Are you losing money on shipping? Check charged vs paid in Shopify

Where shipping charged lives, and where label cost lives

• Shipping charged: Analytics > Reports, in the sales reports, as shipping charges for the date range you pick. It is not inside net sales.
• Label cost: Settings > Billing, on your bills. Shopify says the Shipping section shows labels you bought and label adjustments in the billing cycle, and that per-use charges such as labels come on a separate bill.

Our reasoning on the catch: the two use different dates. Sales reports date shipping charged by the order; a bill dates a label by when it was bought or adjusted. Pull a full month of each, and expect a few labels at the edges to belong to the month before or after.

Sources: Shopify Help Center: Types of charges on your bill · Shopify Help Center: Analytics data points (fields) reference · Shopify Help Center: Buying shipping labels

What the label lines miss

• Return labels. Shopify charges them only after the carrier scans the package, and the charge might not appear immediately, so a return can land on a later bill than the order it belongs to.
• Voids and adjustments. You can void a label you no longer need, and the bill shows label adjustments. Shopify's pages we read do not say when a void is credited, so look for each void and adjustment on the bill rather than assuming it.
• Labels bought outside Shopify. Our reasoning: a label bought in a carrier account or a separate shipping app is not on the Shopify bill at all. Add that invoice, or the comparison reads better than it is.

Source: Shopify Help Center: Buying return labels

Join the two by order number

For a cost per order, export your orders (each row carries the order number and its shipping charged) and match each label to its order. Orders with a label and no shipping charged are your free-shipping orders; orders with shipping charged below their label are the ones losing money on shipping. Which columns the orders export carries is on the orders export, column by column.

A worked example (SAMPLE NUMBERS)

What the free-shipping threshold costs

In the sample, labels average $9.00 ($21,600 over 2,400 orders). At that average, the 1,500 free orders cost -$13,500 in labels with nothing charged, while the 900 paid orders net $1,700. The two add up to the -$11,800 above. Our reasoning: the threshold pays only if it lifts order value, across the orders that qualify, by more than $13,500 of margin. Your own export gives the real split, label by label.

Fixes, ranked by dollars

1. Price the threshold against the label cost it gives away (in the sample, $13,500).
2. Fix the orders where shipping charged sits below the label: rates by weight or zone that undercharge.
3. Check voids and adjustments on the bill: labels bought and never used, and weight corrections.
4. Add labels bought outside Shopify, so the comparison covers every package.

Why your Net Sales can read differently in a profit app over shipping is on the shipping cause. Where Shopify's other fees sit is on where to find your Shopify fees, and how a missing cost changes a profit report is on profit reports missing costs. How ProfitRoot handles it is on how it's different.

Common questions

What this does not tell you

This compares shipping charged with label cost only. It leaves out packaging, pick-and-pack labour and any third-party fulfilment fees, which belong in the same question but are not on the Shopify bill.

The lines marked as our reasoning are not Shopify statements. The worked example uses SAMPLE NUMBERS, not a real store, and assumes every label cost the period's average.