Hi all. I’m Dexter, founder of Profenor. We build bookkeeping software for Shopify sellers, and I want to be upfront that this is an app-builder post, which I understand is what this board is for.
We shipped two free tools that need no signup and no email:
- A per-order profit calculator: what you actually keep on one order after payment fees and your unit cost. The flat $0.30 fee takes a bigger bite out of low-price products than most sellers expect. On a $10 item, processing alone is 5.9% of the sale.
- A sales tax nexus checker: a first read on whether your sales into other states may have crossed a state’s economic nexus threshold. It is educational, not tax, accounting, or legal advice, and it tells you to confirm anything with a professional before acting.
Both are at profenor.com.
The ask: if you sell every day, I would love blunt feedback. Is the per-order number useful or obvious? Is nexus something you actually think about, or noise until a state letter shows up? What would make either tool genuinely worth bookmarking for your store? I will answer every reply.
Thanks,
Dexter
Thanks! Curious what you’d want the profit calculator to handle that it doesn’t yet — shipping cost per order and ad spend are the two we hear most (it deliberately excludes both right now and says so). If you run a store, I’d love to know which line items you currently track by hand — that’s exactly the feedback we’re after.
@Profenor
I like the fact that you made these tools available without requiring a signup. That makes it much more likely that merchants will actually give them a try.
The per-order profit calculator is probably the one I’d use more often. A lot of newer merchants focus on revenue but dont realize how payment fees, shipping, and product costs eat into their margins. Seeing the real profit on a single order can be a useful reality check.
One suggestion would be to let users include a few additional costs, such as packaging, shipping, ad spend, or transaction fees from different payment providers. That would make the profit calculation even more realistic for day-to-day decision-making.
As for the sales tax checker, I think it’s something many small merchants dont pay attention to until they start selling across multiple states. Having a simple educational tool is definitely useful especially if it clearly explains what the results mean and when it’s time to speak with an accountant.
Overall I think tools that save merchants time or help them understand their numbers are always more valuable than tools that just generate AI content.
Steve, useful notes, and one correction on my end rather than yours.
Shipping and packaging are already in the calculator. There is a “Shipping & packaging (optional)” field sitting directly under cost per unit. The word “optional” is clearly doing too much work there, because you are the second person today to look at that tool and not find it. That is a design problem on my side, and I am changing the label.
Same with processor fees. “Payment fee %” and “Flat fee per order” default to Shopify Payments at 2.9% plus 30 cents, but both are editable, so Stripe, PayPal or Shop Pay rates go straight in. That is buried in helper text where nobody reads it.
The ones you named that genuinely are not in there: discounts and returns. Those are next. A discount code and a return rate are what separate profit per order from what you actually keep across a month.
On the nexus checker, agreed, and that is deliberate. The tool says the result is a starting point and that thresholds need confirming with a tax professional. We are not going to be the thing that tells someone they are clear in a state when they are not.
One question, since you are running a store and I am not. Of discounts and returns, which one distorts your real margin more? I would rather build the one that actually bites first.
Appreciate the specifics, and one correction on our side.
Shipping and packaging are already an input, in a combined “Shipping & packaging (optional)” field. Transaction fees from other providers are covered too: “Payment fee %” and “Flat fee per order” default to Shopify Payments but are both editable, so a different processor’s rate drops right in. Two people flagged the same missing fields today that are in fact on the page, which tells me the labelling is failing. That gets fixed before anything new gets added.
Ad spend is a real gap and you are right about why. Once you put ad spend against a single order, the number stops being profit and starts being what you actually keep, and for a lot of stores that flips a product from a winner to a loser.
On the nexus tool, your point about explaining what the result means and when to call an accountant is the bar we set for it. It states the result is a starting point, not a filing position.
Question back to you: when you work out whether a product is worth keeping, do you allocate ad spend per order, or per product per month? I have seen both and I do not want to build the wrong default.
Steve, this is live now.
You called it on the labels. Shipping and packaging no longer says “optional”, the processor fees sit under their own heading telling you to change them, and there’s a line at the top of the card saying every field is yours to edit.
Discounts went in first, the way you ranked them. The discount comes off before the processing fee, since the processor charges on what the customer actually pays, so discounting lowers your fee too. There’s a toggle for dollars or percent.
