This calculator works out what one order is truly worth to your business, and exactly how efficient your Meta ads must be before they make money instead of losing it. Fill in what you know. Where you are unsure, tick the box and we will use a documented industry average.
Prepared for youYour prices, and the offer you plan to run ads to. Bundles matter: a bigger basket carries the shipping and ad cost far better than a single bottle.
Prices are loaded from your live store. Edit them if you are planning a change. Lines with the same price behave identically in this math, so one line stands for each price point.
The order the ad is designed to produce. The side panel shows the math for this offer; the comparison table below shows all of them side by side.
Your planned incentive: buy more units up front, get a bigger discount. Applied automatically by basket size in all the math.
Averaged across all orders. If one order in two uses a 10% welcome code, the average is 5%. This quietly eats margin, so be honest here.
Industry average applied: 10% of the order (typical range 8 to 12% for stores running a welcome offer).
Your landed cost: what one unit costs by the time it is sitting in your warehouse, ready to ship.
What you pay your manufacturer per bottle. If you only know a blended number, put it on every line.
Industry average applied: 18% of the retail price per unit (contract-manufactured topicals typically land at 15 to 25% of retail).
A common trap: the "cost per item" in Shopify is often the factory price only. The container or courier from the manufacturer adds real cost per bottle.
If you offer free shipping, the cost does not disappear. It comes out of your pocket on every single order.
The real label cost to send one typical parcel, US domestic. A 1 to 2 lb box with liquid bottles usually lands between $7 and $10.
Industry average applied: $8.50 per order (USPS Ground Advantage / UPS Ground, 1 to 2 lb, averaged across zones).
What your fulfilment partner charges to pull the bottles off the shelf and box them. If you ship from your own premises, put your best estimate of the time cost, or zero.
Industry average applied: $3.00 per order (typical third-party logistics fee is $2.50 to $3.50 for a small order).
Industry average applied: $0.75 per order (plain mailer box, void fill, one insert).
Costs that never show up on an invoice with your name on it, but take a slice of every order.
Shopify Payments standard rate is 2.9% plus 30 cents per order. Shop Pay costs the same, it just converts better.
Standard Shopify Payments rate applied: 2.9% + $0.30 per online transaction.
Out of 100 orders, how many come back? A refunded order returns the money but you rarely get the shipping cost back.
Industry average applied: 2.5% of orders.
Your products are consumables on a treatment cycle. If a real share of customers re-orders, you can afford to pay more for the first sale than the first sale alone justifies. Skip this and every number stays conservative: it assumes nobody ever buys twice.
Breaking even keeps the lights on. This sets the profit you want left over after product, delivery and advertising, as a share of sales.
Same store, same costs, different basket. Watch what happens to the most you can pay Meta for an order.
| Offer | Customer pays | Truly yours | Margin | Breakeven MER | Max cost per order | Verdict |
|---|
Verdicts assume typical US Meta costs for pet offers, where a purchase from cold traffic rarely comes in under $12 to $20. A ceiling below that range means the ad account fights physics.
This sends your inputs and the computed numbers to The Vitruvian Agency, so we can sanity-check them, replace any estimates with your real figures, and set the ad targets from real math instead of hope. Nothing is shared anywhere else.
Product cost: contract-manufactured topicals typically land at 15 to 25% of retail price (industry supplier quotes, 2025 to 2026). Shipping: USPS Ground Advantage and UPS Ground published rates for 1 to 2 lb parcels, averaged across US zones. Pick and pack: standard third-party logistics per-order fees. Card processing: published Shopify Payments US rates. Refunds: typical category rates. Repeat purchase: consumable benchmarks for stores with basic email flows.
Definitions: MER (marketing efficiency ratio) is total revenue divided by total ad spend, sometimes called blended ROAS. Sales tax is excluded throughout: in the US it is added at checkout and passed through, so it neither helps nor hurts margin. Every average is a starting point, not a fact about your business. Replace them with real numbers as you get them.