How to Use Shopify Analytics to Find Your Most (and Least) Profitable Products

Most Shopify merchants know their best-selling products. But best-selling and most-profitable are not the same thing — and confusing the two is one of the fastest ways to work harder for less money. A $200 Patagonia fleece that sells 500 units a month at a 15% margin is making you far less than a $60 Stanley mug that sells 200 units at a 45% margin. Revenue is a vanity metric. Profit is the one that keeps the lights on.

The good news: the data you need to find your most and least profitable products is already in your Shopify admin. It just takes a few deliberate steps to surface it.

Start With the Sales by Product Report

The first place to go is Analytics → Reports → Sales by product. This report shows units sold, gross sales, discounts, returns, and net sales for each product over your chosen date range. Run it for the last 90 days for a meaningful sample.

What you're looking for here is not just which products sell the most — it's the ratio of net sales to units sold. A product with high gross sales but also high returns and discounts may be netting out to very little. The Stanley Quencher is a cultural phenomenon, but if your store is eating 20% in return shipping costs, the margin story looks very different from the top-line number.

Export this to a spreadsheet. You'll need it in the next step.

Layer In Your Cost Data

Shopify's native reports show revenue — not profit. To get to profit, you need to bring in your cost per item (COGS) for each product. This is the field that most merchants either skip entirely or forget to keep current.

Once you have cost data populated in Shopify, the Profit by product report (Analytics → Reports → Profit by product) does the heavy lifting. It shows:

• Gross profit per product
• Gross margin percentage
• Net quantity sold
• Total revenue vs. total cost

Sort by gross margin percentage ascending. The products at the bottom of that list — the ones with single-digit or negative margins — deserve your full attention. If you're running a store with 500+ SKUs, there's almost certainly a cluster of products in that tail that are actively costing you money after shipping, payment processing, and returns.

What a Product Profitability Breakdown Actually Looks Like

Here's a concrete example. Say you sell outdoor gear and you have three flagship products:

Product	Price	Cost	Units/Month	Gross Margin	Monthly Profit
Cotopaxi Teca Windbreaker	$85	$38	120	55%	$5,640
Yeti Rambler 30oz	$45	$29	310	36%	$4,960
Lodge 12" Cast Iron Skillet	$55	$48	95	13%	$665

The Lodge skillet is probably your best-known brand — but it's generating less monthly profit than the other two combined, with almost the same volume effort. Without this breakdown, you'd never know. You'd keep promoting it equally, buying the same ad traffic, and wondering why margins feel thin.

The action here: raise the Lodge price to at least $62–65 to push the margin toward 25%, or deprioritize it in paid campaigns and let organic demand handle it.

The Profit by Variant Report: Go Deeper

Products with variants can hide a lot. A Carhartt hoodie might sell at 38% margin in size M but only 12% in size XXL if you're running size-specific promotions or if the larger size has higher COGS from your supplier. Shopify's Sales by product variant SKU report lets you get to this level of granularity.

Filter by your highest-volume SKUs and cross-reference with your cost data. Look for:

• Variants with high return rates (visible in the returns column)
• Variants where you've been running discounts that erode margin
• Variants that haven't sold in 60+ days but are still taking up inventory dollars

This analysis is tedious to do manually at scale. BulkOps surfaces this directly in the product editor — the Low Margin tab flags any product or variant where your margin drops below your threshold, so you can act on the whole list at once rather than digging through reports one SKU at a time.

How to Identify Your True Top Performers

Once you've cleaned up the bottom of the list, focus on what's actually working. Your best products by profitability share a few common traits:

1. High margin AND meaningful volume — a 70% margin product that sells 5 units a month is a curiosity, not a business driver
2. Low return rate — returns destroy margin fast; a 10% return rate on a 35% margin product effectively drops you to ~25%
3. Price resilience — products that sell equally well at full price and during sale periods are your core IP

These are the products to double down on: more inventory depth, more ad spend, more prominent placement in collections, better photography. If your Allbirds Tree Runner lookalike sells at 48% margin and has a 2% return rate, that product should be front and center — not buried on page 3 of your catalog.

Setting Up Profitability Benchmarks

A product profitability audit is only useful if you act on it consistently. Set a minimum acceptable margin threshold for your store — most DTC brands target 40–50% gross margin on physical goods to leave room for CAC, shipping, and overhead. Any product below that threshold needs a plan: raise the price, renegotiate cost, or exit it from active promotion.

A simple benchmark structure:

• Below 20% margin: review immediately — these are costing you money on any marketing spend
• 20–35% margin: acceptable for high-velocity anchor products; watch closely
• 35–50% margin: healthy; maintain pricing discipline and protect these
• 50%+ margin: star products — invest here aggressively

Run this analysis every quarter. Supplier costs shift. Shopify payments fees change. Shipping zones fluctuate. A product at 38% margin in January might be at 28% in July if your 3PL raised rates.

What to Do With Underperforming Products

Finding a low-margin product doesn't automatically mean you should cut it. Context matters:

• Loss leader: some products exist to drive AOV through bundling — a low-margin accessory that drives high-margin main purchases is worth keeping
• Price-fixable: if you haven't raised price in 18 months, do it. A 10% increase on a $50 product with $30 COGS moves you from 40% to 46% margin — meaningful at scale
• Cost-negotiable: if volume has grown, renegotiate with your supplier
• Discontinue: if the product has low volume, low margin, and no strategic reason to exist, cut it and free up catalog management time

For repricing at scale — updating 50+ products to hit a target margin — the math gets tedious fast. BulkOps pricing formulas let you apply rules like cost / (1 - 0.40) across an entire filtered product set in one step, so a 40% margin floor becomes a catalog-wide policy rather than a manual calculation for each SKU.

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If your cost data is already in Shopify and you want to see your margin picture across your whole catalog at once, BulkOps's Low Margin tab gives you a filtered view of every product below your threshold — with bulk repricing built in. Install BulkOps →