Every first-hand number this site publishes, in one place, with the date it was measured and what it does and does not cover. All of it is free to quote with a link. Most small-business advice online is written by people who have never shipped a parcel; these figures come out of a real shop that ships them every week.
How to use this page
Three labels run through everything below, and they are not interchangeable.
- Measured — read directly out of a live account, an invoice or an original image file. These are facts about one specific shop.
- Published — taken from a company’s own public page on a stated date. Rates change; the date is part of the figure.
- Computed — arithmetic on the two above. Always marked, never presented as something anyone observed.
Taka figures are converted at 1 USD = 123.04 BDT, read 5 October 2026. The rate moves, so the dollar column ages and the taka column does not.
To cite any of this: Small Shop Lab, “The Numbers Behind This Site”, smallshoplab.com/data/, with the date you read it. No permission needed and no email required. If you quote a figure, please carry its label with it — a computed number reported as a measured one stops being true.
The shop these numbers come from
Rupanjali is a silver jewelry shop in Kormokar Para, Sherpur, Bogura, Bangladesh, selling online across the country on WooCommerce, cash on delivery. Around 500 products, every piece one of a kind, never restocked. The owner is not the maker: a karigor makes each piece, and the shop buys the silver, pays the making charge, photographs, packs and sells.
Two things this is not. It is not an Etsy shop, and it cannot be one — Etsy Payments does not operate in Bangladesh. Every Etsy figure on this site comes from Etsy’s own published pages and says so. And these are Bangladeshi prices: a courier charge here is a fraction of a US one, so the structure of these numbers transfers to a US seller and the prices do not. Where a figure would mislead if read as a benchmark, it is flagged below.
Fulfillment and returns — measured
| Figure | Value | In USD | Label |
|---|---|---|---|
| Courier delivery, inside Dhaka | ৳70 | $0.57 | measured |
| Courier delivery, outside Dhaka | ৳120 | $0.98 | measured |
| Cash-on-delivery charge | 1% of collected | — | measured |
| Charge when a parcel is refused | ৳120 | $0.98 | measured |
| Return rate | about 20% of parcels | — | measured |
| Breakage or loss in transit | 0–1 per 100 parcels | — | measured |
| Packaging and courier, per order | ৳150–250 | $1.22–2.03 | measured |
| Return cost carried by each delivered order | ৳30 | $0.24 | computed |
The most-quoted line on this page is the last one. At a 20% return rate, ten parcels produce eight delivered orders carrying two return charges between them, so each delivered order absorbs a quarter of one — not a fifth. The multiplier is r ÷ (1 − r). The return cost calculator runs it on your own numbers.
And the cause is worth more than the rate. The single biggest reason a parcel comes back is that the customer does not answer the phone at delivery — not damage, not dislike, not the product. The fix was a confirmation call before handing the parcel over. Measured, and the opposite of where most sellers look first.
Unit economics — measured, then computed
| Figure | Value | In USD | Label |
|---|---|---|---|
| Silver buying rate | ৳3,800 per vori | $30.88 | measured |
| Silver selling rate to the customer | ৳4,000 per vori | $32.51 | measured |
| Making charge paid to the karigor | ৳300–1,000 per piece | $2.44–8.13 | measured |
| Making charge billed to the customer | karigor’s rate + 10–30% | — | measured |
| Typical best-selling piece | 1–2 vori (12–23 g) | — | measured |
| Order to ready-to-ship | about 1 day | — | measured |
| Monthly fixed costs | ৳3,000–8,000 | $24.38–65.02 | measured |
| Most profitable product | nupur (anklets) | — | measured |
| Cost to start the business | under ৳50,000 | under $406 | measured |
The structural fact underneath all of it: the raw material is about 84% of the selling price, and the customer can look up what silver costs today. The metal cannot be marked up. Every bit of pricing freedom in this business lives in the making charge — which is why the pricing formula is written the way it is.
Worked through on a 1.5 vori piece with a ৳650 making charge marked up 20% — computed, not observed:
| Sale price | ৳6,780 | $55.10 |
| Gross margin before shipping | ৳430 — 6.3% | $3.49 |
| Net per delivered order, after packaging, courier and returns at 20% | ৳150 — 2.2% | $1.22 |
| Delivered orders a month before fixed costs are covered | 20 to 53 | — |
A 6.3% gross margin is the number to sit with. Etsy’s transaction fee alone is 6.5% of the order. On an order priced like this one, a single marketplace fee would be larger than everything the shop keeps before it has paid for a box. That is not an argument against Etsy — it is what a thin margin means, and most sellers never work theirs out.
