E-commerce
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GMV
Gross Merchandise Value: the gross transaction volume of a marketplace or shop before commissions, returns, and costs. It is scale, not profit.
Detailed explanation
Marketplaces quote GMV to describe volume. Seller payouts, cancellations, and returns can inflate it relative to what the company keeps.
In a first-party shop GMV may sit close to sales, but VAT, shipping, and returns still separate net sales. Mixing GMV with profit in a pitch is a classic distortion.
As a marketing KPI it ties to AOV × orders. Growing GMV without margin can burn cash.
Frequently asked questions
- Is GMV profit?
- No. It is gross volume before take-rate, returns, and cost of goods.
- When is it useful?
- When discussing marketplace scale or category volume. Budget decisions still need margin and cash.
Related terms
Internal links for the topic cluster — read these concepts together.
- AOV (Average Order Value)AOV is an e-commerce metric found by dividing the total revenue from orders in a given period by the number of orders, showing how much customers spend on average per cart.
- RevenueMoney from a sale or another defined value event, shown as currency in analytics and ads. Traffic and leads can precede it, but they are not a substitute.
- Profit MarginProfit Margin is a core financial performance indicator that shows the percentage of a business's total revenue that becomes actual profit, revealing how much of sales converts into real earnings.
- ROASROAS (Return on Ad Spend) is the revenue generated for every unit of advertising spend; it is used to measure profitability in performance marketing.
- Cart Abandonment RateCart Abandonment Rate measures the share of users who add items to their cart on an e-commerce site but leave without completing checkout, out of all users who created a cart.