What is a good ROAS for a health and beauty Shopify store?

If you sell health and beauty on Shopify, a good first-order ROAS is usually anything above 1 divided by your margin. If buyers reorder, a campaign a little below that line can still pay off. Count samples, gifts and refunds as costs before you divide.

If you sell health and beauty

If you sell skincare, cosmetics, supplements or hair care, many of your products run out. A cleanser empties and a tub of vitamins ends. If buyers come back for more, the first order is only part of what the ad started, and first-order ROAS undercounts it. Own-brand formulas can carry a healthy margin, which lowers your line. Then the extras arrive: samples, gifts with purchase, bundles and free-shipping thresholds. Each one is a cost on the order, and each one raises the ROAS you need.

Discovery often happens far from the checkout. If buyers find you through a creator's video they never clicked, or a friend's shelf, they may come back later by typing your name. GA4 files that visit as Direct, so the channel that started the sale gets nothing in a last-click view.

What one store's data shows

One store's anonymised GA4 export, 1 January 2024 to 21 August 2026. It holds shares of revenue only: no ad spend, no order counts. Nothing in it says what the store sells, so read it as one store and not a benchmark for beauty.

The first row applies to any store, beauty or not: at a 40% margin, break-even ROAS is 2.5x (Break-even sheet). It is arithmetic, so your own margin sets your own line.

In one store, 79.5% of revenue came from journeys with a single touch that closed in 0.5 days (Journeys sheet). That is also what a reorder looks like in GA4: one visit, one purchase. The export cannot tell new buyers from returning ones, so it cannot say how much of that 79.5% was repeat business.

The slower rows show how long multi-touch journeys took in this store. Journeys with two to three touches took 12.5 days and held 12.2% of revenue (Journeys sheet). Four to nine touches took 16.9 days and held 5.4% (Journeys sheet). If a new routine needs convincing, your own first orders may look like these.

What changes for a health and beauty store?

Judge first orders and reorders apart. In GA4, User acquisition groups revenue by the channel that first brought each user, while Traffic acquisition groups it by each session's channel. A channel that looks weak per session but strong per first user is finding buyers who come back.

Count the extras as costs. Give every sample and gift product a Cost per item in Shopify, which is the cost to you of the product or variant. Shopify only reports profit for items that had a cost recorded when they sold, so start now.

If you sell subscriptions, read them apart too. Shopify's sales reports include Subscription vs one-time sales. A channel that brings subscribers can live with a lower first-order ROAS than one that brings one-off buyers.

Tell your bidding what a customer is worth. Google Ads predicts value from the conversion values you report. If you report the first order only, it bids for first orders and never sees the refill.

What to do this week

1. Price the extras. In Shopify, go to Products, open each sample, gift and bundle item, and fill in Cost per item. Then open Analytics, Reports, Profit margin by order. Pass: orders with a gift show a lower margin. Fail: they show the same margin as the rest, so the gift still costs nothing on paper.
2. Split first orders from reorders. In GA4, go to Reports, then Acquisition, then User acquisition. Read Total revenue by first user channel over a long date range. Pass: you can name the channel whose first buyers keep spending. Fail: Direct tops the list, so GA4 never saw where those buyers first came from.
3. Cut nothing on first-order ROAS alone. In Google Ads, add Conv. value/cost from Columns, then Modify columns, and flag campaigns under your break-even line. Pass: a flagged campaign whose buyers come back keeps running, on a lower bar. Fail: a flagged campaign with no repeat revenue goes on the cut list.

Check the homework. Your GA4 Attribution paths export already holds the evidence. Causality Engine reads that one file and shows what each channel caused next to what last-click gave it, in 1 to 2 minutes, for €99 once (excluding VAT), refundable within 30 days. Check the homework

Sources, 1 October 2026: Product details page (Shopify Help Center); Profit reports (Shopify Help Center); Sales reports (Shopify Help Center). User acquisition report vs. Traffic acquisition report (Google Analytics Help); Default channel group (Google Analytics Help); About Target ROAS bidding (Google Ads Help).

Related answers

• All ROAS & margin questions
• What is a good ROAS for a Shopify store?
• How to set a good ROAS target for Shopify, step by step
• Incremental ROAS