Fuel Margin Calculation

Ensuring profitability on every fuel transaction

Upside generates personalized promotions that incentivize users to visit your stations over your competitors’, and fill your spare capacity. To ensure each Upside-driven transaction is profitable for you, Upside employs several strategies to track and update fuel margins in real time. 

Upside monitors fluctuating rack and sign prices to calculate and update daily margin numbers for each fuel grade at each individual station. The margin calculation accounts for sign price, OPIS Rack Terminal Price, credit/debit card fees, taxes, transportation costs, supply agreement costs, and retailer-specific costs, to arrive at the most accurate, real-time margin possible. 

Constantly monitoring and re-calculating margin allows Upside’s promotions to dynamically adjust within available margin and ensure profitability. 

Upside uses margin for two key purposes:

• Offer generation: Upside’s offers are always generated within a fuel station’s available margin; when generating an offer, Upside uses the most recent available data to calculate a station’s margin 
• Incrementality calculation: Once a transaction has taken place, Upside recalculates the station’s margin at the time of transaction (accounting for any potential changes in sign price) to confirm that the transaction was in fact profitable even after accounting for Upside’s offer. 

What happens when margins are negative? Upside sets promotion amounts to 1 cpg to ensure your location is still visible to users. No profit share fee is applied for these transactions - you are only responsible for the promotion cost.

How does Upside calculate fuel margin?

In the “Transactions” tab in your Upside Dashboard, scroll down to recent transactions and click the info icon next to the listed margin. Here, you’ll see each component of the margin calculation for that specific transaction.

Where does the information come from and how is it applied to margin calculations?

Sign Price

Rack Price

Card Fee

Taxes

Freight + Other Fees

You may see other margin calculation inputs in your dashboard that are not covered here. These are specific to your margin configuration. Reach out to your Upside account manager with specific questions.