Track Profit Margins on Shopify Without a Spreadsheet

Shopify's analytics show you revenue, orders, and sessions. They don't show you profit.

That's a bigger problem than it sounds. Sellers optimize for revenue and miss the fact that some of their best-selling products have margins thin enough to lose money on with a single price change or supplier cost increase.

Tracking your Shopify profit margin per product isn't complicated, but it requires a step Shopify doesn't take for you.

Shopify doesn't track your profit (and that's a problem)

Shopify shows revenue. Revenue is not profit.

Profit = Revenue - Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) Margin % = (Profit / Revenue) x 100

To calculate either of those, you need your cost per unit for every product. Shopify has a "cost per item" field, but it's optional, rarely used by most sellers, and doesn't connect to any profit reporting.

The danger of not knowing your margin: you might be pushing your highest-revenue products while your highest-profit products sit ignored. Volume at thin margins is expensive to run - more customer service, more shipping, more supplier orders, less money left over.

Two products side by side:

• Product A: sells $89.99, costs $32.00. Profit = $57.99. Margin = 64%.
• Product B: sells $24.99, costs $19.00. Profit = $5.99. Margin = 24%.

If Product B sells 3x more units than Product A, it might look like your winner in Shopify analytics. But Product A generates nearly 10x the profit per unit. Without margin data, you'd never know.

The numbers you need for every product

For every SKU, you need four numbers:

1. Selling price - Shopify has this
2. Cost per unit - you have to enter or calculate this
3. Profit per unit = price - cost
4. Margin % = (price - cost) / price x 100

Start with your top 20 products by revenue. Calculate all four numbers for each. You'll often find surprises - products that feel profitable because they sell a lot, but have margins under 25%.

How to calculate COGS for your store

COGS is the total cost of all units sold in a given period.

COGS = Total Units Sold x Cost Per Unit

For a month with 5 products:

Product	Units Sold	Cost/Unit	COGS
Blue Hoodie	120	$18.50	$2,220
Running Shorts	85	$12.00	$1,020
Water Bottle	200	$6.00	$1,200
Yoga Mat	60	$14.00	$840
Foam Roller	45	$9.50	$427.50
Total	510		$5,707.50

If total revenue for those same products was $18,400, your gross profit is $12,692.50 and your overall margin is 69%.

That one calculation - done monthly - tells you whether your business is actually healthy or just busy.

The spreadsheet approach (and why it breaks)

A Google Sheet with columns for product, price, cost, margin, units sold, revenue, COGS, and profit is a reasonable starting point.

It works well for the first month. Then:

• A supplier raises their price and you forget to update the sheet
• You add 8 new products and don't fill in the cost data
• The "units sold" column gets out of sync with Shopify
• Someone makes a copy and edits the wrong version

After 3-4 months, the spreadsheet is partially stale and you're not sure which numbers to trust. Decisions get made on outdated data.

The deeper problem: the spreadsheet isn't connected to your actual sales. You have to manually export data from Shopify and paste it in regularly. That step gets skipped.

What to track beyond basic margin

Once you have per-product margins, three other metrics become useful:

Monthly P&L trend. Revenue vs COGS vs gross profit over time. Is your margin holding steady, expanding, or compressing? If COGS is growing faster than revenue, something changed - supplier cost, product mix, or higher-cost products becoming a larger share of sales.

Profit at risk. Combine margin with inventory data. If one of your highest-margin products is about to stock out, that's more urgent than a stockout on a low-margin product. A 5-day stockout on a $57.99 margin product selling 15/day costs $4,349 in profit - not just revenue. ABC analysis takes this further — combining revenue ranking with margin data tells you which products deserve the highest safety stock investment and the tightest reorder points.

Cost change history. Supplier costs change over time. Tracking when your cost per unit changed and by how much helps you see margin compression before it becomes a problem. Low margin combined with stagnant sales is the clearest signal for dead stock action — products losing you money with every week they sit unsold.

Tools that do this automatically

Spreadsheet (Google Sheets or Excel) - free, manual, breaks over time as described above. Good starting point for stores under 30 products.

TrueProfit / BeProfit - dedicated profit analytics apps. They pull Shopify data, let you enter costs, and show profit dashboards. Good at reporting but don't connect to inventory or stockout risk.

Debnix - built for Shopify sellers who want profit tracking alongside inventory management. Enter your cost per unit, and it calculates margin, daily profit, and monthly P&L automatically. It also shows which high-margin products are approaching stockout - so you can prioritize reorders by profit impact, not just stock count. 30-day free trial, no credit card.

For more on what stockouts cost you in real dollars, see Why Your Shopify Store Keeps Running Out of Stock. And if you're replacing Shopify's discontinued Stocky app, Shopify Stocky Is Gone: What to Use Instead in 2026 has a full comparison.

TL;DR

• Shopify shows revenue, not profit - you have to calculate margin yourself
• Profit per unit = price - cost. Margin % = (price - cost) / price x 100
• Start with your top 20 products by revenue - you'll often find margin surprises
• COGS = units sold x cost per unit. Track this monthly.
• Spreadsheets work initially but break down without a connected data source
• Track margin alongside inventory risk - a stockout on a high-margin product costs far more than one on a low-margin product