Why Shopify revenue isn't enough
Shopify's native dashboard is designed to show revenue, order count and visitors. These metrics are useful for measuring activity but they don't answer the fundamental question: how much money are you actually making?
A concrete example. Your Shopify store shows 50,000 EUR in monthly revenue. Impressive. But after deducting COGS (15,000 EUR), shipping costs (4,000 EUR), Shopify Payments transaction fees (1,500 EUR), ad spend (12,000 EUR) and miscellaneous costs (subscription, apps, returns), you're left with 8,000 EUR net profit. Your real net margin is 16%, not the 70% gross margin Shopify might suggest.
Without this visibility into real profit, you make flawed decisions. You increase ad budgets on campaigns that generate revenue but not profit. You underestimate the impact of returns and transaction fees. You set prices without knowing your real net margin.
The 5 cost types to track
To calculate your real profit on Shopify, you need to track 5 cost categories.
1. Cost of Goods Sold (COGS). The purchase or manufacturing price of each product. On Shopify, you can fill in the 'Cost per item' field for each variant, but few merchants do it systematically.
2. Shipping costs. The actual shipping cost, not what the customer pays. Include carrier cost, packaging and handling. These costs vary by order and destination.
3. Transaction fees. Shopify Payments charges between 1.5% and 2.9% + 0.30 EUR per transaction depending on your plan. If you use a third-party gateway, add the additional 0.5% to 2% fees.
4. Ad costs. Meta Ads, Google Ads, TikTok Ads. These costs should be attributed at the order level to calculate accurate POAS (Profit on Ad Spend), not just ROAS on revenue.
5. Miscellaneous costs. Shopify subscription, third-party apps, returns and refunds, storage fees. These fixed and variable costs complete the net profit calculation.
Manual methods: spreadsheets and their limits
The most common method for calculating Shopify profit is the monthly CSV export to a spreadsheet. You export your orders, add columns for COGS and fees, then calculate profit per line.
This method works for a monthly aggregate view but has serious limitations. It's manual and time-consuming: every month you spend hours cleaning and enriching the file. It's error-prone: a broken formula, a forgotten COGS, an undeducted refund. It's not real-time: you discover your profit weeks late.
Most importantly, the spreadsheet doesn't let you calculate profit by customer, by cohort or by acquisition channel. You know how much you made overall, but not which customers are profitable, which products have the best real net margin, or which campaigns generate profit rather than just revenue.
Automate profit tracking with Fullmetrix
Fullmetrix connects your Shopify store and automatically calculates real profit by integrating all 5 cost types.
COGS are imported directly from Shopify ('Cost per item' field) or manually configurable in Fullmetrix. Shipping costs are calculated from each order's data. Transaction fees are automatically estimated based on your Shopify plan. Ad costs can be integrated via Meta Ads, Google Ads and TikTok Ads connections.
The result is a dashboard that shows in real-time your net profit, net margin, POAS (Profit on Ad Spend) and profit per order, per product, per customer and per acquisition cohort.
You immediately identify products that generate revenue but not profit, ad campaigns where ROAS is positive but POAS is negative (costs eat all the revenue), and customers whose net LTV justifies a high acquisition cost.
3 decisions to make with profit tracking
Decision 1: rebalance your catalog. Rank your products by real net margin (not gross margin). You'll discover that some best-sellers by volume have mediocre net margin once all costs are deducted. Focus your marketing efforts on high net margin products.
Decision 2: optimize ad spend by POAS, not ROAS. A 4x ROAS looks excellent, but if your margin is 20%, your break-even ROAS is 5x. You're losing money without knowing it. POAS (profit divided by ad spend) is the metric that tells the truth.
Decision 3: set a maximum CAC per customer segment. With profit tracking and net LTV, calculate how much you can spend to acquire a customer while remaining profitable. A VIP customer with 500 EUR net LTV justifies a 100 EUR CAC. A one-time buyer with 30 EUR net LTV doesn't justify more than 5 EUR acquisition cost.