store with healthy coupon usage and a normal refund rate, net can land 15–25% below gross. Decisions made on the gross number — which products to push, whether a discount campaign “worked” — are being made on inflated inputs.
Seeing net without a spreadsheet
Shop Performance breaks revenue into gross and net with refunds and discounts pulled out, shows coupon influence on order value and repeat purchases, and surfaces gateway decline rates and the reasons behind refunds — so a discount code has to prove it earned its margin rather than just moving units.
The one report to check monthly
Net revenue by product, next to units sold. The products that top both lists are your real winners; the ones that sell well but sit low on net are the ones a promotion is quietly subsidising.
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