Shipping profit calculator
Put in a sale and its costs to see what you actually keep. Postage and packaging are usually where the margin quietly goes, so shipping is broken out separately rather than lumped in with everything else.
What this works out
- Net profit — everything the customer paid, minus every cost and fee.
- Profit margin — that profit as a share of what the customer paid.
- Return on item cost — profit against what the item cost you, which is the number that tells you whether the buy was good.
- Shipping contribution — whether the shipping you charged covered the postage, or quietly ate into the item's margin.
- Break-even — the price, and the shipping charge, at which this sale makes exactly nothing.
Worked example
A $24.99 item with $8.45 shipping charged. It cost $11.50, postage was $6.13, packaging $0.42, and the marketplace takes 13.25% of the item and shipping.
- The customer paid $33.44 excluding tax.
- The marketplace fee is 13.25% of $33.44, which is $4.43.
- Costs total $22.48 with the fee included.
- Net profit is $10.96, a 32.8% margin and 95.3% return on the item cost.
- Shipping contributed $2.32, so it paid for itself and helped.
Edge cases worth knowing
- Tax collected is not revenue. It is excluded by default, and the checkbox that includes it warns you why that is usually wrong.
- Fees usually apply to shipping. If you charge $8.45 shipping and postage is $8.45, you have lost the fee on that $8.45.
- A negative break-even shipping charge is a real answer. It means the item's margin already covers everything, so you could ship free and still profit.
- These are estimates from the rates you entered. Not tax or accounting advice, and your statement is the authority on what you were charged.
Common questions
- Why do you not fill in the eBay or Etsy fee for me?
- Because we are not maintaining a versioned table of marketplace rates, and a stale number presented as current would be worse than an empty box. Your own statement has the rate you are actually paying.
- Should I include sales tax?
- Normally no. It passes through you to the state. The option exists for the cases where a seller genuinely needs the gross figure.
- What is "shipping contribution"?
- What you charged for shipping, minus what shipping actually cost. Positive means it helped; negative means the item's margin is subsidising delivery.
- Are the numbers exact?
- Yes. Everything is held in whole cents and each percentage fee is rounded to the cent once, when it is applied, so the totals reconcile against a payout statement.