Find out if your product price actually covers every cost — or if you're quietly losing money on each sale.
Transaction fee: 2.9% + $0.30 per order
Used to allocate Shopify subscription cost
Ad spend per acquired customer
Most DTC founders price by gut feeling. They look at a competitor charging $45, pick something close, and hope for the best. The problem? That competitor might have half your shipping costs, triple your volume, or a completely different ad strategy. Copying their price without matching their cost structure is how you quietly lose money on every sale for months before the bank account tells the story.
When you sell DTC through your own Shopify store, you absorb every cost that retailers and marketplaces would otherwise handle:
Your price needs to cover all of it and still leave room for profit. The fix is straightforward: start with your actual costs, layer in your target margin, and let the math tell you where your price should land. This calculator does exactly that, factoring in every cost line item that matters for a Shopify-based DTC brand.
Your price is too low. If that stings, you are in good company -- it is the single most common problem we see with DTC brands selling through Shopify in Southeast Asia and globally. Here is why: there are three core pricing approaches:
Most successful DTC brands use a hybrid: they calculate their cost floor with cost-plus logic, then adjust upward based on brand positioning.
But here is the part most founders miss. Your price must be high enough to sustain profitable customer acquisition. If you cannot afford to spend on ads at your current price and still make money, the price is wrong. Your price, your margins, and your ad budget are all interconnected -- and getting them aligned from day one determines whether your brand can scale or stalls at $10k/month forever.
Here is where it gets interesting. Cost-plus pricing is the safer model: add up all your costs and apply a markup. If your total cost is $20 and you want a 50% margin, you sell at $40. You are guaranteed profit on every sale, which is why this calculator uses it as your baseline.
But cost-plus has a blind spot -- it ignores what your customers are actually willing to pay. A product that costs $10 to make might be worth $80 to your target customer if the branding, quality, and unboxing experience justify the premium. That is value-based pricing, and it captures the upside that cost-plus leaves on the table.
The smartest DTC brands combine both. They use cost-plus to establish a minimum viable price -- the floor below which they lose money. Then they test higher price points to find the ceiling their market will bear. The gap between your cost-plus floor and your value-based ceiling? That is where brand building, storytelling, and customer experience create real profit. If your cost-plus price is $40 but customers happily pay $65, that extra $25 per unit is the return on your investment in brand. Use the recommended retail price from this calculator as your starting point, then experiment upward.
These five mistakes drain DTC profit margins every single day. If even one sounds familiar, you are leaving money on the table:
The underlying principle is simple: know your numbers before you set your price. This calculator makes sure you account for every cost that impacts your bottom line, so you price with data instead of guesswork.
Add up every per-unit cost: COGS, shipping, packaging, transaction fees, and customer acquisition cost if you run paid ads. Then apply your target profit margin. For DTC brands, 50-70% gross margin is the typical range. The formula is: Retail Price = Total Costs / (1 - Target Margin % - Transaction Fee %). This solves the circular problem where Shopify fees are a percentage of the price itself. Skip this step and you are pricing blind.
Aim for 50-70% gross margin. That range gives you enough room to cover customer acquisition costs, operational overhead, and still generate real profit. If you are spending heavily on ads (most DTC brands are), push toward 60-70%. Brands with strong organic traffic or high repeat purchase rates can work with 40-50%. Below 40%, running profitable paid advertising becomes nearly impossible because there is not enough margin left to absorb the cost of acquiring each customer.
Yes -- this is non-negotiable if you run paid ads. Your customer acquisition cost is a real cost of every sale, not an afterthought. If you cannot profitably acquire customers at your selling price, the price is wrong. Many brands discover they need to raise prices by $5-$15 once they account for the $15-$30 they spend acquiring each customer through Meta, Google, or TikTok ads. Better to find that out now than after 1,000 unprofitable orders.
More than you think. Shopify charges 2.9% + $0.30 per order on Basic, 2.6% + $0.30 on Shopify, and 2.4% + $0.30 on Advanced. On a $40 product, that is $1.26 to $1.46 per transaction. Sell 500 orders a month and you are paying $630-$730 in fees alone. Then add your monthly subscription ($39-$399) spread across your units. This calculator factors in both so you see the true per-unit platform cost.
They sound similar but produce very different numbers. Markup is the percentage you add on top of cost. Margin is the percentage of the selling price that is profit. A 100% markup on a $20 cost gives you a $40 price -- but the margin is only 50% (because $20 profit is half of $40). A 50% markup gives you a $30 price with just 33% margin. DTC brands use margin, not markup, because it directly shows how much of every revenue dollar is profit. When someone asks your margins, they mean margin.
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