Supplier cost, ad CAC, refund rate, app fees. See your real profit per sale and what you'd take home each month — including the costs most calculators forget.
What you charge the customer at checkout, including any shipping you bill them.
Product cost + supplier shipping to the customer (AliExpress, CJ, Spocket — whatever you pay them).
Total monthly ad spend divided by number of sales. Use a 30-day rolling average.
Shopify Payments / Stripe / PayPal — typically 2.5-3.5%.
Sales that get refunded or charged back. Dropshippers typically run 4-10%.
Shopify subscription + every app you pay for. Easy to undercount — most stores hit 80-200 / mo.
Number of sales you'd realistically hit. Try a few values to see the slope.
Apps + tools ($89.00/month) and refund losses sit outside this bar — they erode the green slice as soon as you scale.
| Sales / month | Monthly profit | Annualized |
|---|---|---|
| 50 | $558 | $6,691 |
| 100 | $1,204 | $14,449 |
| 250 | $3,144 | $37,725 |
| 500 | $6,376 | $76,517 |
| 1,000 | $12,842 | $154,103 |
| Ad CAC | Effective profit / sale | Monthly profit |
|---|---|---|
| $7.00 | $19.93 | $4,894 |
| $10.50 | $16.43 | $4,019 |
| $14.00 | $12.93 | $3,144 |
| $17.50 | $9.43 | $2,269 |
| $21.00 | $5.93 | $1,394 |
Ad CAC drift is the #1 dropshipping killer. iOS 14, audience saturation, creative fatigue — every week your effective CAC creeps up.
Connect Shopify and your ad platforms. Ecom Forward calculates real per-sale and monthly profit from your actual orders, ad spend, and refunds. Built for dropshippers who run multiple stores at once.
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Dropshipping refund rates run 4-10% because shipping windows are long (10-30 days from China), product photos are aspirational, and quality varies. Every refund costs you the FULL sell price, plus the supplier already shipped (so you eat the COGS), plus the ad spend you paid to win that sale, plus the transaction fee Stripe and Shopify often keep on refunds. A 6% refund rate doesn't cut profit by 6% — it cuts it much more, because every refund is a triple-loss.
Most dropshipping stores end up running Shopify + page builder + email + reviews + upsell + currency converter + chat + analytics. The base subscription you remember is rarely the bill you actually pay. Calculators that show "pure" per-sale margin without subtracting fixed monthly tools dramatically overstate take-home at low volume — at 50 sales/month, a $150/mo app stack eats $3 per sale.
"ROAS" looks at revenue per ad dollar — so the same product reads better as a $50 sale at 2× ROAS than a $30 sale at 2× ROAS. But for profitability, what matters is cost per acquired sale(CAC). Two stores with identical ROAS can have wildly different CAC, and CAC is what's actually subtracted from your contribution. This calculator uses CAC because it doesn't lie.
CAC drifts week to week, refund rates spike with seasonality and supplier issues, and AliExpress prices change overnight. Spreadsheets capture a moment; the moment is wrong tomorrow. Ecom Forward recomputes per-sale economics live from real Shopify orders and ad-platform spend across every store you run — so when something drifts, you catch it the next morning instead of the next quarter.