Dropshipping Profit Calculator — The Full Workflow

The single most common dropshipping mistake: testing a product that looks cheap on AliExpress but cannot actually support profitable paid ad acquisition.

Example: $10 AliExpress product. You retail it at $30 on Shopify. Looks like $20 margin per sale. Seems profitable.

But you forgot:

• Shipping from China to buyer: $4-6 per unit
• Shopify platform fee: 2.4-2.9% of transaction + $0.30
• Payment processor fee: another 2-3%
• Your ad spend at realistic Meta or TikTok CPMs: $8-12 per acquired customer
• Returns and refunds: 5-10% bleed

Actual margin per sale: $30 revenue - $10 product - $5 shipping - $1 platform fee - $10 ad spend - $2 refund provision = $2 net margin per sale.

At $30 AOV and $2 net margin, you need 500 sales per month to make $1,000 profit. Most dropshipping tests do not generate that volume. The product fails economically before the margin math matters.

AliShopping's Profit tab runs this full calculation in under 1 second on any AliExpress product page.

The 5-Layer Calculation

Layer 1: Product Cost

Auto-pulled from the AliExpress product page. Handles:

• Base price for single-unit orders
• Variant pricing (color/size) when applicable
• Wholesale tier pricing at 50/100/500/1,000 unit volumes

You see both retail-basis cost (for initial tests) and wholesale-basis cost (for scaled campaigns).

Layer 2: Shipping Cost

Auto-pulled from AliExpress shipping options. The calculator picks:

• Cheapest reliable shipping to your target country (default: your current browser's inferred country)
• Estimated delivery time
• Express shipping option with higher cost if you want faster fulfillment

Shipping is often 30-50% of product cost for low-priced items — overlooked by operators who only count product price.

Layer 3: Platform Fees

Default configured for Shopify:

• Shopify transaction fee (2.4-2.9% depending on plan)
• Shopify payment processor fee (2.9% + $0.30)
• Shopify subscription cost amortized per sale (optional, rarely material)

Can be overridden if you use WooCommerce, BigCommerce, or custom stack.

Layer 4: Ad Spend at Realistic CPMs

This is the step paid tools get wrong or skip entirely.

Default CPM data for common ad platforms and countries:

• Meta (Facebook/Instagram) US: $15-25 CPM typical
• Meta UK: $12-18 CPM
• Meta Germany: $8-14 CPM
• Meta France: $6-10 CPM
• TikTok US: $5-10 CPM
• TikTok UK: $4-8 CPM
• TikTok Germany: $3-6 CPM

From CPM, the calculator estimates:

• Cost per click (CPC) assuming 1-3% CTR
• Cost per add-to-cart (ATC) assuming 3-5% ATC rate
• Cost per purchase (CAC) assuming 2-5% checkout conversion

Output: estimated CAC range for your target country and ad platform.

Layer 5: Returns and Refund Provision

Default 5-10% of revenue allocated to returns and refunds. This rate can be adjusted based on product category — fashion has higher returns (15-20%), electronics lower (2-5%), consumables near zero (<1%).

Result: realistic net margin after actual operational costs.

The Break-Even ROAS Calculation

One output most operators do not think about until it is too late: Break-Even ROAS.

ROAS = Revenue / Ad Spend. If you are testing a product and your ROAS is 2.5x, you are generating $2.50 in revenue for every $1 of ad spend. Is that profitable?

Depends on your break-even ROAS. If break-even is 2.0x, a 2.5x ROAS is profitable by 25%. If break-even is 3.5x, a 2.5x ROAS loses money every sale.

Break-even ROAS = Revenue / (Revenue - Net Margin). For a product with 20% net margin, break-even ROAS = 1 / 0.2 = 5.0x. You need to generate $5 in revenue for every $1 of ad spend to break even.

Most dropshipping products require break-even ROAS of 2.5-4.0x to be sustainable. If your product's economics require 5.0x+ break-even ROAS, you are in trouble — most Meta and TikTok campaigns peak around 3.0-4.5x ROAS for unscaled dropshippers.

Knowing break-even ROAS before launching saves weeks of losing ad spend.

Output Table Example

For a $30 AliExpress dropshipping product targeting US on Meta Ads, the Profit tab returns a table like:

The 5% net margin signal is loud: this product cannot sustain anything less than a 3.75x ROAS campaign. Many operators enter this test thinking they have 47% margin and discover the actual economics weeks later.

What If Targeting Tier-2 Markets

Changing target country from US to Germany changes everything:

The same product has 4x better economics in Germany than US. This is why tier-2 market targeting is often underrated — lower CPMs make the same product economically viable at break-even ROAS you can actually achieve.

How Scale Changes the Math

The Profit tab also projects scaled daily revenue and profit:

Seeing scaled numbers helps operators decide whether a small-margin product can scale profitably (if ROAS holds) or whether margins are too thin to bother.

Install and Run on Your Actual Products

Profit calculation is most valuable applied to products you are actively considering testing — not hypothetical examples.

Install AliShopping Tools free — one Chrome permission, no account, no paywall.

Open the next AliExpress product you are considering, click the Profit tab, and see the full calculation in 1 second. If the margin math fails, skip the product. If it passes, proceed with testing.

The Profit tab alone saves most dropshipping operators hundreds of dollars in failed ad tests per month. It is the single most pragmatic feature in the extension.