And how stale merchandising can bring them down

By Mark Del Franco

Think of margins as money for your company. Gross margin is a company’s total sales revenue minus cost of goods sold, divided by the total sales revenue, expressed as a percentage. The higher this percentage, the more the company retains on each sales dollar to service its other costs.

Multichannel marketing is a margin-driven business. Improve the margin by 1 percent, and that contributes directly to overhead and profit. Lose a point, and it affects the bottom line. Depending on the product line, marketers have gross margins between 40 percent to 80 percent. Most multichannel companies are in the 55 percent to 60 percent range.