How to use Shopify profit calculator

The pass

Price, product cost, and the ad assumptions you want to plan with. Open Shopify profit calculator and do it in this order.

1. Enter the price you would actually charge and the product cost from the supplier quote, not from a listing.
2. Enter the shipping you pay to deliver. If a threshold will change that, calculate both versions.
3. If you have no ad history, type a CPM, click-through rate, and conversion rate you are willing to plan against, and label them as assumptions. Ad cost per purchase = CPM ÷ (1,000 × click-through rate) ÷ conversion rate.
4. Replace that estimate with your real cost per purchase as soon as the account has one. The break-even ROAS from price and contribution does not need the estimate at all.

The mistake that wastes the pass

Leaving the placeholder click-through rate in place after the account has history. The estimate is then a guess sitting next to a real cost you already have.

How you know it worked

The brief shows break-even ROAS from the unit. If a click-through rate is still on the page, it is labelled as an assumption, not as account history.

Write the scope on the first line

Before any number, write whether you are subtracting for one unit or for a dated window. Put the dates if it is a window. Put the order count if you will divide down to a unit later. Every figure you type after that has to serve that first line. A figure that serves a different scope gets converted or stays out.

Choose the scope from the decision you are actually making. A reorder decision needs a unit you can buy again. A weekly media decision needs the week. Calculating the week when you meant the unit, then treating the big dollar total as unit profit, is a scope error. Fix the label before you fix the math.

Replace a remembered sales total

Take revenue from an order export filtered to the scope, or from the price a buyer pays on the one unit, after the discount you are modeling. Open the export even if you think you remember the week. Type what it shows. If you round, write the exact figure and the rounded figure. Rounding hiding a loss of a few dollars is how thin offers stay alive.

Remove tax you collected for someone else if the export includes it and you do not keep it. Remove shipping charged to the customer only if you are also leaving carrier cost out, or include both. A clean pair is: customer-paid shipping inside revenue, carrier cost inside the shipping line. A dirty pair is customer-paid shipping inside revenue and no carrier line at all. The dirty pair inflates profit by the freight someone still has to pay.

Product cost from the invoice you will pay

Use the supplier invoice or the bill of materials for the unit in the scope. Include the packaging you pay for if that packaging is required to sell the unit. Exclude the retail price, the compare-at price, and any cost you hope to negotiate but have not secured in writing. Hope is not a line.

If a case pack costs a given amount, divide by the units in the case and show the division in the note. Say an example case is 120 dollars for 20 units. Example unit product cost is 6 dollars. That division is yours, for that case price. It is not a market rate. When the next case is priced differently, redo the division. Do not reuse 6 dollars from memory after the invoice changes.

Carrier cost, not the checkout price

Type what you pay the carrier or the fulfillment partner. If the customer was charged a different amount, that charge is a revenue question, not a substitute for this line. Pull labels from the window when the sheet is a window. When the sheet is one unit, use the label for that weight and zone, or a computed average whose order count and date range you write down.

Replace a flat guess with the service you actually buy. A quote for express, typed onto a sheet for a product you ship by ground, makes profit look worse than the operation. A ground guess typed onto an express promise makes profit look better. Match the service to the promise on the product page. If you are testing a service change, say that the sheet is a test, not a history.

Fees you have read, not fees you remember

Payment fees depend on the processor, the Shopify plan, the country, and whether a third-party processor's extra fee applies. Read the current schedule. The pricing page at https://www.shopify.com/pricing is the place to confirm published plan charges the same day. Do not type a percentage you used on a previous store. Do not type a percentage because it 'sounded like' the card rate.

If you cannot read the schedule today, omit the fee and mark profit incomplete. Omitting a real fee makes the dollars high. Inventing a fee makes the dollars low. Either error ruins a comparison with next month's sheet, where someone else may have used a different invention. A blank you can see is more honest than a precise-looking wrong number.

Ad dollars from the account, same dates

Export or read ad spend for the same dates as the revenue. Include the campaigns in the decision, and exclude campaigns for other products unless you have a written rule for shared spend. Type the spend you were charged, not the revenue the platform claims it produced. Platform revenue columns are not your revenue line.

For a one-unit sheet, divide window spend by window orders only when you mean that average, and show the division. Say the account spent 280 dollars and you count 14 orders in the same dates. Example ad cost attached to one order is 20 dollars. Those 20 dollars are an example of averaging, not a usual cost per purchase, and they expire when the window expires. A new week gets a new division.

Retire assumptions one at a time

Mark each line document or assumption. Give every assumption a reason and a date. When a document arrives, replace the number, keep the old number in the note, and recompute profit. Watch which replacement flipped the sign. That is the line that deserved the wait.

Do not replace five assumptions at once and then celebrate a new dollar figure. You will not know which document did the work. Replace the largest uncertain line first. Recompute. Then replace the next. The path from guess to document is part of the record a client, a partner, or your own future self will need.

Refunds you choose to include

The calculator will not apply a refund rate. If you want refunds in the dollars, compute an allowance from your own orders and type it as a cost, with the window and the count in the note. Say you look at 25 of your orders and 2 were refunded in full at an example price of 40 dollars. The allowance you might type for that set is 80 dollars, or 3.20 dollars if you spread it across the 25. That is your arithmetic on your count. It is not a standard rate.

If you leave refunds out, write that they are out. A sheet that is silent will be read as if refunds were zero. Silence is how a high-return product wins a comparison against a low-return product. The note is part of filling the calculator honestly.

Subtract on paper before you believe the screen

Add product, shipping, fees, and ads. Subtract that total from revenue. The difference is profit. If the screen shows something else, you double-typed a line or you left a line in the note but not in the field. Believe the hand check until the screen matches it. A tool error and a typing error look the same from the outside.

Then read the result back in a sentence. 'On one unit, with these lines, profit is X dollars, and the fee line is still missing.' If you cannot say the sentence, you do not yet have a result you should hand to anyone. Finish the sentence on paper. The fields are only there to support it.

Set up the next sheet while this one is fresh

Copy the note forward. Change only lines that have new documents. Date the copy. This is how a price test stays comparable to the original. If the new sheet adds a fee the old sheet omitted, the dollar change mixes a better definition with a real change. Either update the old sheet's definition and restate it, or accept that the two dollars are not comparable.

Store the sheet where the person who spends and the person who buys inventory can both open it. A profit figure trapped in a personal draft does not change a plan, because the plan is changed by someone who never saw the subtraction. The how of the calculator ends at a shared note, not at a number on a screen.

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