"Is my margin any good?" is a question most wholesalers answer by gut feel, not data. The problem is that a "reasonable" gross margin varies enormously by subsector — and Spain's official statistics make that pretty clear.
Here we walk through the real gross-margin data by wholesale subsector in Spain, how to calculate your own sales-weighted average margin (not the simple average, which is misleading), and why that distinction matters when deciding where to raise prices.
Gross margin varies enormously by subsector
Per Spain's Structural Business Statistics (harmonized INE/Idescat data), the gross commercial margin on sales for non-specialized wholesale of food, beverages, and tobacco was 16.7% in 2022, rose to 18.7% in 2023, and reached 22.3% in 2024. Meanwhile, wholesale of household goods plays in a completely different league: 32.8% in 2022, 33.3% in 2023, and 34.7% in 2024.
It's the same broad economic activity — wholesale trade — but with nearly 13 percentage points of difference between subsectors, and both climbing steadily over three straight years. If you benchmark your margin against a generic "wholesale sector" number instead of your specific subsector's, it's easy to draw the wrong conclusion about whether your pricing is on target.
The average margin is misleading if it isn't sales-weighted
Even inside your own catalog, the simple average margin across SKUs can give you a false picture. What matters for your P&L is the margin weighted by each product's sales volume, not the "typical" margin of an arbitrary SKU.
Weighted margin = Σ (gross profit per SKU) ÷ Σ (sales per SKU)
Illustrative example (sample figures — swap in your own in the calculator below): a catalog with three SKUs, margins of 30%, 15%, and 40%, gives a simple average of 28.3%. But if the 15%-margin SKU is your best seller (€25,000 in sales out of €40,000 total) and the other two barely sell, the real sales-weighted margin drops to 21.9% — over 6 points below what the simple average suggested.
That 6-point gap, on €40,000 in sales, is nearly €2,500 of gross profit you thought you had and don't.
Calculate your real, sales-weighted gross margin
Upload your catalog as a CSV and calculate the gross margin for every SKU — with a free account you'll see the sales-weighted average margin and how it's trending versus your last upload.
Go to the gross margin calculator →What to do with this
- Look up the official figure for your specific subsector (by NACE code), not a generic "wholesale trade" average — the gap between subsectors can exceed 10 percentage points.
- Always calculate the sales-weighted margin, not the simple average across SKUs — a catalog with many high-margin, low-volume items can mask a best-seller that barely earns anything.
- Recheck your weighted margin after every supplier price increase, not just once a year — if cost rises and your sale price stays put, the weighted margin falls even though each individual SKU margin still looks "the same as always".
Sources
- Gross commercial margin on sales by wholesale subsector (2022–2024), Structural Business Statistics: Idescat, "Estadística estructural de empresas del sector servicios".
- Revenue and productivity of Spain's Trade sector (2024): INE, Estadística estructural de empresas: sector comercio.
The per-SKU margins and catalog example are illustrative — built from sample numbers to explain the calculation, not a statistic about any industry. The subsector gross-margin figures cited above are real official data (Idescat/INE); swap the example for your own business's real numbers using the calculator.