How to Enter Your Costs

At the end of these steps, the P&L will take off the costs Shopify doesn’t know about: shipping, payment fees, handling and your other expenses. Each one shows on the P&L as an estimate you entered, separate from your Shopify figures.

Before You Start

• Work out your averages first: what you pay to ship one order, your payment processor’s fee, and what picking and packing one order costs.
• Enter amounts in your store’s currency.
• Product costs aren’t entered here. The P&L takes them from the Cost per item field on each product in Shopify.

Anyone on your team can enter or change these costs. They apply to the whole store.

Steps

Per-Order Costs

1. Open Costs, under Settings in the navigation.
2. Under Per-Order Costs, set the Start Date. These costs apply to orders processed on or after it, in your store’s time zone. Earlier orders carry none of them. Until you first save, it’s today.
3. For Shipping, choose a Shipping Cost Type: Amount per Order, or Percent of Product Revenue.
4. Enter the shipping amount or percentage.
5. For Payment Fees, enter the Fee Percentage and the Fixed Fee per Order. For example, 2.9 and 0.30.
6. For Handling, enter the Handling Cost per Order.
7. Choose Save Costs.

Leave a field blank if it doesn’t apply. A blank field shows as Not entered on the P&L, which is different from entering 0.

Other Expenses

1. Under Other Expenses, choose Add Expense.
2. Enter a Name, such as Agency retainer.
3. Choose a Frequency: Monthly or One-Off.
4. Enter the Amount per Month, or the Amount for a one-off.
5. Set the Start Date, or the Date for a one-off. For a monthly expense that has stopped, also set an End Date.
6. Check Count as Ad Spend if it’s a marketing cost, such as an agency fee or an influencer payment.
7. Choose Add.

What Happens Next

The P&L shows each cost in its Costs You Entered row and takes them off below gross profit, so Contribution Profit includes them. Gross Profit and Gross Margin don’t change.

How each cost is worked out:

• Shipping is charged to every order. As a percentage, it’s a share of the order’s product revenue after discounts, before shipping and tax.
• Payment Fees are the percentage of each order’s total price, plus the fixed fee.
• Handling is charged to every order.
• A monthly expense is spread evenly across the days of each month, so a date range that starts mid-month carries only its share.
• A one-off expense lands whole on its date.

Refunds don’t give back shipping, payment fees or handling: the costs stay on the order, the way carriers and payment processors charge them.

An expense marked Count as Ad Spend is added to Ad Spend instead of Other Expenses. That means it also lowers MER and Contribution Profit, and the Ad Spend card says how much of it you entered.

Changing a figure later recalculates every period it covers, including past ones. To change or remove an expense, use the edit or delete icon on its row.

Every expense you add, change or delete is listed in the Audit Log, with who made it and when.

The Contribution After Ad Spend report also shows the costs you entered, as a separate estimate beside its own figures.