Ecommerce Fees Calculator

Ecommerce Fees Are The Number One Hidden Margin Killer

Every ecommerce founder knows they pay fees. What they don't know is how much those fees actually cost them. Platform subscriptions, payment processing, refund fees, app overhead—it all adds up faster than you think, and most founders are underestimating the impact by 30-50%.

Fees don't show up as a single line item. They're scattered across your Shopify bill, your Stripe dashboard, your app subscriptions, and your shipping integrations. By the time you add it all up, you're losing 5-10% of your revenue to fees before you've even accounted for COGS or ad spend.

Platform Fees Clearly Broken Down

Shopify's Basic plan costs $79/month, but that's just the subscription. Every sale adds 2.9% + $0.30 in payment processing fees. On a $50 order, that's $1.75. Sell 1,000 products a month, and you've paid $1,750 in transaction fees alone. Add the subscription, and your platform costs are $1,829 monthly—or 3.7% of $50,000 in revenue.

WooCommerce looks cheaper because the platform itself is free, but you still pay payment processing fees, hosting costs, security, and plugin subscriptions. By the time you're done, the "free" platform often costs more than Shopify once you factor in the time and complexity required to maintain it.

Payment Gateway Fee Structures

Stripe charges 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. PayPal is worse at 3.49% + $0.49. Square matches Stripe at 2.9% + $0.30 but has fewer integrations. These percentages feel small until you scale. At $100K/month in revenue, you're paying $2,900+ in gateway fees alone.

And that's before refunds. When a customer requests a refund, you don't get the processing fee back. That $0.30 fixed fee is gone forever. On a $20 product with a 15% refund rate, you're eating an extra 0.225% of revenue in unrecoverable fees.

How Refunds Compound Fee Losses

Refunds are margin killers for two reasons. First, you lose the revenue. Second, you've already paid the processing fee, and you don't get it back. If you're refunding 15% of orders, you're effectively paying processing fees on 115% of your actual revenue. That's a hidden 0.4-0.6% margin hit that most founders completely miss.

High refund rates compound this problem. A product with a 25% refund rate isn't just losing 25% of its revenue—it's losing 27-28% once you factor in the unrecoverable fees. This is why controlling refunds is a margin lever, not just a customer satisfaction issue.

Why Founders Consistently Underestimate Fees

Fees are invisible until you add them up manually. Your Shopify bill doesn't include Stripe fees. Your Stripe dashboard doesn't show app subscriptions. Your app costs are spread across monthly invoices from six different vendors. Nobody gives you a single number that says "total platform cost," so most founders never calculate it.

This calculator shows you the real number. Once you see it, you'll understand why your profit margins are thinner than expected and why cutting fees by even 1% can add thousands of dollars to your bottom line annually.

Fees Scale Non-Linearly With Order Volume

The more orders you process, the more fees you pay—but not in a straight line. Transaction fees scale linearly with revenue, but fixed costs like subscriptions get diluted as you grow. At 100 orders/month, a $79 subscription is $0.79 per order. At 10,000 orders/month, it's $0.008 per order.

This is why high-volume stores can afford lower margins than low-volume stores. As you scale, your fixed costs become negligible, and your variable costs dominate. Understanding this dynamic helps you make smarter decisions about pricing and profitability at different scales.

Why Real Profit Tracking Matters

Revenue reports don't show fees. Profit reports do. MerchantFlow tracks every fee automatically—platform costs, payment processing, refunds, and more—so you always know your true profit, not your gross revenue. Because revenue is vanity, profit is sanity.