What Should Your ROAS Be on Trendyol? The Break-Even ROAS Calculation

The ready-made answers you will find online to the question "What should my ROAS be on Trendyol?" ("3 is good", "above 4 is a success") are mostly translated from content written for Amazon sellers, and for your store they are meaningless. Because the right ROAS threshold is not a universal number — it is the inverse of your product's net margin: break-even ROAS = 1 ÷ margin. For a seller with a 25% margin, a ROAS of 4 is break-even; for a seller with a 10% margin, that same ROAS of 4 means money leaves your pocket on every ad-driven sale. In this article we show how to calculate break-even ROAS with Trendyol's real deduction structure (commission, shipping, service fee, withholding tax, product cost) through three category examples, and we explain how to convert the ACOS you keep running into in Amazon content back to ROAS. To try it with your own numbers, you can use the ROAS calculator tool.

Short answer: break-even ROAS = 1 ÷ net margin

ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) is how many liras of revenue each 1 TL you spend on advertising brings in: ROAS = revenue from ads ÷ ad spend. If you spend 1,000 TL and generate 5,000 TL in revenue, your ROAS is 5. The critical word here is revenue: out of that 5,000 TL, commission, shipping, service fee, withholding tax and product cost have not yet been deducted. For advertising to produce profit, the net profit left behind by ad-driven sales has to cover the ad expense:

If you solve the condition revenue × net margin ≥ ad spend, you get: ROAS ≥ 1 ÷ net margin. This threshold is called break-even ROAS. Above it is profit, below it is loss — no matter how green the chart in your panel looks.

So the answer to "what should my ROAS be?" comes in two steps: first work out your product's real net margin, then divide 1 by that margin. The rest of this article is really just the Trendyol-specific details of these two steps — because the hard part isn't the division, it's building the margin correctly.

Why doesn't the "ROAS of 3-4 is good" advice fit Trendyol?

Most of the content that comes up when you search this question on Google is adapted from Amazon PPC guides, and it misleads the Trendyol seller for two reasons:

• The cost structure is different. On Trendyol, commission is calculated on the VAT-inclusive sale price (the invoice is issued VAT-inclusive, with no additional VAT added on top); shipping and the platform service fee are deducted not as a percentage but as a fixed amount in liras per order; on top of that comes a withholding tax equal to 1% of the VAT-exclusive amount. On a low-priced product, the fixed deductions erode the margin far more harshly than in the Amazon examples — so you cannot use the same ROAS target as an Amazon seller in the same category.
• The metric is different. Amazon content usually talks in terms of ACOS, while the Trendyol ad panel shows you ROAS. The two are inverses of the same thing (there is a conversion table below), but if you apply advice like "target 30% ACOS" without converting it to ROAS, you'll manage your campaign against the wrong threshold.

Ad types, campaign setup and budget strategy are not the subject of this article — we covered that side step by step in the Trendyol advertising guide. Here we focus on a single question: what is the threshold for your product?

Build break-even ROAS on a realistic margin

The most common mistake in the break-even ROAS calculation is building the margin incompletely: the seller says "I buy at 150, sell at 400, my margin is 60%" and mistakes a ROAS of 2 for profit. In reality, net margin is found by subtracting five items from the VAT-inclusive sale price:

1. Commission: the category rate is applied to the VAT-inclusive sale price; the invoice is issued VAT-inclusive, with no additional VAT added on top. The classic mistake is to calculate commission on the VAT-exclusive price and make it look smaller — commission is deducted from the price shown on the label.
2. Shipping cost: orders of 10 desi or less use the 0–199.99 TL and 200–349.99 TL brackets; at 350 TL or more, or above 10 desi, the full desi tariff applies. Rates are published VAT-exclusive, with 20% VAT added to the deduction, and the advantageous versus standard dispatch model changes the low-value-order result; check your own product with the desi calculator.
3. Platform service fee: a fixed deduction per order (10.99 TL + VAT on the standard tariff; verify the current amount and any discounted tariffs in your panel).
4. Withholding tax: 1% of the VAT-exclusive sale amount.
5. Product cost: purchase + packaging + operations share if any.

