Mercado Livre Full: the working capital math that decides if it’s worth it

Full is worth it when your product moves. The calculation that decides this fits in one line: stock sent divided by units sold per day. If it’s less than 60 days, Full is almost always worth it. If it’s more than 90, daily storage starts eating away your advantage, and above 120 days you’re paying warehouse rent in São Paulo to store unsold goods.

This isn’t an opinion about Full. It’s the result of how they charge. Commission is a percentage of the sale, so it only exists when you sell. Storage is per day and per unit, so it exists even when you don’t sell. They’re different types of costs, and that’s what changes everything.

#Why Full is great and risky at the same time

The advantage is real and it’s not small. Products in Full ship faster, get delivery time highlights in search, have fewer pickup delays, and take the risk of shipping mistakes off your reputation. In a competitive category, between two similar listings, the one that delivers tomorrow wins.

The risk is that Full hides the cost of buying mistakes. In your own warehouse, a bad purchase just sits there staring at you. In Full, it charges you every day, and the charge comes with all the others, blended into a single bill. You feel the effect on your margin months later, without knowing where it came from.

#Coverage calculation, with numbers

Take the units sold in the last 60 days, divide by 60 to get daily sales. Then divide your stock by that result.

SKU D is the most common case. Someone bought a large batch because the unit price was good, sent everything to Full at once, and now has almost two years of stock for a product that sells two units a week. The discount they got on the purchase turned into storage costs before the second quarter.

In practice. An electronics seller sent me their Full report: 34% of their stock was concentrated in five SKUs with coverage above 200 days. These five items made up 6% of revenue. Just moving them back to their own stock gave immediate cash flow relief, and the store's average coverage dropped from 97 to 44 days without changing anything else.

#When Full is worth it even with average turnover

There are three exceptions you should know.

High-ticket products with a comfortable margin can sit longer, because storage costs are small compared to the sale value. An item that sells for R$ 400 with a 35% margin can stay much longer than one at R$ 60 with a 20% margin.

Products with predictable seasonality are worth sending in advance. Sending stock in October to sell in December is a storage cost you accept on purpose, because the alternative is missing the date.

Products you can't ship on time by yourself. If your operation is slow and your reputation is at risk, Full is solving a bigger problem than its cost. Just know that's what you're paying for.

#The mistake of sending everything at once

Restocking costs collection, and collection costs money, so there's a real temptation to send large batches to spread out this cost. The problem is that collection savings are small and storage is charged daily.

My calculation is simple: how much do I save by sending a bigger batch, versus how much I'll pay to store the extra units for the extra months of coverage. In almost every case I've tested, sending for 45 to 60 days and restocking more often is cheaper, even with more collections.

The exception is very light and very cheap-to-store products, where storage costs disappear compared to collection. Check your table to be sure.

#What to check every week

Two columns are enough: coverage in days and SKU margin after all costs. Products with high coverage and low margin are the first to leave Full. Products with low coverage and good margin are the first to get more stock and more ad budget.

This is the same analysis the curva ABC gives you, just from another angle. And it's the kind of cross-check Milewa does automatically, because it already has your sales history by SKU and the real margin for each one, with no need to export anything.