Your Margin on Every Shopify Order The Free Report That Shows It

The whole report runs on ONE field: Cost per item. Shopify only reports profit on products that had a cost saved at the time they sold. If that field is blank, those orders just aren't in the report. At all!

Pop what the product costs you into the Cost field and click Save.

Good to know before you go filling them all in:

• Every variant needs its own cost: if a product comes in sizes or colors, each one has to be filled in separately. (Sorry!)
• It doesn't go backwards: a cost you add today counts for orders from today on. Your old orders stay as they were, so the sooner it's in, the sooner the report is useful.
• What goes in the number: what it costs you to make or buy the product. If you resell, that's the price you paid your supplier. If you make it yourself, base it on your materials and labor. Leave your outgoing postage OUT of it, because the report already counts your shipping costs separately and you'd be counting them twice.
• Lots of products to do: go to Products, tick the ones you want, click Bulk edit, then click Columns and add Cost per item. Now you can fill everything in on one screen. SO much faster!

Set the date range to last month, then click the margin column heading so the LOWEST margins sit at the top. (Can't see the report? Check which reports your plan includes.)

Anything below zero? That order LOST you money. And a thin order has very little left to pay for your marketing.

While you're in there, open a couple of orders you KNOW you paid to ship and check that a shipping cost is showing. If it says zero, the margin on that order is overstated.

If you sell overseas, open Average profit margin by market too. Click any market and it opens the same report for that market only.

One bad order doesn't tell you much. So scroll through the bottom of the list and look for what those orders have in COMMON:

• A small order total (one low-priced item by itself)
• Free or cheap shipping for the customer, and a big shipping cost for you
• Shipped overseas, with duties you paid
• A discount code on it
• A refund on it

The two that come up again and again: tiny orders with big shipping costs, and international orders where duties ate the whole margin.

Your sales total counts every one of those the same as a healthy order, which is why this report is worth opening.

Keep in mind that this isn't the only number to look at. The name is a little generous, so let's be SUPER clear about what it counts:

• What goes in: what the customer paid (product, shipping, duties and import taxes), minus what your store paid (product cost, shipping cost, duties and import taxes).
• What's missing from that list: your ad spend, your payment fees, your apps, your team and everything else it costs to run the business.

So this is your gross margin on each order, and gross margin is the money you have left to pay for marketing and everything else. An order that looks healthy in here can still be a loss once your marketing comes out of it. Use this report to find your thin orders, and still look at your business as a whole.

I like to have gross margin at 60 to 80% before shipping. If you can hold 60 to 80% after shipping as well, that would be phenomenal.

Shopify's report takes shipping and duties out too, so the number you see in there is your after-shipping one. It'll read a little lower than a margin worked out on product cost alone.

How high you can get depends a LOT on what you sell. These are published gross margin ranges by category. Each bar is the top of the range, and the full range is in the label:

Source: Polar Analytics, June 2026

Eightx lands in a similar place. They call 60 to 75% healthy for a brand selling direct, with beauty and supplements at 65 to 75%, apparel at 55 to 65%, hard goods at 50 to 60% and food at 40 to 50%.

Source: Eightx, May 2026

And for a reality check from the biggest companies, here are gross margins for listed companies:

Source: NYU Stern, January 2026

Those are huge public companies with wholesale in the mix, so they sit lower than a brand selling straight to its customers.

If you sell beauty, skincare or supplements, 60 to 80% is a realistic aim. If you sell food, home goods or electronics, your ceiling is lower, which makes it even MORE important to know your number on every order.

This is the number the report can't give you, and it's the one that tells you whether an order really made money. You need to know what marketing costs you per order, and there are two ways to get it:

• Your blended MER: MER (marketing efficiency ratio) is your total revenue divided by your total marketing spend, across everything you're running. Flip it (1 ÷ MER) and you get marketing as a share of every sale. So a MER of 4 means marketing is 25% of your revenue.
• Your CPA, if ads are your only paid channel: if Meta ads are the only thing you pay for, use the cost per purchase in Ads Manager. That's your ad cost per order in dollars, and it comes straight off the money left on the order.

(Some dashboards show MER the other way up, as spend divided by revenue. If yours shows a percentage like 25%, that IS your marketing share and there's nothing to flip.)

Now take it off. Your gross margin from the report, minus your marketing share, is your margin after ads. Your payment fees, apps and everything else still have to come out of what's left. (If math makes your head spin, ask Claude or ChatGPT to do it for you!)

So an order that looks amazing in the report can look VERY different once your marketing comes out of it. And an order that was already thin can tip into a loss.