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Cite this reportIntroduction
This report sets out wholesale margins in 2026 across five measures: the spread between the wholesale and retail rungs of the supply chain, gross margin by product category, the fee and returns stack that sits between a store's gross margin and its net, the direction of the federal wholesale margin index, and the share of marketplace sellers clearing their category benchmark. US merchant wholesalers realize a 26.2% gross margin on sales on own account. Retail trade as a whole runs 34.2%, and electronic shopping and mail-order houses 45.7%, both short of the 50.0% that keystone pricing implies. Inside the wholesale figure, published consumer categories span 41.4% for clothing down to 14.4% for grocery, with three categories withheld by Census entirely. Across 300 ecommerce stores, a 49.5% average gross margin became a 10.6% net, and 23% of marketplace sellers grew revenue and margin at the same time.
Every figure comes from one of four places: federal statistics (the Census Bureau's gross margin and financial surveys, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics' wholesale margin index), company filings, research with a disclosed sample, and the platforms' own published fee schedules. Survey findings carry their sample size in the same sentence. Forecasts carry an (f). The page is reviewed quarterly, and the next review is scheduled for November 2026.
Is keystone pricing still real, or is 2x cost just a number people repeat?
There are two margins stacked between the factory and the shopper. The wholesaler buys from a manufacturer and sells to a retailer, keeping one. The retailer buys from the wholesaler and sells to the public, keeping a second. Keystone has only ever described the second.
Keystone implies a 50.0% retail gross margin. No line of US retail trade reaches it. Retail as a whole runs 34.2%, per the Census Bureau's Annual Integrated Economic Survey released in February 2026. Electronic shopping and mail-order houses, the closest thing federal statistics have to online retail, run 45.7%, the highest of any major retail line and still just over four points short of the folk rule. One rung up the chain, merchant wholesalers clear 26.2% on sales on own account in the Census Bureau's Economic Census gross margin table, released July 2025. So the doubling rule overstates the retail rung, and "15 to 20 percent" understates the wholesale one.
Some definitions, once. The wholesale price is what a supplier charges a buyer purchasing for resale. The retail price is what the end shopper pays. Each party's gross margin is the gap between what it paid and what it charged, as a share of what it charged. MSRP is the manufacturer's suggested retail price, a number the supplier states and no buyer is obliged to honor.
Markup and margin are different numbers. Doubling cost is a 100% markup and a 50.0% gross margin. A 100% markup quoted as a margin overstates it by a factor of two.
| 50.0% | retail gross margin implied by keystone pricing (2x cost) |
| 45.7% | electronic shopping and mail-order houses (calculated) |
| 34.2% | all US retail trade (calculated) |
| 26.2% | US merchant wholesalers (as published) |
Which product categories actually carry margin in 2026?
Published wholesale gross margins run from 41.4% for clothing and accessories down to 14.4% for general line grocery. That is a 27-point spread inside one dataset. Home furnishings sit at 38.4%, motor vehicle parts at 35.0%, sporting and recreational goods at 34.4%, household appliances and consumer electronics at 31.9%, and computers and software at 27.2%. An average across that range describes no category a reseller would actually stock.
These are the margins wholesalers earned on their own sales. They are not the margins a reseller earns buying from those wholesalers. What they show is where the money already sits before anyone downstream takes a cent, and which categories are thin at the source.
The figures come from the Census Bureau's Economic Census gross margin table, released 31 July 2025, the deepest category detail the Bureau publishes on wholesale margins. It is six-digit industry detail rather than product-level, and it refreshes on the Economic Census's five-year cycle, but it measures what a wholesaler realized rather than what anyone thinks a wholesaler should charge. The published high across every wholesale line, consumer or not, is medical, dental and hospital equipment at 45.1%, which few resellers can enter.
Census withholds the margin figures for jewelry, watches, precious stones and precious metals (6,904 establishments), for toy and hobby goods, and for footwear. All three carry disclosure flag D, defined by Census as "withheld to avoid disclosing data for individual companies." Three categories resellers search heavily have no published federal margin figure at all.
Listed US apparel companies run a 56.88% gross margin across a 35-company group in NYU Stern's January 2026 margin dataset. That is branded-apparel economics: businesses that own their design, their marketing and their pricing. A reseller buying finished goods from a wholesaler is not in that business, and a public-company margin is a ceiling here rather than a target. For which specific products carry margin, rather than what margin a category carries, see SaleHoo's list of low-cost products with high profit margins.
What does a reseller actually keep after fees, shipping and returns?
Ecommerce stores averaged a 49.5% gross margin and a 10.6% net profit margin in 2026. The figures come from eComFuel's survey of 300 store owners representing $3.5 billion in combined revenue, published 2 April 2026, and the publisher describes the pairing as the highest gross margin it has recorded against the lowest net. Channel matters inside the average: stores selling mainly direct to consumer averaged 52.7% gross, stores selling mainly on Amazon 41.9%. And 53% of owners take a modest salary or nothing at all, which is the part of the ladder no margin figure captures. The sample skews toward seven-, eight- and nine-figure brands, so these aren't first-year economics.
Gross margin gets published. Net margin almost never does.
The cost stack between those two numbers is documented line by line, and every rate below is published by the platform charging it. Amazon's referral fee is 15% for home and kitchen, sports and outdoors, toys and games, and pet supplies. Clothing above $20 pays 17%. Jewelry pays 20% on the first $250. Consumer electronics pays 8%. The Professional selling plan costs $39.99 a month, and Amazon's 2026 schedule, effective 15 January 2026, held referral fees flat while raising fulfillment fees by an average of $0.08 per unit. eBay takes 13.6% up to $7,500 in most categories, plus $0.30 an order at or under $10 and $0.40 above. PayPal's rate card, updated 15 July 2026, charges 3.49% plus $0.49. Stripe and Shopify Payments start at 2.9% plus $0.30.
