Break-even orders / month
236
Free calculator
Type your average order value, cost of goods, payment fees and shipping cost. The contribution margin, break-even order count and the orders needed to hit a profit target all move as you type. No email, no gate, nothing leaves this page.
The calculator
The boxes start filled with an illustrative example, not a benchmark. Replace it with your own numbers. All figures are per order, except fixed costs and the profit target, which are monthly.
Per order
Total revenue divided by number of orders. Before payment processing takes its cut.
Landed product cost: unit cost, inbound freight, duty. Not fulfilment or outbound shipping, those are below.
Stripe, PayPal, and most other processors charge a percentage plus a small flat fee per order.
What it costs you to ship the order, not what the customer paid for shipping. One blended figure here; a real book has a different cost on every order.
Pick, pack, packaging, or anything else that scales with each order. Zero is fine if nothing else applies.
Monthly
Rent, salaries, software, anything that does not change with order volume this month.
Leave at zero to skip the comparison against where you are today.
Contribution margin per order
Every order clears $34.02 toward fixed costs and profit before it is spent. That covers fixed costs at 236 orders a month.
contribution margin per order = order value - COGS - payment fees - shipping - other variable costs contribution margin % = contribution margin per order / order value break-even orders = fixed costs / contribution margin per order break-even revenue = fixed costs / contribution margin % orders for profit target = (fixed costs + target profit) / contribution margin per order revenue for profit target = (fixed costs + target profit) / contribution margin %
This is the standard cost-volume-profit formula used in break-even analysis, not something we invented: Investopedia and Corporate Finance Institute both publish it.
See it on your own data Real numbers from your Shopify store, not a guess.
This took one blended cost per order: one shipping figure, one COGS percentage. A real store does not have one shipping cost, it has a different cost on every order depending on weight, zone and carrier, and it does not have one COGS percentage, it has a different landed cost on every SKU. A single blended average can look fine in aggregate while individual products or order types are quietly unprofitable underneath it.
One competitor charging $300 a month in this category still cannot separate a $4.50 shipment from a $100 one, and tells customers to upload a spreadsheet or average the cost annually instead. Averaging is the shortcut this page also takes, on purpose, to stay a two-minute calculator rather than a connected app.
Questions
It depends heavily on category. Beauty and apparel brands often run higher (gross margins alone commonly land anywhere from the low 40s to low 70s percent depending on the brand, before variable costs even come out), while categories with expensive freight or heavy goods run thinner. There is no single healthy number; the more useful question is whether contribution margin comfortably clears fixed costs at your actual order volume, which is what the break-even figure above answers directly.
No. Contribution margin is calculated before fixed costs are subtracted, that is the point of it: it is what is left over from a single sale to go pay fixed costs and, beyond that, become profit. Net profit, not contribution margin, is the number left after fixed costs come out too.
Anything that scales with the sale but is not part of the product cost itself: payment processing fees, outbound shipping, and pick-and-pack labor are the three most common. Gross margin only nets out the cost of the goods.
Arithmetically, only two levers move it: raise contribution margin per order (higher price, lower variable cost per order), or lower fixed costs. There is no third lever in the formula. Volume does not change break-even, it only determines whether you are above or below the number the formula already fixed.
Not in the per-order contribution margin above, and that is deliberate: acquisition cost varies enormously by channel and by customer, so blending it into one per-order number hides more than it shows. A full profit picture nets ad spend against contribution margin at the channel or cohort level instead of the single-order level, which is a connected calculation, not a two-minute one.
Next
Upstream reads real per-order cost, real per-SKU landed cost, and real per-order shipping straight from your store, and nets ad spend and returns against it too. It is the connected version of the calculator above.