The economics
The whole model rests on one asymmetry: the platform fee is flat and the revenue is per client. Everything else about whitelabel economics is a consequence of that.
The two sides
On the cost side, the Cobiro whitelabel add-on is 299 dollars a month billed monthly, or 239 dollars a month billed yearly. Client accounts are billed separately at standard pricing. On the revenue side, agencies typically charge between 30 and 50 euro per shop per month for CSS.
The curve
| Clients | Revenue at €40 | Platform cost | Gross margin | Cost per client |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20 | €800 | €239 | €561 | €11.95 |
| 50 | €2,000 | €239 | €1,761 | €4.78 |
| 100 | €4,000 | €239 | €3,761 | €2.39 |
At a hundred clients the platform costs 2.39 euro per client per month against 40 euro of revenue. The margin is not the interesting number; the shape is. Every client after the first improves it, and nothing about serving the hundredth is more expensive than serving the twentieth.
The marginal cost of an additional client is close to zero while the marginal revenue is not. Price it as a recurring product rather than as billable hours.
Where it breaks even
At 40 euro a client, the yearly-billed add-on is covered by six clients. Below roughly ten, the branding and the traffic are worth having but the arithmetic is thin. That is why whitelabel usually starts to make sense at around ten ecommerce clients running Shopping.
Bundled or standalone
Both work. Bundling CSS into a management retainer makes the retainer easier to defend, because the client can see a cost reduction that is larger than the fee. Selling it standalone gives you a low-friction product to open a conversation with a merchant you do not yet manage. Agencies that do both use standalone CSS as the top of the funnel.
What is not in the table
The branded impressions, and the free clicks to your comparison site. Neither appears as revenue, and both are why agencies who model this purely as fee margin undervalue it.