Any shipping calculator tells you what one shipment costs. This tells you what a delivered order costs — after the refused ones you paid to ship anyway.
§ INPUTS
Average order value (EGP)
What the product costs you
Paid on every delivery attempt
Return leg on a refused order
Courier's % of collected value
Orders returned undelivered
Per-order packaging cost
For the monthly figure
§ PROFIT PER DELIVERED ORDER
171.35
EGP · after returns
True logistics cost
94.15
per delivered order
Net margin
38.1%
of order value
Break-even RTO
64.0%
above this you lose
§ IF RTO DROPPED 5 POINTS
+4,582 EGP / month
That is not a cost saving — it is margin you were spending to ship orders nobody accepted. Confirming orders over WhatsApp before dispatch is the cheapest way to move that number.
When an order is refused you have paid the outbound leg, paid the return leg, and collected nothing. The stock comes back and resells — the shipping money does not.
So the real shipping cost of a delivered order is not the label price — it is that price divided by the share that actually arrived. At 20% RTO, every 4 delivered orders carry the shipping cost of 5.
That is why there is an RTO rate above which a product loses money no matter how well it sells. The break-even figure above is that rate — if yours is anywhere near it, the problem is not your pricing.
In Egypt the usual range is 15–30% depending on the product and where the traffic came from. Channels that produce orders fastest tend to produce the highest refusal rates.