Margin and markup use the same percent sign and different denominators, and the gap between them is the most reliably expensive confusion in freight pricing. Markup is profit divided by cost; margin is profit divided by sell. "Add 15% to cost" is a markup, and it produces a margin of only 13.04% — because the 15% was measured against the smaller number.
The damage compounds because budgets are written in margin and quotes are priced in markup. A desk told to hold 15% that prices by adding 15% is short about two points on every single file — roughly HK$217 on an HK$8,200 cost, invisibly, hundreds of times a year. Nobody catches it because both numbers answer to the name "fifteen percent".
The fix is one division. Sell = cost ÷ (1 − margin). The tool also converts in both directions, because half the arguments about "what do we make on this" are two people using the same word for different fractions.
Same profit, different denominator. Markup divides the profit by the cost; margin divides it by the sell price. Because sell is always the bigger number, a given percentage is always worth less as a margin than as a markup: 25% markup = 20% margin, 15% markup = 13.04% margin, 100% markup = 50% margin. Neither is wrong — what is wrong is budgeting in one and pricing in the other.
Because the margin is defined against the answer. If sell × (1 − margin) must equal cost — which is just the definition rearranged — then sell = cost ÷ (1 − margin). Multiplying cost by (1 + margin) anchors the percentage to the cost instead, which is the definition of a markup. The two formulas converge only at 0%.
There is no universal number — air export from Hong Kong on competitive lanes often runs 8–15% at file level, project and cross-trade work much higher, and big contract accounts lower with volume. The useful discipline is not the target but the floor: know the margin below which a file is not worth handling, put an absolute-dollar minimum under small files, and make every below-floor price a conscious decision with a reason attached.
Usually timing and completeness. The quote margin uses the costs known at quoting; the accounts version includes what arrived later — a corrected weight, a currency adjustment factor, storage, an amended terminal invoice. If the two consistently differ in one direction, your quoting cost sheet is missing a line, and finding it is worth more than any pricing tweak.
Cargo-Stack reads the enquiry, prices it against your own rates, and drafts the quote — with this arithmetic underneath it. Same maths, no retyping.
Try it on a real enquiry