WhatSales
WhatSales logo × Shopify
WhatSales × Shopify Integration

No referral fee. So where’s the margin going?

Your Shopify store doesn’t hand a slice of every sale to a marketplace, so the profit gap is quieter: processing fees, shipping, ad spend and product cost, all nibbling at a number you never actually see. WhatSales adds it up, order by order.

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Order-level accuracy · Multi-marketplace · Per-SKU profit & margin

One Shopify order ● Shopify · UK
Order Total £28.98
Principal£24.99
Shipping£3.99
Payment Processing £-1.14
+Shopify Payments (2.9% + £0.30)£-1.14
Shipping £-4.50
+Label: Royal Mail Tracked 48£-4.50
Apps & Subscription £-0.15
+Per-order share of plan & apps£-0.15
Cost per Unit £-12.00
Cost Per Unit£-12.00
+Operational Cost£0.00
+Other Costs£0.00
✓ No referral fee line here. That’s the entire point of owning your store.
Est. profit £11.1938.6% margin
Where are you starting from?

Wherever you are with Shopify, WhatSales fits.

Already trading

Sales look healthy. Margin is a mystery?

See real profit after processing fees, shipping and ad spend, order by order.

Launching soon

Building your store before day one?

Price with real costs baked in from launch, not guesswork you fix later.

Selling on marketplaces too

Wondering which channel actually pays best?

Put your Shopify margin side by side with every marketplace you sell on.

The quiet cost of owning your own store

No marketplace takes a cut. So the leak is somewhere else.

There’s no referral fee eating into a Shopify sale, which is exactly why the gap between revenue and profit is so easy to lose track of. Payment processing, the shipping label you bought yourself, the app subscriptions ticking along in the background, the ad spend that brought the customer in: none of it shows up on the order confirmation. A sales total tells you what came in. It never tells you what stayed.

Every Shopify order is reconstructed from its components: principal and shipping charged to the buyer, so the starting number is the real one, not an estimate. WhatSales then deducts the costs that decide whether an order made money:

  • ✓Payment processing pulled from the order at its actual rate, no flat estimate.
  • ✓Shipping & postage, including labels you buy yourself.
  • ✓Apps & subscription costs, spread across the orders that carry them.
  • ✓Product cost (COGS) and any per-unit or operational costs you add.
  • ✓Full order P&L, plus product-level economics for every SKU.

The result is an estimated profit and margin you can trust: the figure that reaches your bank, ready to sort, filter and trend across your whole store.

Shopify profitability, built from the ground up. There’s no marketplace commission to reconcile, but processing fees, shipping, app costs and ad spend still have to come out of the same sale. WhatSales rebuilds each order from its raw parts, then applies the actual costs, to give you profit and margin per order and per SKU.

Sort by margin, filter by product, trend across the quarter: the profit view works the same as it does for every marketplace you connect, so Shopify sits in one dashboard with the rest of your channels rather than in a spreadsheet of its own.

Same £25 sale, two very different fee bills

A referral fee you don’t pay is margin you get to keep.

A typical marketplace referral fee runs around 15%. Shopify Payments runs 2.9% plus 30p. On the same sale, that’s not a small difference, and across a whole catalogue it adds up fast, but only if you can actually see it.

Typical marketplace
Referral fee on a £25 sale, around 15%.
£3.75
That’s £2.72 more margin on a single sale
Your Shopify store
Payment processing only, 2.9% + 30p.
£1.03

That’s £2.72 more margin on a single sale, before shipping or product cost even enter the picture.

WhatSales applies your real processing rate to every Shopify order, so the saving shows up as profit you can measure, compare against your marketplace channels, and factor into pricing decisions, rather than a rule of thumb.

⇄ Flow for Shopify

Publish once, sell everywhere.

Flow lets you create and update product listings across multiple stores, marketplaces and regions from one place. Push a new listing, or a price, title or content change, out from Shopify to every marketplace you sell on in a single click, instead of editing every channel by hand.

📦
Your product
Edit once in Flow
Publish everywhere →
SShopifyYour storefrontSynced
EeBayPrice & contentSynced
AAmazonPrice & contentSynced
TTescoMirakl offersSynced

Fewer manual edits, fewer mismatched prices and descriptions between channels, and a faster path from “new product” to “live on Shopify and everywhere else.”

Everything you need

Everything you need to run your store, in one place.

↗

Performance

A product page can be pulling visitors and still be underperforming once ad spend and processing fees are counted. Performance tracks sales trends, orders and refund rates on your store alongside every marketplace you sell on, so you can tell what’s actually driving growth.

▢

Restock

Running ads to a product page that says “sold out” burns budget for nothing. Restock flags low inventory automatically, before your best-performing line goes dark.

↻

Replan

Not every product deserves a second order, especially once processing fees, shipping and ad spend are accounted for. Replan shows you which products are actually worth reordering, based on real sales and margin performance, not just what’s moving.

🚚

Sourcing

You know a product is selling well. What you don’t always know is whether your supplier can restock it before you sell through. Sourcing tracks supplier lead times alongside your sales pace, so restocking decisions reflect real turnaround.

✉

Engage

Without a marketplace badge to fall back on, your own store’s reputation rests entirely on how you handle customers. Engage keeps every message and support ticket in one inbox, so nothing slips through.

◆

Workspace

Scaling your own store brings its own content, imagery and product-page demands. Workspace takes on the listing copy, product imagery, variation and bundle setup, quality assurance and day-to-day support, so growth doesn’t cost you your week.

Step 1 · Get your products in

Three ways to get your products onto Shopify

Already selling elsewhere? Import into Shopify with AI. Have a CSV? Upload it.
Building from scratch? Use Product Studio. All three routes land the same place, live on Shopify, through Flow.

Route A

Import from Source

Move listings from other marketplaces onto Shopify

  1. 1Select your source marketplace.
  2. 2AI optimises for Shopify.
  3. 3Publish to Shopify.
Best for: Moving existing marketplace listings to Shopify using AI.
Route B

CSV Upload

Bulk import made simple

  1. 1Upload your CSV template
  2. 2Review and validate your data
  3. 3Publish your listings to Shopify
Best for: Uploading large product catalogues to Shopify using CSV.
Route C

Product Studio

Create Shopify listings from scratch

  1. 1Add product details and images
  2. 2Complete attributes and pricing
  3. 3Publish to Shopify
Best for: Creating brand-new product listings directly for Shopify.
Questions

Shopify sellers ask

How is Shopify different from selling on a marketplace?+
Shopify is your own store, so there’s no referral fee or commission taken out of each sale like on a marketplace. Your main per-order costs are payment processing, shipping, and any ads you run, which usually means a higher margin per sale.
Can WhatSales compare my Shopify performance to my marketplace channels?+
Yes. Shopify data sits alongside Amazon, eBay, Tesco and other connected channels in one dashboard, so you can see which channel actually pays best per item.
Does WhatSales track Shopify payment processing fees and ad spend?+
Yes. Payment processing fees, shipping costs and ad spend are all pulled from the order and deducted before profit is calculated, so nothing is left out.
Talk to Us

See your real profit, live.

We'll walk through your own store data on the call and show you exactly where the profit is hiding.

Let's Talk
WhatSales dashboard on desktop and mobile

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