How do I see shipping cost per order and per product in ShipStation?

What reports does ShipStation have?

ShipStation is a shipping software subscription. It imports orders from stores and marketplaces such as Shopify, Amazon and Etsy, then buys and prints labels from carriers such as UPS and USPS. Its reports sit in the Analytics tab. Click Reports in the side menu and you get pre-formatted reports you can view in ShipStation or export to PDF, CSV, Excel or plain text. Each one has filters, usually a date range, a store or a carrier account.

ShipStation's help center sorts the reports into these groups:

Group	Reports in it	What it is good for
Orders	Order Details, Buyer Comments, Country Comparison	Order counts and where orders go
Products	Item Demand Summary, Returned Products, Product Sales	What sells and what comes back
Shipments	Shipment Count by User, Shipping Manifest, Shipped Items, Shipping Cost, Batch Detail	Label spend, carrier paperwork, packer activity
Accounting	Account Balance History	Money in and out of your ShipStation balance
Inventory	Low Stock, Out of Stock Shipments, Audit, Status	Only for ShipStation's own internal inventory feature
Raw Data Exports	Customers, Shipped Items, Orders, Shipped Orders, Product Aliases	Feeding a spreadsheet

One detail that trips people up: the Shipments reports only cover shipment records created in ShipStation. Orders you marked as shipped by hand, or that came back as shipped from a store update, are not in them. If some of your labels are bought elsewhere, your cost totals will be short.

Which report shows shipping cost?

The Shipping Cost report. It lists your shipments and sets what the customer paid for shipping when they ordered beside what the label actually cost. That gap is the number most sellers want. If you charge a flat $6 and the label costs $8.40, you lose $2.40 on that order, and the report shows it per shipment. You can filter by shipped date and by shipping account.

Two limits to know. First, it works per shipment, not per product. A box with three different products is one row. Second, the label price is the carrier charge when the label was made. Carriers can adjust it later, for example when the real weight or size differs from what you entered. ShipStation's own UPS guidance says to always enter dimensions, because UPS uses dimensional weight, and wrong weight or size can cause post-shipping adjustments to your balance. Those adjustments show up in your balance history, so check the Account Balance History report as well.

How does the End of Day report work?

People often look for "End of Day" when they want a cost report. They are not the same. End of Day is the process of closing out the day's shipments for a carrier. ShipStation's help page on manifests says carriers call the list different names: a shipment manifest, a SCAN form, an Order Summary or an End of Day form. For some carriers you close the shipments and print the form each day, then hand it to the driver to scan. For others ShipStation sends the data electronically and you print nothing. Carriers also differ on whether the form is required at all.

For UPS, the short version is to read ShipStation's manifest article and check with your UPS representative, since requirements depend on the carrier and your account. If you want a plain list of the day's UPS shipments for your own records, the Shipping Manifest report under Analytics, then Reports, gives you one. It is a record, not a cost analysis. Do not use it to check spend.

Can ShipStation export product cost?

This depends on which export you mean.

• Product records export: a static CSV of your product records. Its field list in ShipStation's help includes SKU, name, weight, dimensions, customs values, tags, UPC and warehouse location. It has no cost-of-goods column.
• Order line item export: you can export each product in an order on its own row, and you can build a custom export format that picks the fields you want and renames the columns. ShipStation's field list includes an "Item - Cost" field, described as the unit cost for the line item. Whether it holds your real purchase cost depends on what is stored on the product record, so spot-check a few rows against your own costs before you trust it. The order export also has an "Amount - Shipping Cost" field, but ShipStation describes it as the base cost of the estimated shipping rate, so use the Shipping Cost report for actual label spend.
• Inventory reports: these exist only for ShipStation's internal inventory feature, so they will be empty if you track stock somewhere else.

My advice: do not make ShipStation the home of your product costs. Keep one cost column in a place you control, such as your store or a spreadsheet. Shopify, for example, has a "Cost per item" column in its product CSV, so cost can live next to the price. My guide to Shopify CSV imports covers how that file behaves.

How do I get shipping cost and profit per product?

ShipStation gives you cost per shipment. Profit per product needs three exports joined together. Here is the steps version.

1. Export shipments. From the Shipments tab, export recent shipments to CSV. This route also lets you filter by ship-from location, carrier and destination country, which the report screens do not. Keep order number, carrier, tracking number and the label cost.
2. Export order line items. Use a custom export with one row per product per order. Keep order number, SKU, quantity and unit price.
3. Add your costs. Make a sheet with SKU and purchase cost from your own records.
4. Join them by order number and SKU. In Excel or Google Sheets, use a lookup to pull cost onto each line.
5. Split the shipping. For a multi-product box, share the label cost across lines. Splitting by item value is simple. Splitting by weight is closer to what carriers charge.
6. Add up per SKU. Revenue minus product cost minus shipping share, minus marketplace and payment fees, gives profit per SKU.

A worked example with made-up figures

Say one order has a mug and a candle in one box. The label cost $9.00. The mug sold for $20 (cost $8, weight 12 oz) and the candle for $30 (cost $11, weight 8 oz). Split by item value: the mug carries 40% of shipping, $3.60, and the candle 60%, $5.40. Split by weight: the mug carries 60%, $5.40, and the candle 40%, $3.60. The mug's profit before fees is $20 - $8 - $3.60 = $8.40 by value, or $6.60 by weight. Neither is wrong. Pick one rule and keep using it, so month to month numbers can be compared.

Common mistakes

• Counting only label cost. Add packaging, adjustments and returned shipments.
• Missing shipments. Labels bought outside ShipStation are not in the Shipments reports.
• Mixed-up date fields. Order date and ship date land in different months. Pick one for profit reports.
• Voided labels. If you void a label and buy another, check that your export does not count both. Compare the row count with the orders you actually shipped.

When the sheet stops being enough

This works well at a few hundred orders a month. When you sell through three or four channels, the monthly join takes hours and the numbers go stale. Then it is worth building the report so it runs by itself. My guide on a KPI dashboard covers what to put on it, and the ecommerce profit dashboard template gives you the sheet layout to start from. If you are also weighing other shipping tools, see my ShipStation alternatives guide, and for Shopify's own reporting gaps see Shopify reporting limits.

How I'd approach this

I would start with the Shipping Cost report for one month and look only at the gap between what customers paid and what labels cost. That single number often shows a flat shipping rate is losing money on heavy items. Then build the three-export join for your top 20 SKUs, not everything. Use one cost column you own, and keep one splitting rule. Once you repeat this monthly and it takes more than an hour, automate it. The same shape of problem, joining shipping, orders and costs, is what business process automation is for.