When starting a dropshipping business, the goal is to make money, right? So, why does it often feel like the more sales you make, the more you struggle? If you’ve found yourself in this situation, you’re not alone. Many dropshippers fail to account for all the costs associated with selling online. As a result, they make quick sales only to discover they’re losing money. Understanding what a good profit margin for dropshipping is and how to set and achieve one can help you overcome the challenges of running a dropshipping business and pave the way for sustainable growth.
Shophunter's Shopify sales tracker can help you achieve your objectives to understand how to find dropshipping products with a profitable margin, enabling sustainable growth and long-term success in your dropshipping business.
Why is Analyzing Dropshipping Profit Margins Important?
Understanding profit margins is essential for dropshipping businesses. Profit margins directly impact a business's sustainability and growth. With sufficient profit margins, a drop shipping business can pay to operate and grow.
Increasing product prices without upsetting customers is crucial for any successful online store. Product prices should always be higher than the cost of production, but that’s not all there is to it. Increasing profit requires some calculation.
How to Calculate Your Dropshipping Profit Margin and Identify Cost Drivers
Learning how to calculate your store’s profit margin and net income will help you:
Stay informed
Respond to changes in a niche market
Optimize your pricing strategy
Actively monitor your management expenses
To start, you’ll need an excellent dropshipping profit margin range to find the most profitable products to sell. From this, you’ll be able to see what is costing you the most money (or not making enough of it).
Key Profit Margin Metrics for a Dropshipping Business
Let’s take a closer look at some key profit margin metrics that you should keep track of when analyzing your expenses and net profit.
Cost of Goods Sold (COGS)
The cost of goods sold (COGS) is a significant expense for dropshipping stores and crucial for any profit margin calculation. Shopify and other eCommerce website hosts have built-in cost-per-product sections that you can use to track your COGS automatically.
The cost of goods sold is based on how much it costs to manufacture the products before an order is delivered. This can include:
Material costs
Production expenses
Fulfillment costs
Other services that enable manufacturing
COGS in dropshipping can differ if you sell ready-made wholesale products or apply prints on custom product blanks.
Comparing Profit Margins: Retail vs. Dropshipping and What to Aim For
To illustrate:
In typical retail, a profit margin of at least 50% is desirable because you must buy more inventory to replace what you sell.
Dropshipping depends more on your COGS (Costs of Goods Sold, i.e., how much you spend to make your sales) and how often you make a sale. You can survive or even thrive with a gross profit margin of at least 15% to 20%, and anything over that would be considered healthy.
Understanding Cost Structures and Gross Margins in Dropshipping Pricing
Now, if your product costs $10 and you spend $5 to make a sale (the average for ad creative + distribution + labor), and you have to buy the product for $4, that would be too thin a gross margin to work with. If you're selling a $10 product, you want to keep your total costs at around $5 or less, but you could survive with total expenses of up to $8.50 as long as there is considerable volume in the sales.
If you sell a product for $10 and your average gross margin is 35%, your total cost to make the sale is about $6.50, and your profit is about $3.50. That is a decent profit.
One tip: If you have low sales (as most beginners do), make sure you include your website hosting fees, domain, etc., in your COGS and average them across all sales.
Breaking Even: Managing Startup Costs and Profitability in Dropshipping
Let's say you are using the Basic $39 / month Shopify plan, you have a domain from GoDaddy, which is $19.99 / year, and you are selling a $10 product. When you make your first sale, I will spend $100 on ad creative + management and $2 on advertising.
The COGS of your first sale would be high, at $160.99, which is all you need to make $10. You have to keep selling and make enough to break even before you make a profit, including everything required to run the business.
Scaling Sales and Adjusting COGS: Managing Costs at Low and High Volumes
If I made 1,000 sales of my $10 product (at the same ad spend to close the deal above), my total cost would be $2,158.99 (if the sales happened in one month), and my COGS would be $2.16.
The sunk and required costs can be added to your monthly cost baseline. Once you routinely grow beyond this, you can calculate COGS without them, but at a low sales volume, it helps to keep these included to ensure you remember these overhead costs.
