Here are some of the ways to think about profitability. Let’s take the example of Zepto.

Store profitability: How many stores are profitable? How long does it take for a store to break even?

User acquisition payback: What is the payback period for CAC?

Transaction level profitability: Unit economics of each order delivery.

Region profitability: As important as store profitability. Over time you want to reduce supply chain opex to make a region profitable. A region can be as small as area like Murugeshpalya or a larger region: East Bengaluru, Bengaluru, Karnataka, South Zone.

Delivery person cost recovery: How many transactions do you need each delivery person to make in a day to cover their daily salary.

Cohort profitability: Do newer cohorts of users become profitable faster than older cohorts?

User acquisition and growth channel profitability: Be it Facebook ads, Google Ads, etc. One can go as granular as they want. You can look even at campaign level. Look at CAC vs LTV for various campaigns running.

Daily profitability (with seasonality in mind): Demand will spike or decline based on the day. It might be more on weekends vs a weekday. It will be different on festival days vs a normal day. You want to look daily.

Zepto Pass: Ideally the pass program should become profitable as a standalone business.

Category margin: You need to check profitability of each category. Zepto CEO has in the past talked about groceries being highly profitable vs other categories.

Profitability at a SKU level: This is one level below category. Zepto can even subsidise some SKUs if they have a higher correlation to user retention or they can bundle other items with these SKUs to increase AOV.

Brand level profitability: Some brands will give a much lower margin. If there are a lot of null searches in the search flow, Zepto may even want to bring these brands on board to retain users.