Shopify Profit Calculator

Your Shopify dashboard shows gross sales and a gross margin that ignores half your costs. This Shopify profit calculator stacks every cost that actually leaves your account: product cost, shipping, packaging, ad spend per order, the payment processing fee for your plan, your plan subscription and app stack spread across your orders, and the refund drag most sellers pretend is zero. It also works backwards, telling you the price you would need to charge to hit any target margin.

The plan figures are Shopify’s own published data, not estimates: the presets price Shopify Payments at each plan’s online card rate and spread the monthly subscription across your orders. Calculator Zilo is not affiliated with Shopify. Plan names and rates on this page are Shopify’s published figures, linked in the References, and the rate check further down confirms the presets match that schedule.

Quick Answer

Your Shopify dashboard is not showing you profit

Shopify reports margin from the cost-per-item field on each product. That number knows nothing about the 2.9% plus 30 cents the payment processor takes, the shipping you subsidize, the ads that bought the order, the apps on your monthly bill, or the orders that come back. A store showing a comfortable 55% gross margin routinely lands near 30% net once the full stack is counted, and thin-margin stores discover they were losing money on every sale only at month end, when the bank account has barely moved.

The chart below breaks a $49 order into where the money actually goes, using the worked-example numbers. The two bars sellers consistently undercount are ad spend and the refund drag, which together eat more than the payment fee most people obsess over.

The full fee stack, line by line

Every line below comes out of your account whether or not your dashboard shows it. The calculator adds them in this order:

• Product cost (landed COGS): wholesale price plus inbound freight per unit, not the number on the supplier invoice alone.
• Shipping you absorb: “free shipping” just moves this line onto you. If the buyer pays full shipping and it passes through, it is zero. If you are not sure what a parcel really costs you all-in, the ecommerce shipping calculator breaks a shipment down line by line.
• Packaging: box, mailer, dunnage, inserts, tape. Small per order, relentless in aggregate.
• Ad cost per order: total monthly ad spend divided by orders. Meta, Google, TikTok, influencers, all of it.
• Payment processing: Shopify Payments US online standard card rates are currently 2.9% + 30c on Basic, 2.7% + 30c on Grow, and 2.5% + 30c on Advanced. Using a third-party gateway instead adds 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, or 0.6% on Advanced, on top of that gateway’s own charges. Our credit card processing fees calculator shows how the percentage-plus-fixed pattern plays out across processors.
• Plan + apps per order: your $39/$105/$399 subscription and your app stack, divided by monthly orders. At low volume this line is brutal; at high volume it nearly vanishes.
• Refund drag: the refunded revenue share. The costs on those orders were already spent.

Which Shopify plan actually wins at your volume?

A higher plan cuts the payment rate but raises the fixed subscription, so the winner depends on your order volume. At the worked-example volume of 500 orders a month, the math is close:

Basic wins by three cents an order at this volume, which is the honest answer: plan choice rarely moves the needle compared to ad spend and refunds. Switch plans in the calculator and watch your own numbers; the crossover where Advanced beats Basic sits around a few thousand orders a month for typical order values.

At Shopify’s current published rates the same logic gives exact revenue crossovers, because each step up saves 0.2% of card revenue. Grow costs $66 a month more than Basic, so it pays for itself once monthly card revenue passes about $33,000. Advanced costs $294 a month more than Grow, so it only starts paying back past roughly $147,000 a month in card revenue. Below those lines, the cheaper plan wins on fees alone, whatever the feature list says.

Worked example, checked against the tool

A store sells at $49 with $14 landed product cost, $5 absorbed shipping, $1 packaging, $9 ad spend per order, 500 monthly orders on the Basic plan, $49 in monthly apps, and a 5% refund rate. The calculator above produces:

• Payment fee: $49 x 2.9% + $0.30 = $1.72
• Effective revenue: $49 x 95% = $46.55
• Total cost per order: 14 + 5 + 1 + 9 + 1.72 + 0.08 + 0.10 = $30.90
• Net profit per order: $46.55 – $30.90 = $15.65, margin 31.9%, monthly $7,826.50
• Price needed for a 30% margin: $47.47, so the current $49 price already clears the target

Margin vs markup: the mix-up that misprices products

Margin is profit divided by the selling price; markup is profit divided by the cost. Same dollars, different denominator, very different percentages, and mixing them up is the most common pricing error new sellers make.

Take a product that costs $20 and sells for $50. The profit is $30 either way. As a margin that is 30 divided by 50, or 60%. As a markup it is 30 divided by 20, or 150%. A supplier quoting “150% markup” and a dashboard reporting “60% margin” are describing the identical sale. The trap springs when a seller wants a 50% margin and applies a 50% markup instead: the real margin lands at 33.3%, before a single fee comes out.

Gross margin is also only the first step. That same $50 product at a 60% gross margin, once a $1.75 Basic plan payment fee, $5 of shipping, and $8 of ad spend per order come out, nets $15.25, a 30.5% net margin. Half the headline margin evaporated into costs the gross figure never sees, which is exactly the stack the calculator at the top of this page runs in full, with packaging, plan, apps, and refunds added. Suppliers quote markups; your bank account runs on net margins.

What competing calculators miss

The fee-stack calculators get the arithmetic right but stop at the per-order number: no target-price reverse mode, no break-even ROAS, and no plan comparison, so you still cannot answer “what should I charge” or “is the upgrade worth it.” The profit-analytics apps are powerful but they are paid products that read your store data; they do not help you model a product before you launch it. Shopify’s own materials explain the fee schedule but never assemble the full stack in one place. This page does all three: the forward math, the reverse price target, and the plan math, with refund drag treated as a first-class cost instead of a footnote.

Sellers who also list on marketplaces face a different fee stack on every channel. The Amazon sale calculator runs referral and fulfillment fees the same honest way for that platform, and the eBay and PayPal fees calculator does it for eBay orders paid through PayPal. Run the same product through each channel’s math before deciding where it earns its keep.

Frequently asked questions

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