Shopify Profit Calculator
Shopify markets itself as fee-free, but the real cost shows up in your payment gateway, plan, app stack, and ad spend. Enter your numbers below — pre-set to Shopify — for the honest per-unit picture.
What Shopify actually costs in 2026
Shopify charges no marketplace commission, but you pay a payment gateway fee — typically 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction on the Basic plan with Shopify Payments, dropping to 2.7% on Grow and 2.5% on Advanced. Use a third-party gateway instead and Shopify adds a 0.2–2% penalty on top, which is how it keeps merchants on Shopify Payments. Plans run $39 (Basic), $105 (Grow), and $399 (Advanced) per month, with Plus from $2,300.
The hidden line items
Two costs sink most Shopify margin math. First, the app stack: a real store running email, reviews, subscriptions, and shipping apps easily spends $400–$1,200/month — the equivalent of a meaningful percentage of revenue. Second, attribution leakage: since iOS privacy changes, most stores under-attribute paid revenue by 20–40%, so the ROAS your ad platform reports is rosier than reality. Enter your real cost-per-unit ad spend, not platform-reported ROAS.
A worked example
A $35 product with $9.00 COGS, $4.50 shipping, and $5.00 ad spend pays roughly $1.32 in gateway fees (2.9% + $0.30). Net profit lands near $15.18 per unit on the transaction alone — but that is before your monthly plan and apps are spread across units. At low volume, fixed monthly costs can quietly erase that per-unit win, which is why Shopify rewards scale.
Shopify shows the lowest fees in this calculator and it is my most expensive channel in real life. The sticker fee ignores your plan, gateway, app stack, and the fact that you pay for every visitor — my per-unit ad spend on Shopify runs roughly double what it does on Amazon, because nobody lands on my store by accident. When you model Shopify, put your true acquisition cost in the ad-spend field. That is where the channel actually costs you.