Markup is added to your cost
Markup asks how much you add on top of what you paid. A 100 percent markup doubles your cost, so a $15 wholesale item is priced at $30; at $39.99 the markup is about 167 percent, because the same $24.99 of gross is divided by the $15 cost rather than by the price.
This is the language of the buy side - I mark that up two times - and it is a perfectly usable number as long as nobody calls it a margin. Its denominator is the cost, the smaller of the two figures in any profitable trade, so markup always comes out larger than the margin on the same sale.
The page shows markup as a statistic on the hero and as its own line in the table, positioned under the margin so the two percentages can be read against each other without hunting through the page for the comparison.
Margin is kept out of the price
Margin asks how much of the price you keep. It is the gross divided by the retail price, so on the same $15 cost and $39.99 price it is 62.49 percent - the identical $24.99 of gross measured against a larger base, and therefore a smaller percentage than the markup.
This is the number budgets, tax and comparisons actually run on, which is why it is the headline. Pricing to a markup instead of to a margin is the standard retail mistake: a 2x markup produces a 50 percent margin, not the 100 percent that the arithmetic on the cost side can suggest to someone building a budget.
The table also carries a Keystone line that reports whether the price reaches twice the total cost, so the traditional benchmark is answered directly rather than left for the reader to work out.
The break-even retail price is the floor
When the retail price equals your total cost per unit, the gross is exactly zero and every unit sold then has to pay for running the store out of nothing. The page prints that figure on its own line, so the bottom of the price range is a stated number rather than something discovered at the end of a quarter.
Extra costs per unit - freight, duty, repackaging - raise that floor and are entered separately from the quoted wholesale cost, because a supplier price is not a landed cost. A $10 wholesale item with $1 of freight has an $11 floor, and the margin on a $16 retail price falls to about 31 percent once that dollar is counted.
A retail price of zero stops the page instead of returning a margin, since there would be nothing for the gross to be a share of. Everything else is subtraction and division on the three figures you supply.
Where gross margin stops
Gross margin stops before rent, wages, advertising and your own time. A healthy-looking gross on a shop with a lease can still be a loss-making business, which is why the headline is labeled gross and the page refuses to present it as take-home profit.
It also leaves out sales tax, which sits on top of the tag at the till, along with bulk discounting and seasonal markdowns. Those move the effective numbers without changing the arithmetic, and the page prefers to say so rather than model them badly.
What remains is a pricing reference: the margin, the markup and the floor below which every unit loses money. Whether the market will pay the retail price you have in mind is a separate question that only your own sales data can answer.
Keystone, target margin and the price ladder
Keystone - double the cost - is a 50% margin, not 100%, and it is a habit rather than a law. Work backwards from the margin you want: 60% needs price = cost / 0.40, which is 2.5x cost; 40% needs 1.67x. On an $18 landed cost those three rungs are $45.00, $36.00 and $30.00.
Extra costs belong in the cost, not in the margin. Fifteen dollars of wholesale plus three dollars of freight is an $18 cost, so a $39.99 retail price carries a 55% margin rather than 62% - the difference between a healthy product and a thin one, decided by a line most sellers leave out of the sheet.
Markdowns compound against you: at a 55% margin a 20% cut leaves 44%, and a second 20% cut leaves 30%. Two ordinary sales remove nearly half the gross, which is why the break-even retail price is worth knowing before the markdown calendar is written, not after.
Margin is not cash either: $21.99 of gross at $39.99 becomes $31.99 at $49.99, so a 25% higher price earns 45% more gross per unit. The asymmetry runs the other way for discounts, where 25% off removes more than a quarter of the profit - price changes move gross faster than volume does.
Check the ladder against a competitor before trusting it: if the same unit sells at $32 around the corner, a 55% margin at $39.99 is a price the market has already rejected, and the answer is a cheaper landed cost or a different product rather than another markdown.
Danfio