Profit per unit
$15.00
Free calculator
Type your cost and markup percent. Selling price, profit, and margin move as you type, so you can see where markup and margin diverge. 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.
What the item costs you, before it is marked up for sale.
Markup is added on top of cost. A 60% markup means the price is cost plus 60% of cost, not the margin you end up with.
Selling price
A 60% markup on a $25 cost prices the item at $40.00. Profit is $15.00, which works out to a 37.5% margin, a smaller number than the markup percent, and that gap only grows as markup climbs.
price = cost * (1 + markup / 100) profit = price - cost margin = profit / price * 100
Markup is a percentage of cost. Margin is a percentage of price. They use the same profit dollar amount but different denominators, which is why the same deal produces two different-looking numbers. This only accounts for product cost, not payment processing, shipping, or other variable costs, so a real contribution margin will run lower than the margin shown here.
See it on your own data Real numbers from your Shopify store, not a guess.
This only accounts for product cost. It does not subtract payment processing fees, outbound shipping, or any other cost that scales with the order, so the margin shown here will always be higher than your real contribution margin. It also treats cost as one fixed number, when a real store usually has a different landed cost on every SKU and every shipment.
If you want the fuller picture, the contribution margin calculator linked above adds payment fees and shipping cost on top of this, and gets you closer to what an order actually clears.
Questions
Markup is profit expressed as a percentage of cost. Margin is the same profit dollar amount expressed as a percentage of selling price. Because price is always larger than cost (assuming you are making money), margin is always a smaller percentage than markup for the same sale, and the two only converge as both approach zero.
Because the denominators differ. A $15 profit on a $25 cost is a 60% markup. That same $15 profit measured against the $40 price it produced is only a 37.5% margin. The dollar amount never changes, only what it's being divided by.
A 100% markup, meaning you double your cost, produces exactly a 50% margin. That specific case is common enough in retail to have its own name, keystone pricing, and it's worth checking with a keystone pricing calculator if that's the target you're aiming for rather than a markup percent.
No. This calculator only works with the cost figure you type in. If that figure is product cost alone, the margin shown here will be higher than your real contribution margin once payment processing, shipping, and other variable costs come out.
Not a universal one. It depends heavily on category, competition, and what the rest of your cost structure looks like. Some categories commonly run markups well above 100%, others operate on much thinner margins by design. Treat any single "right" markup number with suspicion.
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.