Shopify Fees Explained: How to Calculate Your Real Profit per Order

Gross collected revenue on an order is the selling price plus any shipping charged to the customer. If the item is $50.00 and shipping charged is $0.00, gross revenue is $50.00. That is the amount the checkout collected. It is not contribution, and it is not what remains after Shopify-related fees.

Profit answers a different question: after the costs attached to that order—and after mixing in the chance of a refund—did anything leftover remain? Treating Shopify sales reports as profit hides COGS, pick-and-pack, labels, card processing, ads, and returns.

These are two different fee stacks. Collapsing them into “Shopify always takes X percent” will misstate the order.

Shopify Payments. Card processing fees apply. Shopify's extra third-party transaction fee generally does not apply when Shopify Payments is the sole provider for eligible transactions. The calculator therefore fills sourced United States Shopify Payments online standard-card processing rates and sets the Shopify third-party transaction percentage to 0% for that modeled checkout.

Third-party provider. The provider can charge its own processing percentage and fixed fee. Shopify can also charge its applicable third-party transaction percentage. Exact treatment depends on plan, setup, and market. This project sources the Shopify third-party percentage for United States Basic, Grow, and Advanced plans. It does not publish Stripe, PayPal, or other processor rate cards—those fields stay as your inputs.

To show only Shopify's extra percentage, one educational scenario keeps this article's existing example processing assumption (2.9% + $0.30) and adds the sourced United States Basic Shopify third-party transaction fee of 2%. Expected profit per order then falls from $14.75 to $13.75. That is not a Stripe, PayPal, or other processor quote. A real third-party provider sets its own card rates, which need not be 2.9% + $0.30.

The table below is the same sourced United States schedule the Shopify Profit Calculator uses. Figures are educational presets for standard online cards on Basic, Grow, and Advanced—not universal Shopify rates, not premium-card or POS rates, and not Shopify Plus. Last checked on Shopify's pricing page on 2026-09-08. Actual rates can vary by market, card or payment type, plan, contract, and later Shopify changes. Verify what your store is charged in Shopify admin and in current Shopify documentation.

Sources: Shopify pricing, Shopify Payments fee documentation, and Shopify third-party transaction fee documentation. Monthly subscription is always your input; the calculator does not treat a sample plan price as a sourced rate card.

Expected contribution per order follows the same identity as the Shopify Profit Calculator. Gross collected revenue is reduced by product/COGS, fulfillment/shipping, packaging, payment processing, any applicable Shopify transaction fee, advertising, other variable costs, and expected refund losses.

Expected profit per order = mix of a successful-order outcome and a refunded-order outcome at your refund rate

Payment processing is gross revenue times the processing percentage, plus the fixed processing fee. The Shopify third-party transaction fee is gross revenue times that percentage (zero on a modeled Shopify Payments transaction). Percentage fees apply to selling price plus shipping charged.

A successful order keeps the collected revenue and pays those costs. A refunded order keeps no customer revenue in this model; remaining costs depend on the loss rates you set. Expected profit is not “take the refund rate off revenue and stop.”

These figures are an illustration, not recommended prices or fees. They come from the same production engine example as the calculator supporting content: selling price $50.00, shipping charged $0.00, product cost $15.00, fulfillment $5.00, packaging $1.00, payment processing 2.9% + $0.30, Shopify third-party transaction fee 0%, advertising $10.00 per order, 5% refunds with conservative 100% loss assumptions, and 100 orders per month. The $14.75 expected profit per order does not include monthly overhead. The monthly net-profit line uses hypothetical example inputs of $29.00 Shopify subscription and $50.00 apps/software ($79.00 combined)—not universal Shopify fees, not what every merchant pays, and not the calculator form's starting monthly fields. Actual subscription and app costs depend on the merchant's plan and software stack.

A kept order is $50.00 − $15.00 product − $5.00 fulfillment − $1.00 packaging − $1.75 processing − $10.00 ads = $17.25. Shopify's extra third-party fee is $0.00 in this Shopify Payments example, so it does not further reduce that line.

That leftover is still far from the $50.00 collected at checkout. Mix in refunded orders at 5% and expected profit per order is $14.75, not $17.25. Expected retained revenue is $47.50, so expected margin is 31.1% of kept revenue—not of the original ticket.

Profit For Sellers does not subtract “refund rate × revenue” from an otherwise perfect order. It mixes two cash outcomes. Successful orders keep collected revenue after costs. Refunded orders keep no customer revenue in this model, while some costs may remain.

Default loss rates treat product, fulfillment and packaging, payment processing, and Shopify transaction fees as fully lost on a refund, and treat advertising and other variable costs as already spent. Those percentages are configurable. They are modeling choices, not a claim that every warehouse scraps every unit or that every Shopify fee is always kept on every refund.