Three years of Meta ads — measured
Read out of Ads Manager on 4 September 2026, date range Maximum, covering August 2023 to September 2026 across 19 campaigns.
| Figure | Value | In USD |
|---|---|---|
| Total lifetime spend | ৳130,477.08 | $1,060.44 |
| Spend on the one campaign buying page follows | ৳101,097.69 — 77.5% of everything | $821.67 |
| What it bought | 76,298 follows at ৳1.33 each | about 1 US cent each |
| Where those follows were | 76,294 in Bangladesh | — |
| Spend on the campaign built to sell | ৳1,852.67 — 1.4% | $15.06 |
| What that bought | 22 adds to cart at ৳84.21 each | $0.68 each |
| A campaign left switched on with an error since Oct 2023 | ৳0.00 delivered | — |
Read the cost-per-outcome figures with care. One US cent per follow is a Bangladeshi market price and nothing like a US, UK or Canadian cost. What transfers is the shape of the mistake: three years of budget went to the cheapest metric on the platform, and 1.4% went to the thing that was supposed to produce revenue. The full write-up is here, and the ROAS calculator shows what a campaign has to clear before it is worth running.
What the website itself costs — measured
| Line | Per year | In USD |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting | ৳15,000 | $121.91 |
| Domain | ৳2,000 | $16.25 |
| Plugins | ৳1,500 | $12.19 |
| Fixed total | ৳18,500 | $150.36 — about $12.53 a month |
| Payment gateway | 1% of transaction value | variable |
Photography, measured off the original files
Two photographs of gold jewelry, taken by the shop, measured from the uncorrected originals — not estimated by eye. Both came off a phone, with a lightbox and a ring light.
| On red velvet | On plain white paper | |
|---|---|---|
| Gold as a share of the frame | 80.6% | 75.9% |
| Average background pixel | R202 / G3 / B8 | R182 / G187 / B192 |
| Pixels blown out in the red channel | 2.4% | 0.22% |
| Neutral reference in frame | none | yes |
Silver and gold want opposite backgrounds, and the shop has a before-and-after pair that shows it: silver on a light grey table loses its edges completely, while the same piece on a dark backdrop and on a form reads clearly. Gold goes the other way — the dramatic red velvet clipped more than ten times as many pixels as plain white paper. Both pairs are in the photography write-up.
What this site does not have, and will not invent
The gaps are listed because a numbers page without them is a sales page.
- Any Etsy seller dashboard figure. There is no Etsy shop and there cannot be one. This will never be filled in.
- Conversion-rate lift per change. Five changes to the product page moved orders; at a few orders a day, no one can separate one of them from noise, so no percentage is published for any of them.
- Profit margin by category. Partly answered — anklets are the most profitable — but the per-category percentages do not exist yet.
- Email marketing results. The list has two subscribers, both the owner’s. Any post on this topic says so rather than implying an audience.
- Competitor listing data at scale. Blocked by the sites’ own robots.txt, and working around a robots.txt is not something this site does.
- What a generous returns policy wins you. Real, uncounted here, and not guessed at.
One rule governs this whole page and every post built on it: a number that nobody measured does not get published. An empty cell is a better answer than a plausible one.
Measured figures were read from the shop’s WooCommerce admin, its Meta Ads Manager account and its own image files on the dates given above; courier rates and operating costs were supplied by the shop owner on 4 and 24 September 2026. Currency conversions use 1 USD = 123.04 BDT, read 5 October 2026. Published third-party rates carry their own source and date in the post that uses them.
Questions people ask about this
Can I quote these numbers in my own article or video?
Yes, with a link back to this page and the date you read it. No permission needed, no email, no form. The one thing asked in return is that you carry the label — measured, published or computed — because a computed figure reported as an observed one is no longer true.
Why would a US seller care about a shop in Bangladesh?
Because it is the same business with the dials turned up. The raw material is 84% of the price and the customer knows what it costs, so every mistake a handmade seller can make — absorbing shipping, ignoring returns, pricing off feel — shows up immediately instead of hiding inside a comfortable margin. The prices do not transfer. The structure does.
How often is this page updated?
Whenever a new first-hand figure is measured, and whenever one of these is re-measured and changes. Nothing is removed quietly — if a number here turns out to be wrong, the correction is written next to it.