Shopify profit analytics, written out in full. Every page here answers one question a store owner actually asks — how to calculate true profit, what contribution margin is, what is left after ad spend, shipping, refunds and fees — with the arithmetic, a worked example, and where each number comes from.
No page is gated and none of it requires the app. Written by the team behind NetNet, a Shopify profit analytics app for DTC brands.
Every page below works through the arithmetic by hand. These do it for you, or tell you which product does it on every order.
What profit means inside Shopify, and how to calculate it end to end.
What belongs on a store P&L, in what order, and why it differs from the statement your accountant produces. With a full worked monthly example.
The gap between the two is every cost of serving an order. Why gross margin overstates what you can pay for a customer, usually by fifteen to twenty points.
Gross profit judges your pricing. Net profit judges your business. What sits between them, and why using one where the other belongs is expensive.
The month-end procedure for calculating Shopify profit: the five inputs, where each one lives, the order to subtract them in, and a worked per-order example.
Contribution margin is what one more order adds after every variable cost. How to calculate it per order, and why it is the real ceiling on acquisition cost.
Net profit is what remains after fixed costs, advertising and owner pay. What belongs below the contribution margin line, and why it rarely matches your bank.
Published margin benchmarks are mostly unusable, and this page explains why rather than adding another set. How to build a baseline from your own numbers.
What continuous profit tracking requires: the four data flows, their cadences, what to watch daily and monthly, and why staleness costs more than precision.
Revenue is what customers paid. Profit is what survives the costs of serving them. Why a Shopify store can grow revenue every month and keep less each time.
How a management P&L differs from the statement your accountant files, why the two disagree, and which one to run the business on.
Why a closed month keeps getting worse: carrier adjustments, return freight, late refunds and chargebacks, and how to attribute them back to orders.
Shopify profit explained: the three numbers Shopify calls sales, where its profit report stops, and the four layers of profit underneath it.
What is left after acquisition cost — and why ROAS does not answer that.
Channel CAC depends on attribution and always sums to more customers than you gained. Blended CAC reconciles to reality. When to use each, and for what.
One comparison decides whether growth funds itself. Why both sides drift together, and how a store crosses from profitable to not without any number alarming.
Google's campaign types behave differently on margin. How to reach a profit figure that reconciles, and why Shopping and brand search need separating first.
Joining Meta spend to real margin: which spend figure to use, why platform-attributed revenue overstates, and how to reach a profit number that reconciles.
Three ways to judge advertising, each answering a different question. What MER fixes about ROAS, what it still cannot tell you, and which one to run on.
Contribution margin per order against acquisition cost per customer — the single comparison that determines whether paid growth builds or destroys value.
Channels do not just cost differently, they sell differently. Why margin varies by channel, and how the smallest revenue source is often the biggest earner.
Platform cost per purchase is not customer acquisition cost. What belongs in the numerator, what belongs in the denominator, and why the gap is usually large.
Two campaigns at the same 3x ROAS, one profitable and one not. How to calculate your break-even ROAS, and why the number moves whenever your margin does.
What delivery actually costs per order, versus what you charged for it.
Cash on delivery carries no processing percentage and a much worse economic profile. How failure rates turn a healthy-looking margin into a much smaller one.
Packaging looks trivial per order and lands around four percent of order value. The bigger cost is indirect — box size decides what the carrier bills you.
The gap between what customers pay for delivery and what delivery costs, where it concentrates, and how to close it without raising prices across the board.
Delivery is the largest source of margin variation between two orders of the same value. How to measure profit after it, and what the spread usually reveals.
A returned-to-origin parcel costs freight twice, packaging once and produces no revenue. What one RTO actually consumes, and how many good orders it cancels.
What a parcel actually costs once surcharges, dimensional weight and adjustments land, and why the quoted rate is the smallest part of the delivery bill.
The deductions that land after the sale and rarely reach a spreadsheet.
A chargeback reverses revenue you already spent, keeps the goods gone and adds a fee whether you win or lose. What one costs, and how many orders it cancels.
A 20% discount does not cost 20%. It costs a share of contribution margin, usually around a third, and the arithmetic is what makes promotions decidable.
The small recurring costs that never reach a profit spreadsheet — fee taxes, FX spread, carrier adjustments, app creep — and what they add up to in a month.
A refund costs far more than the amount returned. What a single return actually consumes, why partial refunds are worse, and how to attribute them correctly.
Contribution margin measured on shipped orders ignores the ones that come back. What the adjustment does to the number, and why it changes what you can bid.
What a payment actually costs: percentage, fixed component, tax on the fee, cross-border uplifts, dispute fees, and what a refund does not return.
Profit cut by SKU, order and cohort instead of by revenue.
What a customer is worth after acquisition, retention costs and the returns they make. Why averages mislead, and which segments actually carry a business.
Allocating shipping, fees and packaging down to individual products, and why the best-selling SKU is so often not the most profitable one.
The ratio most DTC brands quote is built on revenue LTV and blended CAC, which inflates it twice over. How to compute one that means something.
Three orders at identical value can produce wildly different profit. Why averages destroy the finding, and what per-order costing surfaces that totals cannot.
Two products at the same price and the same gross margin can differ by thirty points once each carries its own fulfilment cost. How to calculate and read it.
Delivery cost and failure rates vary enormously by geography, so margin does too. How to cut profit by region and what to do about the loss-making ones.
Grouping customers by first-order month is the only way to see whether acquisition is getting better or worse. How to build the view and what it reveals.
Revenue rankings and margin rankings rarely match. How to read the two together, and why the bestseller is so often the worst thing to promote harder.
What to track at your size, and how to read the numbers you get.
Six checks that tell you whether a store makes money, in the order they should be run — and the two adjustments that most often change the answer.
Five numbers cover almost every profit decision a DTC brand makes. What each one governs, the order to fix them in, and the metrics that quietly mislead.
At $833,000 a month the constraint shifts from knowing the numbers to acting on them. Which cuts become essential, and which reporting finally earns its cost.
At roughly $83,000 a month, four numbers decide almost everything. What to measure, what to ignore until later, and the reporting most stores buy too early.
One screen, six numbers, each tied to a decision. What earns a place on a finance dashboard for an ecommerce business, and what should be left off it.
A store at $1M a year, or ₹1 crore a month, can run at a loss without a single obvious mistake. The four thin margins that compound into a negative result.