Shipping Costs
Shipping costs are the next necessary expense after manufacturing. These can be highly variable and depend on the supplier you’ve paid to ship your orders at any given time.
The costs for shipping are based on multiple crucial steps in dropshipping, which rise in expense depending on your level of customization and branding. This includes:
Custom labels
Packaging
The delivery estimates made by the shipping provider
Optimizing Shipping Costs with Printify for Dropshipping Success
With Printify, shipping costs are calculated separately for all dropshipping products and subtracted from the total revenue after a sale. You can lower shipping costs by choosing Print Providers locally or as close to your customer’s location.
Average Order Value (AOV)
One way to increase your average dropshipping profit margin is to raise your average order value (AOV), another formula-based metric that calculates each customer’s average spending on your store. To calculate AOV, divide the number of orders made at your store by the total revenue of all sales, which is usually counted in monthly intervals.
Average order value = Total revenue / Number of orders
The average order value will depend on the types of products you sell. For example, a store that sells stickers will have a much lower AOV than a store that sells custom sneakers.
Conversion Rate
Ecommerce conversion rates show the percentage of people who, having visited your store, actually buy something. Your conversion rate likely rests at a single-digit percentage point since a reasonable ecommerce conversion rate stands between 2.5% and 3%.
To calculate your dropshipping store's conversion rate, divide the number of orders by the number of unique store visitors.
Conversion rate = Number of orders / Number of unique visitors
Boosting Conversion Rates: SEO, Dynamic Content, and Effective Outreach for Dropshipping
Conversion rates can increase your profit margin for dropshipping, but some products do not have the same rate as others. You can increase the number of unique user sessions by improving the click-through rate through search engine optimization (SEO) and dynamic content marketing and maintaining frequent advertising and outreach campaigns.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
After AOV, we can move on to more long-term metrics to help you predict future revenue. Customer lifetime value measures each customer's average revenue while shopping in your store.
Because of its long-term nature, customer lifetime value is highly unpredictable. Therefore, you’ll have to make some informed guesses about the likelihood that your buyers will shop again.
Calculating Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) to Drive Dropshipping Growth
To calculate your dropshipping store CLV, multiply your previously calculated average order value by the number of individual customer transactions per month, then multiply by a retention period. The latter variable refers to the period you predict a customer will revisit your store.
Customer lifetime value = Average order value * Number of monthly transactions * Retention period
Predicting Customer Retention: Using Engagement Metrics to Forecast CLV
There are ways to predict customer retention, for instance, by seeing how many previous buyers have subscribed to your:
Newsletter
Participated in social media posts
Used previous coupon codes or deals
Depending on the goods you sell, CLV can decrease or increase depending on whether a single product from your store fulfills customers' needs. This is why product diversity is crucial.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
Naturally, attracting new customers should be a prime focus if you want to increase market demand. Customer acquisition costs are the money you spend to attract more buyers, usually through:
Advertising
Marketing
Content-related efforts
Calculating Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and Its Impact on Profitability
To calculate your CAC, you must sum up all your marketing/advertising expenses and divide that by the number of new customers acquired in that marketing cycle.
Customer acquisition cost = Total marketing expenses / Number of new customers
If your customer lifetime value exceeds the cost of gaining more customers, your average net profit will likely increase throughout your marketing efforts.
Refund Rate
We can’t forget that often teeth-grinding process of handing out refunds to unhappy customers. Decentralized dropshipping can invariably cause you to send items back, whether it’s a:
Supply chain issue
Product quality
Customer-related problem
Managing Refund Rates: How to Minimize Returns and Protect Profit Margins
To calculate your refund rate, the percentage of orders sent back. You divide the refunds by the total number of orders made during a specific period.
Refund rate = Number of refunds / Number of orders
High refund rates will likely result in a much lower profit margin, especially in dropshipping. It’s crucial to vet your suppliers and critique the product I’m selling personally, ensuring that the item quality meets my store's and customers' standards.
How to Calculate Dropshipping Profit Margins
Two different profit margins measure the efficiency and growth of dropshipping businesses: gross and net profit margins.
