How to Set Up Transaction Costs in Lifetimely

Adding transaction costs helps you get a more accurate view of your net profit in Lifetimely reports. These are the payment processing fees charged by platforms like Shopify, Stripe, or PayPal whenever a customer places an order.

By entering your transaction fee rates, Lifetimely will automatically apply those costs to all orders moving forward, so you won’t need to manually calculate them or adjust reports.

What Are Transaction Costs?

Transaction costs are the payment gateway fees charged per order. These are typically a combination of:

• A fixed fee (e.g. $0.30 per order), and
• A percentage-based fee (e.g. 2.9% of the order total)

Lifetimely applies these automatically to your order data based on your saved settings.

Where to Set Transaction Fees in Lifetimely

1. Log into Lifetimely
2. Click the Costs & expenses

3. Choose "Transaction Costs"

   Enter your fee details:

   • Fixed cost per transaction (e.g. 0.30)
   • Percentage fee (e.g. 2.9)
4. Hit Save

These rates will apply to all orders going forward and will be reflected in your Income Statement, Contribution Margin, and other profit-based reports.

Common Transaction Fee Examples

Here are a few common fee structures (confirm with your provider):

Shopify Payments

• If an end customer uses Shopify Payments for checking out, then Shopify takes a %-fee and a fixed amount in USD based on the merchant’s Shopify plan.
• If an end customer uses some other payment gateway, Shopify takes an alternative %-fee based on the merchant’s Shopify plan.

Based on your Shopify plan, we show you the transaction costs formula for the Shopify payments which looks like below 

To edit these values, click the pencil icon:

Once this is done, for all the orders that had Shopify payments, we calculate the transaction costs based on the values you set up in the above step.

Other Payment Gateways

You can also set up transaction cost formulae for other payment gateways like Paypal, Stripe, and Others.

Simply click the + Add gateway button to add the transaction cost per each payment gateway, as shown below:

Once you set these up, we will recalculate your orders and will assign a transaction cost for each of them depending on the payment gateway.