How Much to Spend on Facebook Ads for a Shopify Store

How much to spend on Facebook ads for a Shopify store depends on one number you can calculate today: how much gross profit one order leaves you. That is your break-even cost per purchase, the most an ad can cost per order before you lose money on the first sale. A first test budget should then buy enough purchases at that price to tell a working ad from a lucky one, which for the example store below comes to about $840 over two to four weeks.

The method below is ours, with a worked example in made-up numbers. Shopify facts come from the Help Center pages on profit reports and marketing performance, read on October 23, 2026.

Start from your margin

Step 1: get your gross profit per order. Shopify’s profit reports (Analytics > Reports, category Profit Margin) show gross profit by product, but only for products that had a Cost per item recorded when they sold. If you haven’t filled it in, open each product, click Cost per item in the Price section and enter what the item costs you (for variants, each variant has its own). Without it, the profit reports stay empty.

Step 2: subtract what each order costs beyond the product. Shipping you pay, packaging, payment processing.

Step 3: that is your break-even cost per purchase.

If an ad brings purchases at $20 each, you keep $7.90 per order. At $35 each, you lose $7.10 per order on the first purchase and need repeat orders to make it back.

Step 4: decide whether repeat orders count. If customers often buy again (consumables, refills), you can accept a first-order cost above break-even, because the second order costs no ad money. Only do this if your Shopify reports show a real share of returning customers; the channel and campaign reports in Growth split first-time from returning customers.

A test budget that can teach you something

A test that buys three purchases tells you nothing: three can come from luck. A test that buys 30 to 50 purchases tells you whether the ad works at a cost you can live with. So:

Test budget = target number of purchases x break-even cost per purchase.

For the example store: 30 purchases x $27.90 = about $840, spread over two to four weeks. If that is too much, test fewer things rather than spending less per thing: one product, one audience, two creatives.

A plan for that $840:

1. Two ad sets, $15 a day each, for four weeks. One with Advantage+ audience, one with a lookalike of past buyers, both showing the same two creatives.
2. Don’t touch them for the first week, so both ad sets run under the same conditions you will compare.
3. At the end of week two, look at cost per purchase in Ads Manager and at orders from the campaign in Shopify’s Channel performance report (with UTM parameters on the ads). Turn off the ad set whose cost per purchase is clearly above break-even.
4. At the end of week four, decide.

Shopify’s marketing pages don’t show cost or ROAS for Facebook campaigns, so cost comes from Ads Manager and revenue from Shopify. Put both in one sheet per week.

When to scale or stop

Scale when cost per purchase has stayed below break-even for two weeks and Shopify shows the orders. Raise the budget in steps (we would go 20% at a time) rather than doubling it overnight, and watch the cost per purchase after each step.

Change one thing when cost per purchase sits between break-even and 1.5x break-even: a new creative, a different product in the ad, or a better product page. Our guide to Facebook ads targeting covers the audience side.

Stop when the whole test budget is spent and cost per purchase is well above break-even, or when there are clicks but almost no add-to-carts in Shopify’s conversion report. In both cases, look at the product page and the price before spending more on ads. Our guide to Shopify profit reports helps with the price side.

For dropshipping stores, where margins are thinner, the same math applies with less room; see our guide to dropshipping ads. More guides are in the marketing and SEO hub.

Frequently asked questions

How much should a new Shopify store spend on Facebook ads? Enough to buy about 30 purchases at your break-even cost per purchase. For a store with $28 of gross profit per order, that is roughly $840 over two to four weeks.

What is a break-even cost per purchase? The gross profit one order leaves you after product cost, shipping, packaging and payment fees. An ad that costs more than that per purchase loses money on the first order.

Is $5 a day enough for Facebook ads? A $5 daily budget can run an ad, but at that rate it takes weeks to collect enough purchases to judge it. Work out how many purchases your test needs and divide by the time you can wait.

Where do I find my profit per order in Shopify? In Analytics > Reports under the Profit Margin category, once you have entered a Cost per item for your products. Profit is reported only for products that had a cost recorded when they sold.