Payment processing fee
$1.32
Free calculator
Type sale price, supplier cost, shipping, ad spend and payment fee inputs. Real profit per order updates live. 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.
What the customer pays for this order.
What your supplier charges you for this item.
What it costs you, or your supplier passes through to you, to get this order to the customer. Not what the customer paid for shipping.
Total ad spend divided by orders it produced, an average. A real per-order acquisition cost varies by which specific ad drove that sale.
Payment processing
Most processors charge a percentage of the order plus a small flat fee.
Profit per order
At $35.00 sale price, after $12.00 supplier cost, $4.00 shipping, $8.00 ad spend and $1.32 in payment fees, this order clears $9.69, a 27.7% margin.
payment fee = sale price * (processing rate / 100) + flat fee profit = sale price - supplier cost - shipping - ad spend - payment fee margin = profit / sale price
This is per order, not per SKU or per month. A real store's ad spend and shipping cost both vary order to order, so treat this as one order's math, not a store-wide average.
See it on your own data Real numbers from your Shopify store, not a guess.
Ad spend per order here is an average, total spend divided by orders it produced. A real per-order acquisition cost varies enormously by which specific ad, audience, or placement actually drove that sale. Some orders are nearly free to acquire, others cost far more than this average, and a single blended number hides that spread.
This also does not account for returns, chargebacks, or the supplier shipping delays that drive refunds, all especially common in dropshipping given the longer shipping times and less direct quality control than holding your own inventory. A profitable-looking order on paper can still turn into a refund after the fact.
Questions
Notoriously thin and variable. Dropshipping margins are squeezed from both ends, supplier cost is usually higher than owning inventory at scale, and ad spend to compete for the same trending products is often high. There is no reliable single number to target, and anyone quoting one flat "typical margin" figure for the category is oversimplifying.
Rising ad costs are commonly cited as a general pressure across e-commerce, dropshipping included, though we are not aware of a single reliable, current, category-specific statistic worth citing here. More competition for the same viral or trending products is another commonly cited factor. Treat this as a general trend, not a precise number.
No, and that is a real gap. This tool computes profit on an order that ships and stays sold. Returns, chargebacks, and refunds all eat into that profit after the fact and are not modeled here. A cost-of-returns view is a separate calculation this page does not attempt.
Some do, on top of supplier cost and payment processing. Platform or app fees are not modeled in this calculator, so if your setup includes one, subtract it separately from the profit figure above.
Print-on-demand platforms usually bundle production and fulfillment into one base cost number rather than separate supplier cost and shipping lines the way dropshipping typically works. The underlying shape of the math is similar, sale price minus costs minus ad spend minus payment fees, which is why there is a separate print-on-demand profit calculator built around that one bundled cost.
Next
Upstream reads real per-order shipping and payment fees straight from your store, nets ad spend against real orders instead of an average, and accounts for returns. It is the connected version of the calculator above.