Returns sit outside the fee schedule and hit the same line. NRF and Happy Returns project that 19.3% of online sales value will be returned in 2025 (f). Across all channels, in-store included, they put total US returned merchandise at $849.9 billion (f), with 9% of returns fraudulent. Take sporting and recreational goods, where the wholesaler realized 34.4%. A seller in that category pays 15% of the sale price to Amazon, close to three percent again in card processing, and watches nearly a fifth of sales value come back. Pricing off the 34.4% is a mistake.
Two costs sit outside the documented stack because the seller sets them, not the platform: advertising and shipping. Sellers rank the first close to the top. In the Marketplace Pulse Seller Index, published April 2026, 49% of sellers active on Amazon named marketplace fees as their primary margin concern and 46% named advertising spend (the publisher does not state the size of the Amazon-active subset). So a reseller's real take-home sits below the ladder above, by an amount that turns on the seller's own ad and shipping costs.
Are wholesale margins narrowing, and who is absorbing it?
The durable-goods wholesale margin index reached 234.657 in July 2026, the highest reading in the series. The nondurable index did not: it peaked at 234.660 in June and fell 1.7% in July, to 230.687.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics measures wholesale trade output as margins and publishes it as an index, not a level. The index shows whether margins moved. It can't show that grocery wholesalers earn 14 percent. The durable and nondurable series also run on different base periods, so their index levels can't be compared with each other either. Only their direction.
Nondurable is the larger half of the sector by sales, and it turned first. Its index set its series high in June 2026 and gave back 1.7% in July, while durable rose 0.7% in the same month. So one half of wholesale trade is still setting records and the other has just rolled over, and nondurable is where grocery, drugs and petroleum sit.
A second federal source points the same way. Wholesale trade corporations reported $25.1 billion in after-tax profits in the first quarter of 2026, on unadjusted sales of $1,003.6 billion, against $18.8 billion on $900.4 billion a year earlier (US Census Bureau, Quarterly Financial Report, released 8 June 2026). Profits grew faster than sales. The series covers corporations with assets of $50 million and over, so it describes large wholesalers rather than the whole universe, and it measures profit rather than margin. Two federal measures, both 2026, both pointing the same way. The second-quarter release lands 8 September 2026.
Two caveats on reading the chart. The index is nominal and has climbed through a period of high goods inflation, so a wholesaler capturing more dollars of margin per unit is not the same as one capturing a wider percentage of the sale price. And the index tracks what wholesalers capture, not what their customers keep. A rising wholesale margin index and a squeezed reseller are compatible. For the quarterly version of this question, see the Dropshipping Price Index.
How many small sellers actually hit their category's margin benchmark?
23% of marketplace sellers grew revenue and improved margins at the same time in 2026. Another 31% grew revenue on flat or declining margins, and 38% reported no growth at all. A fourth cohort makes up the balance and is not separately quantified, so the three published figures sum to 92%. The figures come from the Marketplace Pulse Seller Index, published 2 April 2026, a survey of 181 marketplace sellers representing over $2 billion in combined annual revenue.
Two billion dollars across 181 sellers is about $11 million each, so this is a survey of established operators rather than first-year stores. That cuts the opposite way from what you'd expect. These are the sellers with the scale, the buying power and the ad budgets to defend a margin, and more than a third of them aren't growing.
Concentration is the other half of the picture. Fewer than 8,000 sellers generate half of Amazon's estimated $300 billion in US third-party sales, which is 1.6% of an active base of roughly 500,000 (Marketplace Pulse estimates, published February 2026). Three years earlier it took 15,000 sellers to reach the same halfway mark. Amazon's own filing adds the platform view. Third-party sellers accounted for 61% of worldwide paid units in the second quarter of 2026, after dipping to 60% in the first quarter, the first back-to-back quarterly decline in the metric's history. In the same quarter, paid units grew 17%, third-party seller services revenue grew 16% to $46.780 billion, and advertising services revenue grew 26% to $19.809 billion (Amazon, second-quarter 2026 results, 30 July 2026). So the median seller is competing inside a market where revenue is consolidating upward and the platform's advertising line is growing faster than the units sellers sell.
A clothing wholesaler realized 41.4% gross. Ecommerce stores averaged 10.6% net. Different measures, different rungs of the chain, different populations. The pair proves nothing on its own. What it does show is the distance between the two numbers a seller meets: the benchmark in sourcing advice is a gross figure from upstream, and the figure that reaches a bank account is a net one at the bottom. Between them sit platform fees, payment processing, returns, advertising and shipping.
Conclusion
Three findings.
Keystone's 2x rule and the "15 to 20 percent" claim both fail verification, and they miss in opposite directions. Doubling cost implies a 50.0% retail gross margin against a measured 34.2% for US retail trade; "15 to 20 percent" sits below the 26.2% US merchant wholesalers realize.
Category dispersion inside one federal dataset runs from 41.4% for clothing and accessories to 14.4% for grocery, and Census withholds the figure entirely for jewelry, toys and footwear.
Across 300 ecommerce stores surveyed in 2026, a 49.5% gross margin became a 10.6% net margin, and 53% of those owners paid themselves a modest salary or nothing.
Next review: November 2026, after the Census Bureau's next Annual Integrated Economic Survey release.