How do I model my D2C unit economics in a spreadsheet, and how many orders do I need to break even?
Build one row per order: net price after discount, minus COGS, shipping, packaging, payment fee, an RTO/returns allowance and allocated CAC - that gives CM3 per order. Break-even in orders is simply your monthly fixed costs divided by CM3 per order, so if fixed costs are ₹5 lakh and you make ₹250 CM3 per order, you need 2,000 orders a month just to stand still. Start in a Google Sheet before you buy any analytics tool; the discipline of filling every cell is where founders discover the costs they'd been ignoring.
Go deeper
4 resources, 1 India-specific, 4 link-checked.
📋 Template
✓ Link checkedFreeBeginner
A free, downloadable contribution-margin calculator you can open straight as a Google Sheet and adapt to your own SKUs and costs - the fastest way to stop guessing and start modelling. Exactly the 'open a sheet before you buy a tool' starting point.
Goes one level deeper than a formula: it rebuilds the contribution-margin income statement for a real D2C P&L, so you can structure your own sheet the way a finance-literate operator would. The right reference once you're past the basics and want to model properly.
A structured framework for CM1/CM2/contribution margin thinking that applies directly to a D2C brand regardless of market, the concepts are identical whether you're shipping from Mumbai or Miami.
Founder interviews that get into how Indian D2C brands actually structured their content and creator strategy, in their own words - a good listen for pattern-matching what a repurposing or founder-content system looks like once it's running, not just in theory.
