How to work out profit per order

Revenue tells you how busy you were. Profit per order tells you whether the busy was worth it. It's the single most useful number a small product seller can know, and it takes about five minutes to work out for one order.

Here's the method, a worked example, and a few traps to avoid.

What counts in profit per order

Profit per order is what one order leaves you after every cost that order caused. For most product sellers that means:

• Order total: what the customer paid, including any shipping you charged them
• Channel fees: what your store or marketplace charged for the order
• Payment processing: what the card processor charged
• Shipping you paid: the label, not what the customer paid
• Packaging: boxes, mailers, tape, inserts
• Product cost: what it cost to make or buy what's in the box
• Ad spend for the order: the share of ad cost that brought the order in

Profit per order = order total − all of the above.

Leave out monthly costs like your store plan for now. They're real, but they don't change with one order, and mixing them in hides what each order is doing. Look at them in your monthly review.

Find your real fee rates

Your rates depend on your channel, plan and country. Check the channel's own pricing page, then compare it with your statement. For reference, on Oct 10, 2026 (US rates):

• Shopify's pricing page listed Shopify Payments online standard card rates of "2.9% + 30¢" on Basic, "2.7% + 30¢" on Grow and "2.5% + 30¢" on Advanced, with "+ 1%" for online international cards.
• Stripe's pricing page listed "2.9% + 30¢ per successful transaction for domestic cards".
• Amazon's selling fees page described referral fees as "a percentage of the total price or a minimum amount, whichever is greater", varying by category (for example 15% with a $0.30 minimum for "Everything Else").

A worked order

Example (made-up round numbers, not real store data). A US customer orders one item priced at $30.00 and pays $5.00 for shipping. The order total is $35.00. The store is on Shopify Basic with Shopify Payments, and the card is domestic.

1. Payment processing: 2.9% × $35.00 = $1.015, rounded to $1.02, plus $0.30 = $1.32
2. After fees: $35.00 − $1.32 = $33.68
3. Shipping label you paid: $5.50
4. Packaging: $1.00
5. Product cost: $9.00
6. Ad spend for this order: $3.00 (say a $15.00 ad brought in five orders: $15.00 ÷ 5)
7. Profit per order: $33.68 − $5.50 − $1.00 − $9.00 − $3.00 = $15.18

That's 43.4% of the $35.00 order total. Notice the shipping: the customer paid $5.00 and the label cost $5.50, so shipping alone cost this order $0.50 before anything else.

Three traps that make profit look better than it is

1. Using the price instead of the order total for fees. Processors charge on what the customer paid, shipping included. On Amazon, the referral fee is on the total price including shipping charges, per Amazon's own page.

2. Forgetting ad spend. If you only count it monthly, every order looks profitable and the month doesn't. Splitting it across the orders it brought in is rough, but far closer to the truth than zero.

3. Treating every order the same. An order with three items and one label keeps more than three single-item orders. Work out a few typical orders, not just one.

Spreadsheet, app or something else?

Lots of sellers start with a small business sales tracking spreadsheet, and that works for a while. You type in each order and copy the formulas down. The trouble starts when you sell in more than one place, rates change, or you skip a week and have to catch up.

Others look for an app to track sales and expenses. Many of them are built for accounting, which is useful at tax time but doesn't always show profit per order by channel.

Whichever you pick, the test is the same: can you see, for any order, what it kept, and do you trust the fee rates behind it?

Work out one order now

The free calculator at lunithlabs.com/calculator is the quickest way to try this. Enter a sale price, channel fees and payment processing (each as a percent and/or a flat amount), shipping you paid, ad spend for the sale and your cost to make or buy it. It shows what the sale kept, in dollars and as a share of the price, with each deduction listed. It runs in your browser, and the page says nothing you type is stored.

The calculator has one field for product cost, so add packaging into "cost to make or buy it" and enter the full order total as the sale price. Use the rates from your own statement; the page's starting values are an example, not any channel's real fees.

From one order to every order

Once you know your profit per order, the next step is seeing it for every order without redoing the math. Lunith Commerce OS is a business operating system that runs in Notion. It keeps each channel's fees on file, so every sale you log shows what it kept, by channel, in one place. It's $59.99, one time. See what's inside.

Or work out one order today in the free calculator.