Profit by Product
Profit by Product shows the gross profit each product brought in, after the cost of the goods sold.
How It’s Calculated
The report is a table with one row per product. Rows are listed with the most gross profit first, up to 500 products. Choose a product’s name to open its product page, if your store can open them.
The columns are:
- Product: the product’s title and image from your catalog. A product that’s no longer in your catalog, or an item with no product, shows as Unknown.
- Orders: the number of orders that included the product.
- Units Sold: the number of units sold.
- Net Sales: what the product sold for, after discounts: price times quantity, less the discount on that line. It leaves out returns, shipping and tax.
- COGS: the cost of the goods sold, worked out as quantity × unit cost.
- Gross Profit: Net Sales less COGS.
- Gross Margin: Gross Profit as a share of Net Sales.
- Cost Coverage: the share of the product’s units sold whose variant has a unit cost. A cost of 0 counts as a cost here.
- Units Returned, Return Rate and Kept Profit: the effect of returns, explained below.
A totals row under the table adds up the rows listed, except Units Returned and Cost Coverage, which have no total. An order with 2 products counts in both rows, so the totals can show more orders than you had. Show totals row in the Report settings menu turns it on or off for every report.
Net Sales here means something different from Net Sales in Total Sales. This one is only items less discounts. Gross Profit isn’t reduced by returns, and shipping and tax aren’t part of it.
Unit Costs
COGS uses each product variant’s Cost per item from Shopify. It uses the cost set today, not the cost when the order was placed. A unit whose variant has no cost counts as zero cost, so a low Cost Coverage means Gross Profit and Gross Margin are too high.
Returns Columns
Returns take time to arrive, so these 3 columns count only orders placed more than 90 days ago:
- Units Returned: units refunded, counted against the order they came from, not the day of the refund.
- Return Rate: Units Returned as a share of units sold on those orders. A dash means fewer than 20 units, too few for a rate. It doesn’t mean no returns.
- Kept Profit: the profit on the units customers kept: each line’s net sales less its cost, weighted by the share of its units not returned.
Order lines that don’t record whether they were returned are left out too.
For a date range inside the last 90 days, Units Returned and Kept Profit show 0 and Return Rate shows a dash. For a longer range, they cover only the older orders, so don’t compare Kept Profit with Gross Profit in the same row.
What Counts
- Orders count on the day they were processed, in your store’s time zone.
- Canceled orders, and orders whose payment was voided or expired, are left out.
- Sales Channel, Segment and Filters narrow the report. There’s no comparison period.
What Good Looks Like
Check that your best sellers are also your most profitable ones.
- Cost Coverage is near 100%. Where it isn’t, the row’s profit is overstated.
- Margin matches what you intended. A top seller with a thin margin is worth a price or cost review.
- Return Rate is low on your high-profit products. A high return rate takes back the profit the row shows.
What to Do About It
- Fill in missing costs. Open Unit Cost Coverage to find products with no cost, then set Cost per item for them in Shopify.
- Push the winners. Feature the products with a high gross profit and a low return rate in your ads, emails and collections.
- Review the thin ones. Raise the price, lower the cost or stop discounting a high-volume product with a low margin.
- Look at returns. Product Return & Kept Rate shows which products come back most.
Get AI Insight at the top of the report asks Copilot for a short read of it.
Where to Find It
- Profit by Product: open Reports and look under Profitability.
- Profit & Margin: gross profit and margin over time.
- Product Detail: one product’s sales, margin and returns on its own page.