Gross Profit Margin Formula
The gross profit margin shows the income you receive when subtracting production costs from the product’s total revenue or sales price. The profit you make from a single sold product is surprisingly easy to calculate.
Understanding Gross Profit and Gross Profit Margin: Key Metrics for Dropshipping Success
You need to calculate your gross profit. Take the selling price (total revenue) and subtract the wholesale buying price, also known as the costs of goods sold (COGS). This is your entire production expenses.
Gross profit = Total revenue – COGS
To calculate the gross profit margin, divide the gross profit by total revenue.
Gross profit margin = Gross profit / Total revenue
Calculating Gross Profit and Gross Profit Margin: A Step-by-Step Guide for Dropshipping
For example, your dropshipping store earns $60,000 in monthly sales. The dropshipping supplier you work with requires $25,000 as COGS, which covers expenses for all products sold.
Using the first formula, we calculate your gross profit of $35,000. Using the second formula makes your gross profit margin the difference between gross profit and total revenue, or 0.42. Turning that into a percentage, your gross profit margin would be 42%. That’s all there is to it.
Net Profit Margin Formula
Net profit margins consider the product’s price and all other dropshipping costs from running your business. This is a more holistic way of reviewing your sales expenses and is good practice to take all my gains and losses into account.
Expenses outside of production costs may include:
Advertising expenses
Taxes and sales policies
Website hosting costs
Account subscriptions
Transaction fees
Shipping fees
Electricity, internet, etc.
Calculating Net Profit: Understanding True Profit After Expenses in Dropshipping
To begin the calculation, take your total revenue from sales minus the cost of goods sold and all other expenses, like the ones listed above. This will equal a net profit, or how much money you get after all other costs are paid – your actual profit.
Net profit = Total revenue – COGS – All other expenses
Calculating Net Profit Margin: Measuring Your Store’s Efficiency in Converting Sales to Profit
Now that you have the net profit, you can divide it by the total sales revenue and get a net profit margin that shows how well your store is turning sales into tangible income.
Net profit margin = Net profit / Total revenue
From Gross Profit to Net Profit: Incorporating Business Expenses for a Clearer Picture
Let’s use the previous example with the same supplier; the only difference is that you add all your other expenses to the gross profit margin calculation.
Your net profit would be $20,000 if you had $60,000 in monthly sales minus the $25,000 in COGS and $15,000 in business expenses.
Maintaining Accurate Net Profit Margins: The Importance of Monitoring Business Fees and Expenses
Divide the net profit of $20,000 by the total revenue of $60,000, and you would get a net profit margin of 0.33. In percentage terms, that would be a net end profit of 33%.
The key to calculating an accurate net profit margin is to keep all business fees and expenses in check, at least monthly.
There is no single answer to this question. The average profit margin for dropshipping depends significantly on the:
Type of business you start
The products you intend to sell
Your expectations
The time you dedicate to this business model
According to sites like Statista, in 2020, the global market value for dropshipping e-commerce was estimated at 128.6 billion U.S. dollars.
Understanding Dropshipping Profit Margins: How They Evolve from Startup to Established Business
The market will grow to 476.1 billion U.S. dollars between 2021 and 2026. This indicates that with the right strategies and planning, we can impact customers’ finances or economic situation. Our average profit margin for dropshipping will not be the same when we start as it will be after running the business for a year. Profit margins can be understood as follows.
Scaling Profits in Dropshipping: From Beginner to Advanced Strategies for Growth
As a beginner, the initial steps of your dropshipping store will yield smaller profits, which will grow consistently over time. On average, you can earn up to $1000 monthly when starting. If you find a winning product, you can make between $500 and $2500 monthly. Another way to increase our average profits is to dropship high-ticket products with higher profit margins.
Once you incorporate different techniques and gain experience as an intermediate dropshipper, the average profits for dropshipping can scale to $1000-$5000 per month. Additionally, by leveraging automation’s benefits in terms of investment and time, you can reach earnings of $10,000 per month. This level of sales is typically seen in businesses that have been operating for more than 6-12 months, with a solid brand establishment and effective marketing strategies.
