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Cost settings are where you tell Upstack what it actually costs to fulfill an order. Once your costs are in, Upstack subtracts them from revenue to give you accurate contribution margin (CM1–CM4) and a real P&L — not just revenue and ROAS.
Cost settings are available to admin and owner roles.

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Where to find it

Open Settings → Cost settings. Every cost category is a collapsible section on that one page — open a section to configure it, and only one stays open at a time.
Two things to know before you start:
  • Changes apply to past orders too. When you add or edit a cost, Upstack goes back and recalculates the orders it affects, so your reporting stays consistent.
  • You can date every cost. Most cost lines accept an effective start and end date, so a rate change from last month doesn’t rewrite the months before it.

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Where to start

Product defaults is the one section Upstack flags as required — until it’s filled in, its header shows a Setup badge, because without it an order can be missing a product cost entirely. A good first pass:
  1. Product defaults — a fallback COGS % so every product has a cost
  2. Payment processing fees — what your gateways charge
  3. Shipping — what it costs to ship an order
  4. Order fees — any other per-order or per-item fees
Add Product costs, Variable costs, and Recurring expenses as you need them.

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Product defaults

Two settings that apply when a product is missing its own cost data:
  • Default COGS % — a percentage of the item’s sale price (0–100), used as the cost of goods for any product that has no specific cost.
  • Handling fee — a flat amount charged on every unit sold, so a line item with quantity 3 is charged three times. It’s a separate cost from COGS, and it has its own fallback: it applies only to products that don’t have their own handling fee.
Set the Default COGS % first so no order is ever missing a product cost.

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Product costs

Per-variant cost overrides. If you maintain Cost per item in Shopify, Upstack syncs it automatically — those synced costs are read-only here. You can also enter your own cost for any variant, with effective date ranges; your manual entry takes precedence over the Shopify-synced value. Both Product Cost and Handling Fee here are per-unit amounts, multiplied by the quantity sold on each order. A variant’s handling fee replaces the default Handling Fee — set it to 0 to charge no handling fee for that product.
Give each cost entry for a variant a different start date. If two entries share one, Upstack warns you in the editor and only one of them is used for any given order.

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Payment processing fees

Payment processing fees per gateway, entered as a flat amount plus a percentage:
  • Flat Fee — a fixed amount per transaction (e.g. $0.30)
  • Percent Fee (%) — a percentage of the order (e.g. 2.9%)
Gateway names are discovered from your order history, so you only configure the ones you actually use.

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Shipping

Choose how Upstack accounts for shipping cost, using one of three modes: With Shipping Profiles, each profile matches one or more countries. A profile can be a single Flat Rate or Weight Tiered, and you can set a default profile as a fallback.
If two shipping profiles cover the same country, Upstack shows an Overlapping Shipping Profiles warning and uses the first match. Keep country coverage distinct so the right rate always applies.

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Order fees

Fees that apply per order, per line item, or per refund — beyond product cost. For each cost line you choose how it’s calculated: Each cost line gets a category (COGS, Fulfillment, Transaction, Marketing, Agency Fees, Opex, or Other), which decides its contribution-margin tier, and a channel (Online, POS, or Both). You can also filter a cost so it applies to some orders only:
  • By order — shipping method, payment gateway, tags, or source
  • By product — vendor, type, tags, or category
  • By location — country
  • By specific products — pick the products yourself

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Variable costs

Costs that scale with ad spend. Today this is % of Ad Spend — a percentage applied to your ad spend, under a Marketing or Opex category. Useful for agency fees or tools billed as a percentage of spend. By default the percentage applies to all your ad spend. You can narrow it to specific platforms — Facebook Ads, Google Ads, or TikTok Ads — or exclude some of them.

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Recurring expenses

Recurring overheads like rent, salaries, and software subscriptions. Set an amount and a frequency — Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, or Yearly — and a category (Marketing, Opex, Agency Fees, or Other). Upstack averages the cost across the period so it shows up correctly in your P&L.

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How costs roll into contribution margin

Each cost’s category decides which margin tier it reduces: Recurring expenses and variable costs land in the tier that matches the category you give them — a Marketing-category cost reduces CM3, while an Operating expenses, Agency fees, or Other cost reduces CM4. See Contribution margin for how the tiers are used across the P&L dashboard.

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Frequently asked questions

Yes. When you add or edit a product cost, product default, order fee, payment processing fee, or shipping rate, Upstack recalculates the past orders that fall inside that cost’s date range. Set start and end dates to control exactly which orders a cost applies to.Variable costs and recurring expenses work differently. They aren’t written onto individual orders — Upstack applies them when it builds your reports, so a change shows up straight away with no recalculation needed.
Mostly. Order fees, payment processing fees, shipping, recurring expenses, variable costs, and the Product defaults handling fee each carry their own currency, and Upstack converts them into the order’s currency. Per-variant Product costs are the exception — those are always in your store’s currency.

Contribution margin

How CM1–CM4 and the P&L dashboard use your costs.

Manage costs from the CLI

Read and update cost configuration with the upstack costs command.

Attribution and reporting

How Upstack attributes conversions and calculates reporting metrics.

Costs API

Manage cost configuration programmatically.