Shopify policy is a separate question from the model. Shopify documents that original Shopify Payments credit-card processing fees are generally not returned when a refund is issued. See Shopify Payments fee documentation. Treatment of Shopify's third-party transaction fee after a refund can depend on circumstances and setup; see Shopify third-party transaction fee documentation and your admin. Confirm current rules in Shopify's own help articles rather than assuming every fee behaves the same.

In the default example, a refunded order is -$32.75. With a 5% refund rate, expected profit is $14.75. The same costs with a 0% refund rate would leave $17.25 expected profit per order. The gap is the expected-value cost of refunds—not a round 5% haircut on $50.00.

Card processing and any applicable Shopify third-party transaction fee scale with the order (plus a fixed processing amount per charge). The Shopify subscription and most app bills do not. They are recurring store costs.

The calculator therefore keeps expected profit per order as contribution after variable costs, ads, fees, and expected refunds. Monthly Shopify subscription, apps, and other overhead reduce monthly net profit. With more than zero orders they also reduce fully-loaded profit per order by allocating that overhead. They do not change contribution profit per order or break-even CPA.

Expected profit per order stays $14.75 with or without those bills. For the monthly illustration only, this example assumes 100 orders, a hypothetical $29.00 Shopify subscription, and a hypothetical $50.00 apps/software expense—$79.00 total example fixed costs, not a universal Shopify charge and not a claim about every merchant's bill. Actual Shopify subscription and app costs depend on the merchant's plan and software stack. The live calculator treats those fields as your inputs and can start at $0.00.

Monthly contribution at that order volume is $1,475.00. Subtracting the $79.00 example overhead leaves $1,396.00 monthly net profit. Allocated overhead is $0.79 per order, and fully-loaded profit per order is $13.96. Pretending the subscription disappears—or treating it as if it were another checkout percentage—hides that split.

Advertising cost per order (CPA) is treated as incurred on both successful and refunded orders. It lowers contribution after ads. Contribution before ads is expected profit plus that CPA. Break-even CPA is that pre-ad amount, floored at zero: the most you can spend on ads per order and still expect to break even after refunds, before monthly overhead.

In the default example, CPA is $10.00 and break-even CPA is $24.75. Spend below that ceiling and expected profit stays positive; spend it all and expected contribution after ads is about zero. With advertising removed and every other default held fixed, expected profit per order would be $24.75.

Break-even ROAS is expected retained revenue divided by break-even CPA when that CPA is greater than zero. Here that is 1.92x. Ads-manager ROAS may use a different revenue definition. For the advertising identity without entering a CPA, use the Break-Even ROAS Calculator or the break-even ROAS guide.

• Treating revenue as profit. Checkout totals ignore COGS, shipping you pay, processing, ads, and refunds.
• Forgetting fulfillment and packaging. Labels, pick-and-pack, and mailers are cash even when the customer paid “free shipping.”
• Forgetting acquisition cost. Paid traffic is part of the order. Contribution before ads is not the same as profit after ads.
• Assuming every plan and payment setup has the same rate. Basic, Grow, and Advanced presets differ, and third-party checkout is a different stack from Shopify Payments.
• Confusing payment processing with Shopify's third-party transaction fee. One is the processor's card rate. The other is Shopify's extra percentage when a third-party provider is used. They can appear together.
• Ignoring refunds. Or subtracting a refund percentage from revenue while assuming every cost disappears. Expected-value mixing is stricter.
• Treating subscription and app bills as if they disappear. They are not a checkout percentage, but they still reduce monthly net profit.
• Copying a United States fee preset into another country. Verify local rates in Shopify admin before planning inventory or ads around them.

1. Confirm plan, market, and whether the order uses Shopify Payments or a third-party provider.
2. Read the processing rate and any Shopify third-party transaction percentage from Shopify admin (and from your processor, if you are not using Shopify Payments).
3. Enter selling price, shipping charged, product cost, fulfillment, and packaging. Add other variable costs that actually attach to the order.
4. Enter advertising cost per order, or leave ads at zero and compare the result with break-even CPA and break-even ROAS.
5. Enter an expected refund rate and adjust loss rates only when you have a reason (for example restocked inventory).
6. Read expected profit per order first. That is contribution after variable costs, fees, ads, and expected refunds.
7. Enter monthly Shopify subscription, apps, and other overhead, plus expected order volume, to see monthly net profit and fully-loaded profit per order.
8. Recalculate when plan, payment setup, ad costs, or refund mix change. If you need a selling price instead of profit at a known price, use the Product Pricing Calculator or How to Price a Product for Profit.

The Shopify Profit Calculator asks for price, costs, United States plan presets or custom rates, Shopify Payments versus third-party setup, advertising, refund rate, optional refund-loss rates, monthly Shopify and app overhead, and optional order volume. It returns expected profit per order, expected margin, monthly net profit, fully-loaded profit per order, break-even CPA, and break-even ROAS.

Results are planning estimates, not bookkeeping, tax advice, or a Shopify invoice. For a marketplace-agnostic version without Shopify presets, use the E-commerce Profit Calculator.