What the service actually costs you, per 1,000 units.
What you charge your own customer, per 1,000 units.
How many units the order is for.
Total cost
Revenue
Profit
Margin
Markup
Margin vs. markup
Margin is profit as a percentage of what you charged (revenue) — it answers "how much of what I collected is profit?" Markup is profit as a percentage of what you paid (cost) — it answers "how much did I add on top of my cost?" The two numbers are never equal except at 0%, and mixing them up is the most common pricing mistake resellers make.
Example: a service costs $10 per 1,000 and you sell it for $15 per 1,000. Your profit is $5. Margin is $5 ÷ $15 = 33.3% (profit as a share of what you charged). Markup is $5 ÷ $10 = 50% (profit as a share of what you paid). Same order, two different — both correct — percentages depending on which question you're actually asking.
How to price SMM services for resale
Start from a target margin, not a round number
Deciding "I want 30% margin" and pricing backward from there is more consistent than picking a price that just looks reasonable — it also makes it obvious when a low-cost service is worth pricing more aggressively.
Price refill-covered services differently
A service backed by a refill guarantee costs you nothing extra if it drops within the window — that's worth a slightly higher margin than a no-refill service, where a drop is a cost you absorb with no recourse.
Round to prices that read as intentional
A rate like $0.0347/1K reads as an unrounded database export, not a price someone set. Rounding to a clean figure (even $0.035) reads as a deliberate business decision to a customer comparing options.
Re-check margins when wholesale rates move
Provider costs change; a margin that was healthy last month can quietly erode if retail pricing never gets revisited. Revisiting pricing periodically is part of running a reseller catalog, not a one-time setup task.
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