Net margin = (sale price − these five items) ÷ sale price. Instead of adding the items up by hand one by one, you can enter your price, cost and category into the Trendyol profit calculator and see your net margin directly; and we covered in detail how invisible items such as returns and campaigns eat into the margin in the real profit article.

Three category examples: same ROAS, three different outcomes

Let's first build a single product's margin item by item, then place three different category profiles side by side. Example: a 1-desi apparel product sold for 400 TL VAT-inclusive; commission rate 21% (an example — verify your own rate in the panel), purchase cost 140 TL:

Net margin = 52.73 ÷ 400 ≈ 13.2%. Break-even ROAS = 1 ÷ 0.132 ≈ 7.6. So for this product, the ROAS of 5 you see in the panel is not a "good campaign" — it's a loss. Let's add two more profiles built the same way (rates and costs are examples; shipping is assumed to be 1 desi for all):

The lesson from the table is striking: in all three products "ROAS 4" is the same number, but its meaning is completely different. In the cosmetics example a ROAS of 4 produces profit (above the break-even of 3.2); in apparel it's a loss; in the hand tool it's a heavy loss. Pay special attention to the last row: the product assumed to have a wide margin because its price is high actually runs on a 10.4% margin due to its large purchase cost, and it demands a ROAS of 9.6 for break-even — something very hard to hit on Trendyol. With a thin-margin product, the right decision is usually not to turn on advertising but to fix the margin first — you can try building the sale price backwards from a target margin with the profit margin calculator.

What is ACOS, and how do you convert it to ROAS?

In Amazon-sourced content you'll see ACOS (Advertising Cost of Sale) instead of ROAS: the ratio of ad spend to ad revenue. The two are inverses of each other:

ACOS = 1 ÷ ROAS (as a percentage) and ROAS = 1 ÷ ACOS. And break-even ACOS is directly equal to your net margin: if your margin is 16.6%, you're at a loss once ACOS exceeds 16.6%.

You can use the table in both directions: if you read an Amazon guide that says "target 25% ACOS", that means a ROAS of 4 — and it only produces profit on Trendyol if your net margin is above 25%. Conversely, if you see a ROAS of 5 in the panel, your ad cost is 20% of revenue; if your margin is below 20%, that campaign is growing revenue while eroding profit.

How do you set your target ROAS?

Once you've found the break-even ROAS, three practical rules for setting the target:

1. Set the target above break-even. The panel's ROAS attributes the entire ad-driven sale to advertising; yet some of those customers would have found the product organically anyway. Also, the revenue from ad-driven sales that get returned shows up in ROAS, but the profit reverses. For these two reasons, treat break-even ROAS as a floor and keep your target clearly above it (for example, if break-even is 6.0, target 7-8).
2. Allow a deliberately low ROAS at launch, but with a deadline. Tolerating a ROAS below break-even while a new product gathers its first sales and reviews can be an investment decision — as long as you don't mistake it for "I'm winning" and you set an end date.
3. Don't decide without 7 days of data. The ROAS of the first few days is statistically unreliable. If after a week the ROAS is clearly below break-even, first question the product page (image, title, price); if conversion doesn't improve, stop the campaign.

If you use smart campaigns, this calculation is even more critical: if the target ROAS you give the system is below break-even, the automation scales the loss on your behalf.

Track ROAS per product, together with margin

Break-even ROAS is not a single number for the whole store; since every product has a different commission, desi and cost, each product's threshold is different. Maintaining this in Excel becomes impossible as the catalog grows. When you import your advertising report into Verimle as a CSV, the system matches each campaign's spend with the products' real margins (including commission, shipping, service fee and withholding tax) and shows, per product, which campaign produces profit above break-even ROAS and which one inflates revenue while eroding profit — explore the advertising ROAS tracking feature. If you want a quick calculation for a single campaign, enter your price, cost and commission into the ROAS calculator: you'll see your break-even ROAS and the current campaign's net profit impact. Remember: the measure of success in advertising is not a green chart, but a ROAS that stays above break-even.

The break-even ROAS threshold and the example figures in this article (commission rates, category profiles, table values) are illustrative; your target ROAS varies with your profit margin, your commission and your category — there is no single correct value that fits everyone. To see your real threshold with your own numbers, use the ROAS calculator tool. This guide was reviewed on 18 July 2026.