Staying Motivated in Dropshipping: Overcoming Challenges and Building Long-Term Success
If you’re feeling discouraged and thinking about quitting, don’t! Every beginning has challenges, but the reward always comes after hard work. Dropshipping is not a get-rich-quick scheme, and like any other business model, it requires dedication and persistence. Whether as a full-time venture or a source of passive income through dropshipping automation, you can build a successful long-term business with the right strategies and consistent effort.
Suppose you are genuinely interested in learning, adapting, and understanding the keys to success in dropshipping. In that case, you will probably achieve a good profit in this business, whether you want it as a side job or gradually turn it into your primary source of income.
How Do the Profit Margins for Dropshipping Vary by Platform?
Two key aspects to ensuring your store's growth are staying constantly informed and up-to-date with trends and taking advantage of automation's benefits by resolving small daily tasks, which can save you time.
Of course, the profit margin also depends on your selling channel to establish the online store where you sell your products. To illustrate, let’s look at the average profit margin for dropshipping on different platforms.
Average Profit Margin for Amazon Dropshipping
To start dropshipping on Amazon, we need an Amazon seller account, which costs $39.99 monthly for a professional account. Unlike Shopify, Amazon provides access to a large built-in customer base, so we don’t need to invest heavily in driving traffic to the platform. We still need to attract customers to our specific products through:
Competitive pricing
Keyword optimization
Advertising
In addition to advertising costs, we must account for Amazon’s referral fees, which vary by product category but generally range from 6% to 15% of the selling price. For example, if we sell a product for $50 and the referral fee is 15%, we will be charged $7.50. Amazon also handles the payment gateway, so payment processing fees are included in the referral fee.
Factoring in Amazon FBA Fees: How to Price Products for Profitability in Dropshipping
It’s essential to consider shipping costs as well. If you’re using Amazon FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon), there are additional fees for storage and shipping. For example, FBA fees are based on:
The size and weight of the product
Covering picking
Packing
Shipping the item to customers
These costs must be factored into your pricing strategy to maintain profitability. We must price products to cover all these expenses to ensure a good profit margin.
For instance, if a product costs $100, and total expenses, including Amazon’s fees and shipping, bring the cost to $125, pricing it around $200 would cover all costs and leave a $75 profit. Balancing competitive pricing with a healthy margin is critical to Amazon's success in dropshipping. This marketplace is highly competitive. The profit margin for Amazon dropshipping is around 10% for beginners and 30% for experienced sellers. On average, you can expect 20%.
Average Profit Margin for Shopify Dropshipping
Starting dropshipping on Shopify requires a subscription, with the Basic plan costing $39 per month (or $29 per month with an annual plan). Unlike Amazon, Shopify doesn’t have built-in traffic, so you’ll need to invest in marketing strategies like Facebook Ads or Google Ads to drive visitors to your store. Shopify charges payment processing fees for each sale made through its platform.
If you use Shopify Payments, the fee is 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction on the Basic plan. If you choose a different payment provider, Shopify also charges an additional transaction fee of 2% on top of your payment provider’s fees. As you upgrade to higher-tier plans, these fees decrease.
Pricing for Profit in Shopify Dropshipping: How to Account for Shipping and Fees
Shipping costs should also be factored in. While some suppliers offer free shipping, others may charge depending on the product size and destination. Shopify offers various shipping carrier integrations to help you provide competitive rates. To ensure a profit, you must price products to cover all expenses. For example, if a product costs $50 and total costs—including shipping and fees—bring it to $65, pricing it at $100 would cover your expenses and leave a $35 profit.
You can maintain a healthy profit margin on Shopify by accounting for:
Marketing
Fees
Product costs
Due to lower fees, control over your store’s design and branding, and the potential for higher-priced products, the profit margin for Shopify dropshipping businesses typically ranges from 15% to 50%. The average profit margin for most companies is around 20-30%.
Average Profit Margin for eBay Dropshipping
When starting eBay dropshipping, you can use a free personal account, but opting for a business account is recommended, as it offers valuable features for dropshippers, such as:
Better analytics
Higher selling limits
Access to eBay’s various store subscription plans
For instance, the Starter Store plan costs $21.95 monthly and provides additional benefits, like reduced fees and more free listings.
eBay functions as a marketplace with built-in traffic, reducing the need for paid advertising compared to platforms like Shopify. You may still want to invest in PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising through eBay’s Promoted Listings to give your products more visibility and drive sales.
