Commission variance
The difference between the commission a marketplace was contracted to charge on an order and the commission actually deducted in the settlement report.
Commission variance is per-order discrepancy between expected commission (per your negotiated rate card with the marketplace) and actual commission charged. It's one of the largest sources of silent margin leakage in Indian e-commerce.
Variance happens for several reasons: category misclassification (a product taxed at the wrong slab), seller-tier downgrade during a billing cycle, promotional commission rates that were supposed to apply but didn't, F-Assured premium fees charged on non-F-Assured orders, and simple data-entry errors on the marketplace side.
Detecting commission variance manually is essentially impossible above a few hundred monthly orders — the per-order amount is often just a few rupees, small enough to be invisible to visual review but compounding into lakhs per month at scale. Rate-card-aware reconciliation engines catch this automatically.