Return rate is in as well, as a separate figure rather than folded into per-order profit. You were right that it’s a different number.
One thing worth flagging, because it changed the math. The obvious version is profit times one minus the return rate. Our finance review killed it. A returned order doesn’t net zero: you don’t get the payment fee back on a US refund, and the outbound shipping is already spent. So it’s now (1 - r) x profit - r x (fee + shipping). It shows a smaller number than the simple version. It’s the honest one.
Ad spend is the one thing I didn’t ship. It contradicts a line on the page saying the number excludes advertising, so it needs a decision about what the headline means rather than just another field. It’s queued.
Thanks for the specifics. Ranking discounts over returns was the useful part, it set the build order.
Steve, one more thing since you’ve now shaped what got built.
The calculator only does one hypothetical order. What I actually want to do is run it on real ones. If you’re up for it, export your last 90 days from Shopify and send it over with your product costs, and I’ll send back your real per-order profit across every order, what you kept after fees, and which states you’re approaching economic nexus in.
No charge and no signup. You’ve already given me more useful input than my last month of guessing, so this is me returning it. If you’d rather not hand over order data to someone you met in a forum, that’s completely fair and no hard feelings.
dexter@getprofenor.com if you want to take it off the thread.
Following up on your list, since most of it shipped.
Shipping and packaging was already there, you just couldn’t see it, which was a fair miss on my part and the labels are fixed now. Per-processor fees were also already editable and are now under a heading that says so. Discounts went in yesterday. Ad spend is the one I didn’t do, because the page says the number excludes advertising and I’d rather change what the number means deliberately than quietly fold it in.
If you want it on your own orders instead of a hypothetical one: export your last 90 days from Shopify, send it with your product costs, and I’ll send back your real per-order profit and your nexus position by state. Free, no signup.
dexter@getprofenor.com.
Yuta — really useful reply, thank you. You’re right that they’re two different experiments; we’d been reading them as one.
Straight answer to your question: neither, yet. The surprise is that our deduction checker — neither of the two you named — outdraws both of them combined, and the profit calculator is last. No order-data imports and no professional handoffs so far. Small denominator, and our analytics tag was missing on some pages for part of that window, so treat it as a floor rather than a count.
Fair hit on bookmarking, too — we used it because it was easy, which is the wrong reason.
The thing I’m taking away is flagging which inputs are known versus estimated. We’ve been showing both in the same typeface.
Thanks again — genuinely helpful.
I went down a similar path for my own store and the biggest shift for me was moving from “profit on one order” to “profit across a date range / channel”.
Once I could filter orders and compare product cost and gross profit against Google or Meta ad spend for the same period, the useful question became less “was this order profitable?” and more:
did this channel actually leave any profit after product cost and advertising?
The messy part is attribution, obviously. I wouldn’t pretend Meta/Google attribution is accounting truth, but even a clearly labelled last-touch view is useful operationally if the merchant understands the limitation.
I’d therefore prioritise recurring order import + channel/ad-spend analysis before trying to make the single-order calculator account for every possible overhead.
Shipping/payment fees would be my next layer because they materially change contribution profit, but app subscriptions/office costs/etc. feel more like P&L territory than an order-profit tool.
salor_works, that shift is the right one and I would build it in roughly the order you named. One place I will be straight with you, because it goes the other way.
We are not building channel or ad spend attribution, and we are not planning to. Not because it is not useful. Because when we started pulling real payout data we hit something underneath it that we could not get past.
Shopify deposits one lump sum. The lines inside it, charges, refunds, adjustments, reserve holds, retried transfers, marketplace tax, do not add up to that total unless you capture all of them. The four term version we were using, gross minus fees plus adjustments, does not hold on the real exports we have tested. We had it on our own screen for weeks and it was wrong.
So “did this channel leave any profit after product cost and advertising” has a floor under it, which is what actually landed in the bank and what the gap is made of. We would rather be right about that than approximately right about the layer above it.
Your ordering still holds inside that scope. Recurring order import first, then shipping and payment fees. And I think you are right that app subscriptions and office costs are P&L territory rather than an order profit tool.
One question, if you do not mind. When you compared your Shopify payouts against what your bank actually received, did they ever fail to match? And when they did not, could you tell why without opening the export?
Thanks for writing that out properly.