Offer free shipping over the wrong minimum order value and you quietly hand back your margin on every order. Enter your own margin and shipping cost and see the threshold that breaks even and the one that still keeps the profit you want.
| Per free-shipping order at that value | Amount |
|---|---|
| Product gross profit Threshold order value × your margin % | $0 |
| Shipping you absorb The label + packaging you pay so the customer pays $0 | −$0 |
| Profit you keep on that order | $0 |
Free shipping is affordable on an order only when the product profit on that order covers the shipping you absorb. At order value V with margin m, product gross profit is V × m. To keep a target profit P after paying shipping S, you need V × m − S ≥ P, which rearranges to:
Set P = 0 and you get the pure break-even threshold: the order value where free shipping neither makes nor loses money. Below it, every "free shipping" order costs you.
The dangerous case isn't the threshold you set on purpose — it's the one that quietly stops matching reality. Carrier rates creep up, your real shipping cost drifts above what you modeled, or a promo drops the threshold and nobody re-checks the margin. None of that throws an alert; you find it at month-end when the profit isn't there.
Ops Monitor connects to your Shopify and Stripe with read-only API keys and watches for the silent operational failures that erode the margins this calculator assumes — payout and settlement gaps, oversells, orders stuck past SLA, broken syncs — then alerts you by email or Slack the moment one shows up. It's read-only: it never writes to your store and never moves money. It detects and alerts — it does not prevent or guarantee anything.
Start monitoring in minutes with read-only keys — $149/month, self-serve, cancel anytime.
Start monitoring — $149/mo →Not ready? Run the free, no-signup Ops Reliability Scorecard, or get a one-time $29 ops audit of your store.