eSIM reseller margins, all the way down

The number everybody quotes

Every eSIM reseller platform publishes a margin figure, and they are all enormous. Fifty percent and up. Thirty to fifty percent. Up to two hundred percent. If you have spent an afternoon comparing platforms you have seen all three, and they cannot all describe the same business.

They can, in fact, and they do. The figures are broadly accurate and they are all measuring the same thing: gross margin on a single eSIM, which is the selling price minus the wholesale cost, and nothing else. That is a real number. It is just not your earnings, and the gap between the two is where most new resellers get their first unpleasant surprise.

Let us take that example completely seriously — their package, their wholesale rate, their suggested retail price — and carry it down to the money that actually arrives.

The four subtractions nobody puts in the calculator

Between the $4.29 and your bank balance there are four costs. None of them is hidden or unfair; they are simply absent from every margin figure in this industry.

1. The payment gateway

Your customer pays by card, and the card costs money. A common published rate is somewhere around 2.9% plus a fixed 30 cents per transaction, though the real figure varies by country, card type and what you have negotiated. On a $4.99 sale the percentage is trivial and the fixed fee is not: 30 cents is six percent of the whole order.

This is the single most under-appreciated cost in low-priced eSIM reselling. A fixed per-transaction fee hurts small baskets far more than large ones, which is an argument for bundles and multi-eSIM carts rather than for cheaper packages.

2. The platform, amortised

If you pay a flat subscription, divide it by your monthly orders and subtract it per sale. This number falls as you grow, which is the point of a flat fee. If instead your platform charges inside the wholesale price, this cost is already in the $0.70 and you cannot separate it — which is a different article.

3. Refunds, failures and support

Some orders go wrong. A customer buys the wrong destination, a device turns out not to support eSIM, an activation fails. Most are cheap to resolve and a few cost you the whole sale plus half an hour. Budget a few percent of revenue rather than pretending it is zero.

4. Getting the customer at all

This is the big one and it is entirely absent from every platform calculator, because no platform can know it. If you pay for traffic, your cost per acquisition can exceed your entire gross margin on a single eSIM. If your customers come from a travel business you already run, it can be close to zero. Which of those two you are determines whether this is a good business for you.

The same sale, all the way down

One 1GB seven-day eSIM, sold at $4.99, bought at $0.70, on a reseller doing 500 orders a month with a $99 flat subscription:

So the honest figure is $3.50, not $4.29 — around seventy percent of the sale price rather than eighty-six. That is still an excellent margin by the standards of almost any retail business, which is the genuinely good news buried under the marketing.

At 500 orders a month that is roughly $1,750 of contribution. Whether that is a business depends entirely on the fourth subtraction: if acquiring 500 customers costs you more than $1,750, you are running a very efficient way to lose money.

• Where a “free” platform’s fee actually lives →
• How to price your packages →

The levers that actually move the number

Having built the table, it is obvious which lines are worth attacking and which are not.

• Average order value beats everything. Moving a customer from one $4.99 eSIM to a $14.99 regional package roughly triples contribution while the gateway’s fixed fee stays at 30 cents. This is the highest-leverage change available to you.
• Wholesale cost is worth attacking once, properly. Negotiating your own provider rate, or sourcing each order from whichever of two connected providers is cheaper, compounds across every future sale.
• The subscription line takes care of itself, provided it is flat. At 100 orders a $99 fee is 99 cents an order; at 1,000 it is ten cents.
• Squeezing refunds is mostly not worth it. Clear device-compatibility copy before checkout removes more of this cost than any refund policy, and it does it without annoying anyone.

Notice what is missing from that list: cutting your retail price. Price competition in eSIM reselling is a race between people who all buy from the same few suppliers, and the winner takes home the contribution figure above minus whatever they gave away.

Measuring your own, not ours

The table above is an example, and examples are worth exactly what you paid for them. Yours takes about twenty minutes to build.

1. Export last month’s orders and total the revenue.
2. Total what you were charged for the eSIMs themselves, from your provider or platform invoices.
3. Take the gateway fees from your payment provider’s statement rather than estimating them — this is the line people guess wrong most often.
4. Add your platform subscription, whatever it is, as a single monthly number.
5. Subtract refunds actually issued, not refunds you expected to issue.
6. Divide what is left by your order count. That is your real contribution per order, and it is the only margin figure that belongs in a business plan.

A margin figure shown inside a reseller panel is usually revenue minus eSIM cost, and it will be higher than the number you just calculated. Ours is too, and it says so in the handbook: it cannot see your gateway’s fees because it never touches your payments.

Do it once a quarter. The wholesale side of this market moves, and a margin you measured last year is a claim about a price that has since changed.

• Where the gateway fee comes from →
• How orders and profit are recorded →
• What a plan costs →