Managing Fees and Shipping Costs in eBay Dropshipping: Pricing for Profitability
In addition to potential PPC costs, eBay charges listing and final value fees (a percentage of the sale price), which vary by product category and can impact profit margins. Depending on the category, final value fees typically range from 10% to 15%. You must also consider shipping costs, which can vary depending on the supplier and shipping method.
Incorporating Free Shipping into Your eBay Pricing Strategy for Optimal Profit Margins
These expenses should be factored into your pricing strategy if you're offering free shipping. For example, if a product costs $90 total (including the item price, eBay fees, and shipping), and you sell it for $150, you would make a potential profit of $60.
Keeping a close eye on fees and shipping and adjusting pricing strategies accordingly will help you maintain a healthy profit margin. While specific figures can be difficult to pinpoint due to the marketplace's nature, the average profit margin for eBay dropshipping can range from 20% to 30%.
Average Profit Margin for Etsy Dropshipping
Etsy charges a one-time fee of $30 to open a store. This fee is intended to deter users from being severe about selling on the platform. Unlike other platforms like Shopify, Etsy operates as a marketplace with a built-in audience, which can reduce the immediate need for extensive marketing efforts. Etsy charges transaction fees and a listing fee for each product on the platform.
The transaction fee is 5% of the total sale price, while the listing fee is $0.20 per item. Sellers must also consider shipping costs, which vary depending on the product and delivery method. These fees and expenses can significantly impact profit margins, so factoring them into pricing strategies is crucial.
Calculating Profit on Etsy: Factoring in Fees and Shipping Costs for Maximum Margin
For example, if a product costs $50 and you sell it for $100, the expenses would break down as follows:
The listing fee is $0.20
The transaction fee is $5.00 (which is 5% of $100)
Shipping costs $15 (for example)
This results in total expenses of $70.20.
Therefore, the potential profit would be calculated by subtracting the total expenses from the selling price: $100 (selling price) minus $70.20 (total expenses) equals a profit of $29.80. Etsy is a unique marketplace with a focus on hand-made and vintage items. Because of this, you can have higher profit margins than on most other popular platforms. Etsy dropshippers report average profit margins between 30% and 50%.
Average Profit Margin for TikTok Dropshipping
TikTok Shop is rapidly gaining popularity as an e-commerce platform, particularly for dropshippers looking to tap into its vast user base. With the unique advantage of combining entertainment and shopping, TikTok allows sellers to reach an audience through viral content and live-streaming sales, making it a highly engaging selling platform.
Understanding Fees on TikTok Shop: How to Factor Commissions and Ads into Your Pricing Strategy
There are no upfront subscription fees on TikTok Shop. The platform charges a commission on each sale, ranging between 2% to 4%. Besides the commission, there’s a 2% transaction fee for processing payments. So, the maximum fee you will pay will be 6%. And you need to factor in the cost of running TikTok Ads, which is crucial to gaining visibility and driving traffic to your products.
Pricing for Profit on TikTok Shop: Accounting for Commissions, Ads, and Competition
For example, if you sell a product for $50, with TikTok taking a 6% commission, the platform would retain $3. Our pricing strategies should account for these fees, especially when utilizing paid ads. A typical approach would be to price a product around $100 to cover costs and leave a reasonable profit margin, potentially yielding $25 to $30 in profit, depending on ad spend.
Being a new eCommerce platform, TikTok Shop's competition is lower than that of Amazon or eBay. TikTok Shop dropshippers report average profit margins between 20% and 40%.
8 Tips to Increase Your Dropshipping Business Profit Margins
1. Establish a Pricing Strategy to Boost Your Profit Margins
Create a solid pricing strategy to boost profit margins and manage product prices. This will ensure you don’t set your product prices too high, where no one wants to buy them, or too low, so you’re missing out on potential revenue. Pricing strategies should account for all your business expenses and customer preferences. Also, conduct target audience research to fully understand your niche and the perceived value of your products.
