Shopify Profit Calculator

Using an external gateway means paying that gateway's processing rate and Shopify's additional transaction fee. Two costs, two percentages, on the same order. Store owners who chose an external processor for a slightly better headline rate frequently end up paying more in total than they would on Shopify Payments, and the difference compounds across every sale.

The plan you are on changes the size of the penalty — it steps down as plans get more expensive, which is part of how the pricing tiers are designed to pay for themselves at volume. Check your current plan's exact rate before entering a platform fee here, because the figure differs by plan and by country.

Your monthly plan fee and app subscriptions do not appear in a per-order calculation, and they should not — they are fixed costs. But they determine how many orders you need before the store is profitable at all. A store paying $79 in plan fees plus $150 in apps needs $229 of contribution margin every month before it earns anything.

App costs accumulate even when no order is placed. List every recurring app charge instead of relying on a typical amount, then allocate the total only after choosing a defensible order-volume scenario.

Use the per-order net profit from this calculator, then divide your total monthly fixed costs by it. That is your break-even order count, and it is a more actionable number than margin percentage.

Refund treatment depends on the fee type, provider, plan, and transaction. Model a refunded order from its actual statement: amount returned, fee credits, fees retained, shipping already spent, and recoverable inventory.

Chargebacks are worse — the amount is reversed, a fee is added, and the goods are usually gone. This is why net margin on paper and net margin in the bank diverge for stores with delivery or sizing problems, and why solving fulfilment issues often improves profitability more than optimising ad spend.

The most valuable use of this page is to increase the ad spend field until net profit reaches zero. That figure is your maximum allowable cost per acquisition — the most you can pay to win one order before the order stops being worth having.

Compare it against what you are actually paying. Many stores run paid traffic at a cost per acquisition above their break-even without knowing it, because they measure return on ad spend against revenue rather than against net profit. Revenue-based targets look healthy while the business loses money on every order.

The other lever is average order value. Because the fixed portion of processing and the cost of acquiring a customer are largely independent of order size, a bundle or upsell that raises average order value from $40 to $60 improves net margin disproportionately — worth testing in this calculator before building it.