The exact ROAS your ads must hit just to cover variable costs. Below this number, every conversion loses money — no matter what your ad platform tells you.
What a typical order rings up — Shopify revenue divided by order count.
What you pay your supplier for the products in a typical order.
Carrier cost minus what you charge the customer.
Shopify Payments / Stripe / PayPal — typically 2.5-3.5%.
Pick & pack labor, packaging, returns processing — anything that scales 1-for-1 with order count.
| ROAS | Ad spend / order | Profit / order | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1.50× | $43.33 | -$7.72 | Losing money — ad spend eats the contribution |
| 2.00× | $32.50 | $3.12 | Profitable — keeps the contribution after ads |
| 2.50× | $26.00 | $9.62 | Profitable — keeps the contribution after ads |
| 3.00× | $21.67 | $13.95 | Profitable — keeps the contribution after ads |
| 4.00× | $16.25 | $19.37 | Profitable — keeps the contribution after ads |
| 5.00× | $13.00 | $22.62 | Profitable — keeps the contribution after ads |
| AOV | Contribution / order | Break-even ROAS |
|---|---|---|
| $45.50 | $16.68 | 2.73× |
| $55.25 | $26.15 | 2.11× |
| $65.00 | $35.62 | 1.83× |
| $74.75 | $45.08 | 1.66× |
| $84.50 | $54.55 | 1.55× |
Every $5 you raise AOV (cross-sell, bundle, free-shipping threshold) drops your break-even ROAS — sometimes dramatically.
Connect your Shopify and ad platforms. Ecom Forward computes your actual contribution margin and break-even ROAS from real orders, real refunds, and real ad spend — updated daily, across every store you run.
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Break-even ROAS = AOV ÷ contribution per order. Contribution per order is what's left after COGS, shipping, transaction fees, and other variable costs. If your contribution per order is $25 on a $65 AOV, you need $65 ÷ $25 = 2.6× ROAS just to cover the ad spend. Anything below 2.6× and you're paying to acquire customers at a loss.
Meta and Google know your ad spend and the revenue Shopify reports back via pixel. They have no idea what your COGS is, what your supplier charges, what shipping costs you, or which orders got refunded. So they show you a "ROAS" — revenue divided by ad spend — that looks fine even when you're losing money on every order. The 3× ROAS your ad manager reports could mean a 50% profit if your CM% is 60%, or a $10/order loss if your CM% is 25%.
Three levers, in order of difficulty: (1) raise AOV (cross-sell, bundle, free-shipping threshold) — usually the fastest. (2) cut COGS (negotiate supplier tier breaks, switch SKUs) — slower but durable. (3)reduce per-order cost: cheaper packaging, smaller dimensional weight, automated pick & pack. Use the AOV sensitivity table above to model lever 1 in real time.
Real businesses have AOVs that drift, ad spend that's lumpy, refunds that lag, and COGS that varies by SKU. Ecom Forward calculates your live break-even ROAS from real orders and real ad spend, daily — and shows you the gap between your actual ROAS and your break-even on every Shopify store you run, in one dashboard.