A simple profit check for sellers who don't want a spreadsheet

You can check your profit without keeping a big spreadsheet. The fair options are a short monthly sheet, a tracker that connects to your shop such as ProfitTree, eRank's profit calculator, Etsy's own Stats for sales, or a one-time check-up like ours. Which one fits depends on whether you want an answer once or a number every month.

Why profit is hard to see

Profit is what's left of an order after every cost, and the costs live in different places. Platform fees sit in a monthly statement. Shipping labels sit in your label history. Materials and packaging sit in receipts. Ad spend sits on the ads page. A spreadsheet feels like work because it is the job of bringing those together. Each option below does some of that job for you.

Option 1: a short spreadsheet

If you keep one, keep it small. One row per month is enough for most small shops; you don't need a row for every order. These columns cover the main costs:

• Month, and orders that month
• Sales, including the shipping buyers paid
• Platform fees and taxes, from the monthly statement
• Offsite Ads fees, if you pay them
• Ad spend
• Shipping labels
• Materials and packaging
• Refunds
• Kept: sales minus every cost column

On Etsy, the fees come from Shop Manager, then Finances, then Monthly statements, where you can generate a CSV file of the month (Etsy Help). It suits sellers who like seeing every number and can spare half an hour a month. It costs nothing, but it only works if you keep it up.

Option 2: a tracker that connects to your shop

ProfitTree connects to an Etsy shop and says it works out profit after Etsy fees, advertising, shipping, discounts and product costs, by order, product and shop. Its pricing page lists a free plan with one Etsy shop, 200 credits a week and the last 7 days of history, and paid plans at $5.99, $17.99 and $29.99 a month. It suits Etsy sellers who want profit tracked for them and are comfortable connecting their shop, including print-on-demand sellers, since it can sync Printify and Printful costs. The free plan's 7 days of history is short if you want to see whole months.

Option 3: a calculator inside a tool you may already use

eRank is a shop research and keyword tool. Its Profit Calculator sits under Tools, then Calculators, and its help page says it is available to all eRank members. You type one item's price, shipping, tax and discount, then labor, materials, shipping cost, Etsy Ads, renewal and Offsite Ads, and it shows estimated profit and margin with each fee. The eRank pricing page lists a free plan (5 keyword lookups a day, 1 shop, 50 listings) and paid plans at $5.99, $9.99 and $29.99 a month. It suits sellers who already use eRank and want a quick check on one item at a time.

Option 4: the stats you already have

Etsy's Stats, in Shop Manager, show visits, orders, conversion rate and revenue for any period, and how shoppers found you, including Etsy Ads and Offsite Ads (Etsy Help). They don't list your costs, so revenue there is sales, not profit. Stats suit everyone for traffic and sales; for profit, pair them with one of the other options.

Option 5: a one-time profit check-up

Our free check-up asks 7 questions you can answer from memory: orders a month, item price, materials, the shipping buyers pay, the label cost, whether the shop has passed $10,000 in sales, and ads. There is no login, no shop connection and no spreadsheet. It shows a grade in words, what each order and each month keeps, and your three biggest losses, each with its fix and what the fix is worth at your numbers, if orders hold. For a single question there are free calculators, such as Etsy fees, the shipping gap and price for a margin.

The check-up grades this shop Watch: about $86 a month is lost at these numbers, about $1,026 a year. Most of it is shipping. Each order costs about $7.00 to ship and the buyer pays $4.00, so about $3.00 an order goes missing, about $75 a month. Raising the item price from $24.00 to about $27.37 and keeping shipping at $4.00 would keep about $75 more a month, if orders hold; orders could fall by about 21% before that fix leaves the shop worse off. The rest is Offsite Ads fees not priced in, about $11 a month.

A spreadsheet would hold the same gap, but only if the label column and the shipping column sat side by side and you compared them per order. The check-up does that comparison for you. It doesn't track month to month: run it again when your prices, shipping or ads change.

The options side by side

Which one to pick

• If you want a number every month without typing, a connected tracker such as ProfitTree fits.
• If you want to price one new item, a per-item calculator fits: eRank's, or our price for a margin calculator.
• If you like control and don't mind half an hour a month, a short spreadsheet fits.
• If you want to know today where the money goes and what to fix first, a one-time check-up fits.

These aren't either-or. Many sellers run a check-up once to find the big losses, then keep a short sheet or a tracker to watch the lines that mattered.

If you'd like your own numbers, the free check-up takes 7 questions and a few minutes. If you want more after it, the profit report and full audit are paid once, with a refund for any reason within 14 days.