The five revenue leaks every D2C founder should monitor weekly

Growth conversations usually start with "how do we get more traffic?" In our weekly reviews, the bigger number is almost always the revenue a brand already earned the right to and then lost — quietly, without an alert, somewhere inside a seller dashboard.

We call these leaks. Across the brands we run on Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra, Nykaa, Meesho and Ajio, the same five show up again and again. None of them need a new tool to find. They need a fixed slot in the week where someone looks.

1. Listings that went inactive, suppressed or stopped being found

A listing can stop selling without disappearing. Common causes:

• Suppression — a missing main image, an image that breaks the white-background rule, a title that is too long, or a missing mandatory attribute.
• Category or attribute errors after a bulk upload or a marketplace template change.
• Variation breaks — a child SKU detached from its parent, so reviews and ranking no longer carry over.
• Search-term indexing loss after someone "cleaned up" a title or backend keywords.

What to check weekly: the inventory or listing-quality report for inactive and suppressed SKUs, and a manual search for your top 10 revenue SKUs using the exact phrase a customer would type. If you cannot find your own best-seller in the first two rows, neither can your customer.

2. Stock-outs and stranded inventory

A stock-out costs more than the days you were out. Marketplaces rank on sales velocity, so a week out of stock usually means weeks of rebuilding rank afterwards — often with extra ad spend.

The quieter version is stranded inventory: units sitting in a fulfilment centre that are not attached to a live, buyable listing. They look like stock in your spreadsheet and are invisible to customers.

What to check weekly: days of cover for every SKU that drives the top 80% of revenue, in-transit shipments against expected stock-out dates, and the stranded or unfulfillable inventory report.

3. Pricing gaps and lost Buy Box

If another seller lists the same product, the marketplace decides who wins the Buy Box — and most customers never click "other sellers". Losing it on a best-seller can halve that SKU's revenue overnight.

Price leaks also happen across channels. If your Myntra price is visibly lower than your Amazon price (including coupons and bank offers), customers comparison-shop, and some marketplaces reduce visibility for listings they consider uncompetitive.

What to check weekly: Buy Box percentage for your top SKUs, any new sellers on your listings, and a side-by-side of the final customer price across every channel and your own website.

4. Ad spend on search terms that never convert

Sponsored ads on marketplaces are auction-driven and automatic campaigns are generous with your money. Without a weekly search-term review, a growing share of spend goes to terms that get clicks and no orders — broad category words, competitor brand names you cannot win, or irrelevant matches.

What to check weekly:

• The search-term report, sorted by spend, for terms with meaningful clicks and zero orders. Add them as negatives.
• Terms that convert well in automatic campaigns — move them into exact-match manual campaigns where you control the bid.
• Spend on SKUs that are low on stock. Advertising a product that will go out of stock in four days is buying a ranking you are about to lose.

5. Returns, cancellations and RTO

Every return is the full acquisition cost of that order, plus reverse logistics, plus whatever the product is worth when it comes back. In India, cash-on-delivery adds a specific leak: RTO (return to origin) — orders refused at the door, which cost two-way shipping and earn nothing.

Returns also feed account health. Amazon's seller-performance targets, for example, are an order defect rate under 1%, a pre-fulfilment cancellation rate under 2.5% and a late-shipment rate under 4%. Other marketplaces track their own versions.

What to check weekly: return rate by SKU and the top return reasons in customers' own words. "Size smaller than expected" is a size-chart fix. "Not as shown" is an image or description fix. Both are cheaper than the returns.

The 30-minute weekly leak check

This is the order we run it in every Friday review:

1. Account health — any new notifications, policy warnings or metric changes.
2. Listing status — inactive, suppressed and error SKUs; search for the top 10 SKUs.
3. Stock — days of cover for top SKUs; stranded inventory.
4. Price — Buy Box percentage; cross-channel price check.
5. Ads — zero-order search terms to negate; winners to promote to exact match.
6. Returns — return rate and reasons for the top SKUs.

Write down one owner and one action per leak found. The point is not the report — it is that nothing found on Friday is still broken the next Friday.

Why this matters more than the next campaign

New campaigns compete for new attention. Leaks are revenue you already paid to acquire — the ranking, the reviews, the ad spend — leaking out the back. Closing them is the highest-return work in most marketplace accounts, and it is the first thing we do in every onboarding.

If you want a second pair of eyes on your account, send us a brief with the marketplaces you sell on. We will tell you which of the five leaks we would look at first.