Setting the Right Price: Balancing Costs, Marketing, and Customer Perception in Dropshipping
These variables may include:
Production costs
Price elasticity
Marketing expenses
Business expenses
Audience and perceived value
Taxes and eCommerce fees
A good rule of thumb for beginner dropshippers struggling with making enough sales and having few returning customers is to set a lower price to introduce your product to more people.
2. Negotiate a Lower Price With Your Supplier
eCommerce stores are not in the dropshipping business alone – suppliers rely on the number of goods sold and customer demand. Your aim should be to negotiate wholesale prices instead of consumer prices. Your value as a partner increases as your business grows, and it’s not a taboo topic to ask your supplier for a personal contract that can benefit both your profit margins and the number of orders the supplier receives.
You should also pay attention to shipping, ensuring that packaging and supply routes are optimized to decrease costs and delivery times.
3. Offer Product Bundles to Boost Profit Margins
Do you want to sell more products in each transaction? Try bundling. This is when you lump several items into one bundle, typically marketed as a “starter kit” or a “customer favorites” collection. You can command a higher price for bundles, which is good news for your profit margins.
Bundling is an excellent strategy because it allows you to sell bundled products in one go and save on expenses. You don’t have to market or pay fees separately for all of the products piecemeal.
4. Minimize Expenses
Avoid any unnecessary expenses. One of the pitfalls of dropshipping is paying for services you don’t need. These elements can be beneficial to negate low dropshipping margins:
Subscription costs
Finance trackers
Analytic tools
If they cost more money than they make, you’re better off without them. Similarly, you may try selling lighter products that reduce shipping costs, or, like any other business, reducing redundancies and pulling unsuccessful campaigns can make all the difference.
5. Increase Order Volume to Raise Your Dropshipping Profit Margin
If you want to make more money, increase the number of products you sell and diversify your potential audience.
Either way, targeting the right customer will involve significant marketing and user psychology research, so consider it a long-term effort to increase your dropshipping profit margin.
6. Sell Using Multiple Channels
Multi-channel selling involves listing the same goods on separate sales channels, such as your Shopify store and the Facebook marketplace. Using multiple channels allows you to target different buyer behaviors, including pandering to those who browse more significant eCommerce marketplaces and those looking for specific web stores. The more frequently a customer is exposed to your products, the more likely they are to purchase.
7. Automate Where You Can to Increase Your Margins
As you grow your dropshipping business, you’ll quickly realize that you can’t do it alone. Even if you hire a team to help you, there’s too much work for you to handle, particularly without automation. Human labor is expensive and time-consuming, so automating specific finicky tasks to reduce labor costs makes sense.
Solutions like Shophunter.io allow you to minimize the hands-on time and expenses of managing your business. You can optimize your margins 24/7 while boosting profits with real-time pricing updates.
8. Sell on Multiple Platforms
Starting with your own Shopify store is good, but attracting visitors can take a lot of work. To boost sales and profits, consider selling on big online marketplaces. Sites like eBay, Amazon, Walmart, and Etsy connect you to many buyers.
But remember, these sites have rules and fees. So, pick the one that fits your business best. It's a good idea to start with one site. This way, you can learn how it works without being swamped with too many orders at once.
Sign Up for a Free Trial (no credit card required) to Our Shopify Sales Tracker to Find Your Next eCom Opportunity Today!
ShopHunter puts a spotlight on Shopify sales tracking. Its Shopify sales tracker tool helps:
Ecom founders, particularly dropshippers, quickly validate product potential. The platform’s custom algorithm estimates sales for entire stores and specific products.
Beyond sales tracking, ShopHunter also features an ad spy tool that monitors advertising activity across stores. This combination lets users spot trending products and successful marketing strategies early on.
ShopHunter aims to streamline product research and reduce the risk of investing in low-performing items, whether you’re:
A dropshipper
A Shopify store owner
Someone looking to enter the e-commerce space
Sign up for a free trial (no credit card required) to our Shopify sales tracker tool to find your next eCom opportunity or to level up your current eCommerce store by learning from your competitors.