Shopify fee & profit calculator

A fee number is only as good as the constants beneath it. This guide sits below the fee and profit calculator with one job: showing where each figure comes from, and where the arithmetic stops matching a real British shop. Still choosing software? Start with what Shopify is and how it works in the UK, then the full walkthrough in Setting up a Shopify shop in the UK: the full guide.

What it computes

This is for a UK seller working out what a sale actually leaves behind. The calculator splits the payment fee in two: a card percentage of the price, plus a fixed amount per order. On Shopify Payments that is the whole charge. On a third-party gateway, Shopify adds its own surcharge.

From those parts it builds the breakdown: fee per sale, net per sale, and margin once your product and postage cost comes out. Then net for the month after the plan subscription, and the sales needed to cover it. Product cost is the line that separates turnover from profit.

Our suggested check before trusting any output: price £, product and postage £, sales per month , plan . If one input is a guess, so is the answer.

How it works

The arithmetic is short. Payment fee equals the card percentage of the price plus the fixed amount: 2% plus 25p on Basic, 1.7% plus 25p on Grow, 1.5% plus 25p on Advanced. Those rates, and the plan prices of £25, £65 and £344 a month on monthly billing, come from Shopify's UK pricing page, checked on 9 September 2026, in pounds sterling.

Add a third-party gateway and two things change. The fee now uses the gateway's own rate and fixed amount, and Shopify levies its surcharge: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced. Staying on Shopify Payments keeps the surcharge at zero, the cheapest route on every plan, as our Shopify Payments guide explains.

The rest is subtraction. Net per sale is price minus fees; margin removes your cost. Monthly net is margin times sales, less the plan. Break-even sales are the plan divided by the margin, rounded up. The plan trade-offs get a longer hearing in Shopify plans compared for a UK shop.

Examples

Three baskets, on the published rates.

A £50 order costing £20 to fulfil, the £20 covering product and postage, on Basic with Shopify Payments, 50 sales a month. The card fee is £1.25: 2% of £50 plus the 25p fixed amount. Net per sale is £48.75, margin £28.75. One sale covers the plan; the month closes £1,412.50 net.

The same order paid by PayPal at 3.4% plus 35p. The payment fee climbs to £2.05, and the 2% surcharge takes another £1.00. Net per sale falls to £46.95 — £1.80 gone on an identical basket, purely for the route the money took.

A £120 order costing £45, Grow plan, 120 sales a month. The fee is £2.29 (1.7% plus 25p), net per sale £117.71, margin £72.71. One sale covers the plan; 120 close the month £8,660.20 net.

Limits

The constants cover standard online card rates on monthly billing, and nothing else. American Express, non-UK cards and in-person sales carry their own published rates. Annual billing drops the plans to £19, £49 and £259 a month; our guide to what Shopify costs per month in the UK sets out the full bill.

VAT, refunds and any postage you charge the customer sit outside the formula; the cost field carries your own outlay. Read every output as VAT-exclusive, and see our VAT guide for the registration side. Paid apps are not subtracted either, so add their subscriptions yourself.

The fixed 25p bites small baskets hardest: 5% of a £5 sale, but 0.2% at £120. Think before passing fees on through higher prices. The Baymard Institute's 2026 checkout research found 40% of US online shoppers abandon a cart because extra costs are too high. Sales into the EU raise questions this tool cannot answer; the European Commission's One Stop Shop guidance (2021) sets a €10,000 threshold for distance sales of goods within the EU.

Our take: the plan choice is quieter arithmetic than it looks. On the published rates, Grow's 0.3-point card saving covers its extra £40 a month once online sales pass roughly £13,300. Below that line, Basic is the rational default. The louder lever is the gateway: at that volume a 2% surcharge costs £266 a month, more than the whole Basic-to-Grow plan gap.