Where a shop's money goes each month, and how to find out

A shop's money goes to seven places: platform fees, shipping labels, materials, packaging, ads, refunds, and subscriptions or apps. To find out where yours goes, add up each one for the same month and set the total against your sales. Your platform's reports hold most of these numbers. Materials and packaging come from your own receipts.

The seven costs to add up

1. Platform fees: listing, transaction and payment processing fees on Etsy; card fees and the plan on Shopify; referral, fulfillment and plan fees on Amazon.
2. Shipping labels, and any carrier adjustments or insurance on them.
3. Materials or product cost: what goes into each item you sold.
4. Packaging: mailers, boxes, tissue, tape, cards.
5. Ads: Etsy Ads and Offsite Ads, or ads on Meta, Google, TikTok or Amazon.
6. Refunds: the money returned, plus the label, item and packaging you don't get back.
7. Subscriptions and apps: a selling plan, apps, design or label software.

Pick one full month and use the same dates for every number. A month that mixes dates will look better or worse than it was.

Where to find each number on Etsy

Open Shop Manager, choose Finances, then Payment account. Etsy's help page on managing your Payment account says the Activity summary there shows separate totals for sales, shipping label purchases, refunds you issued, sales tax paid by buyers, fees and credits from Etsy. A time range menu lets you pick the month.

• Fees: under Sales and fees, by fee type: listing, transaction, processing and deposit fees, with fee credits shown under each.
• Ads: under Marketing, which holds Etsy Ads and Offsite Ads.
• Labels: under Shipping, for labels bought on Etsy, with carrier adjustments and shipping insurance.
• Refunds: under Sales and fees.
• The full month: Monthly statements give a breakdown of sales and fees, and you can download one as a CSV file for a spreadsheet.

Etsy's Activity summary also shows a Net profit line. Etsy describes it as sales minus refunds, fees, shipping costs and taxes. Materials, packaging and labels bought outside Etsy aren't on that list.

Where to find each number in the Shopify admin

On Shopify the costs sit in two places: your payouts and your Shopify bill.

• Card fees, refunds and chargebacks: go to Finance, then Documents, then the Shopify Payments activity report. It shows the fees taken from your balance, refunds, disputes and payouts for the dates you choose.
• The plan, apps, labels and third-party transaction fees: go to Settings, then Billing. Shopify's page on the charges on your bill lists four sections: Subscription, Apps, Shipping and Transaction fees. Shopify Payments card fees aren't on the bill; they come out of payouts.
• Labels by order: open a bill and its Shipping section, as Shopify's help on label billing describes.
• Product cost: under Analytics, then Reports, filtered to Finances, the Finance Summary has a gross profit breakdown. It only counts sales where a product cost is recorded.
• Ads: on the bills from Meta, Google, TikTok or whichever ad company you use.

Where to find each number in Seller Central

Amazon's selling cost page names the main charges: a selling plan ($39.99 a month for Professional, or $0.99 per item sold on Individual), referral fees by category, fulfillment fees if you use Fulfillment by Amazon, and optional costs such as advertising.

To see a month in one place, a post by Jessica_Amazon_ on Amazon's Seller Forums points to Date Range reports: from the Payments menu, choose Reports Repository. The Summary report is a PDF with your income, expenses, taxes and fund transfers for the dates you pick. The Transaction report is a CSV of each transaction.

Amazon groups these reports by the date money posted to your account, not the order date, so a month's report won't match a month of orders exactly. If the menu path differs in your account, search Seller Central's help for Date Range reports.

A worked month for an example shop

Here is one made-up Etsy shop, worked out by the site's check-up. It sells 100 orders a month of a $30 item with $5 shipping. Materials cost $8, packaging $1.50 and the label $7. It has passed Etsy's $10,000 line, so Offsite Ads charge 12% on the orders they bring, about 10% of sales here. It spends $300 a month on Etsy Ads at a ROAS of 1.5, and refunds 3 orders a month where the buyer keeps the item.

Over the month, that's about $3,500 in sales and about $1,072 kept, before the owner pays themselves. The month figure also takes off the cost of the three refunds. The check-up grades this shop Needs work: about $561 a month is lost to three costs.

• A shipping gap of about $350 a month: each order costs $8.50 to ship and pack, and the buyer pays $5.00.
• Ads that don't pay back, about $111 a month: at this shop's numbers, Etsy Ads pay back only from a ROAS of 2.38.
• Refunds, about $59 a month: each one costs about $19.50 that Etsy doesn't give back.

None of these three shows up as a single line in Etsy's reports. The shipping gap needs the label and the packaging set against what buyers pay. The ads need your margin. That's why adding the seven costs yourself, or with a tool that does it for you, finds what a statement alone won't. The shipping and ads fixes are worth their figures at the shop's numbers, if orders hold; the refunds figure is what refunds cost, not what a fix is sure to save. For one cost at a time, see the shipping calculator or the ads break-even calculator.

If you'd like your own numbers, the check-up is free and takes about a minute, for Etsy, Shopify or Amazon. You don't sign in or connect your shop.