A butcher selling online has to price against sellable weight, not purchased weight, and the gap between the two is larger than most shops budget for: per SDSU Extension, a fed steer dresses at 62–64% of live weight and yields roughly 65% of that carcass as boneless trimmed beef — about 40% of the live animal reaches a customer's bag. Everything else in an online butcher setup follows from that number: the per-kilogram price, the minimum order weight, and whether the customer knows before checkout that a kilo of bone-in rib is not a kilo of meat.
That last part is what pushed a wastage percentage into By-Weight Pricing for WooCommerce — showing ordered weight and actual delivered weight side by side turned out to be the difference between a transparency feature and a weekly argument. What follows is the verified yield data, the pricing chain built on it, and the WooCommerce configuration a meat counter actually needs. Yield figures were checked against university extension publications in July 2026; they are averages, and your own cutting records beat every one of them.
How much of what you buy can you actually sell?
Between 40% and 50% of live weight for beef, depending entirely on how you cut. Three losses stack up, and each one has a published range you can plan against.
The 260 lb that disappears between carcass and counter is not waste in the moral sense — SDSU breaks that same 750 lb carcass into 490 lb of boneless trimmed beef, 150 lb of fat trim and 110 lb of bone. It is simply weight you paid for and cannot ring through the till.
Dressing percentage varies a lot by species, and buying decisions should start there:
| Species | Dressing percentage, live to carcass | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Fed beef | 62–64%, averaging about 63% | SDSU Extension; Penn State Extension |
| Pork | 70–76% | SDSU Extension |
| Lamb | About 50% | SDSU Extension; Virginia Tech Extension |
There is a fourth loss most price lists ignore. Carcasses lose water in the cooler at 1–4% of hot carcass weight per day, per Virginia Tech Extension. Buy on hot weight and sell three days later and that shrink is already inside your cost, invisible, before a knife touches anything.
Which decision moves your sellable weight most?
Cutting style, by a wide margin — it swings the yield further than breed, grade or feeding ever will. Virginia Tech's lamb example is the cleanest illustration published anywhere: one 45 lb cold carcass returns about 38 lb of bone-in, regularly trimmed retail cuts, or about 22 lb of closely trimmed boneless cuts. Same animal, same day, 42% less weight to sell.
Beef behaves the same way with wider bands. Penn State Extension puts boneless retail cuts at 45–55% of carcass weight and bone-in cuts at 64–79%, varying by yield grade. Translated into a price list: a boneless cut has to carry a substantially higher price per kilogram than its bone-in equivalent to return the same money per animal — bone-in yields roughly 73% more sellable weight than closely trimmed boneless from the same carcass, so a flat markup applied to both is a quiet transfer of margin from you to whoever buys the boneless.
This is why cut style belongs in your catalog structure rather than in a product description. One product per cut, variations for bone-in, boneless and french-trimmed, and a separate price per kilogram on each — with each variation showing its own per-kilogram figure rather than a price range, which is the display problem covered in how to show a price per kg on every WooCommerce product.
How do you price a cut so trim loss doesn't eat the margin?
Divide costs by the weight you can sell, never by the weight you bought. Penn State Extension publishes the same chain in its meat-pricing guidance: take the live cost per pound, divide by dressing percentage to reach a hanging cost, add processing fees, divide by cut-out yield to reach the real cost of the cuts, then divide by your markup to reach retail.
For a butcher buying sides rather than live animals, the chain starts one step later and looks like this:
€1,170
paid for the side
117 kg
sellable after cutting
€10.00
break-even per kg
€15.38
retail per kg at a 35% margin
The break-even is 54% above the €6.50 you think you paid per kilogram, and that is before cutting fees, packaging and cold-chain delivery — add those and the gap widens again. The €15.38 is also an average across the whole side, not a price tag: tenderloin sits far above it and mince far below, but the weighted average across everything you sell from that side has to clear it or the animal loses money regardless of how well individual cuts perform.
Whatever number you land on, it has to appear on the storefront as a price per kilogram next to every pack price. In the EU and the UK that is a legal duty rather than a courtesy, with a specific unit prescribed per market — the detail is in unit pricing laws for online stores.
How do you show customers the weight they'll actually receive?
By displaying two numbers instead of one: the weight ordered and the weight that will be in the bag after trimming. A customer who orders 1 kg of bone-in rib and receives 750 g of usable meat has not been cheated, but if the first they hear of it is when they unwrap the parcel, you will spend the afternoon proving that.
A wastage percentage set per product handles this mechanically. You configure the trim loss for that cut, the product page shows the ordered weight the customer pays for alongside the actual weight they will receive, and both figures carry through the cart, the order confirmation and the packing bench — so the customer's email and the person wrapping the parcel are reading the same two numbers before anything ships.
Set it from your own records, not from a table. Weigh ten orders of a cut, divide delivered weight by ordered weight, and use that. Boneless mince and pre-trimmed steaks are 0%; bone-in and made-to-order cuts are wherever your knife actually lands. A percentage set optimistically is worse than none at all, because now the wrong number is in writing.
How do you configure WooCommerce for a butcher counter?
Around six settings, none of which core provides — the product weight field feeds shipping and nothing else, which is the gap how to sell by weight in WooCommerce lays out in full. With a by-weight pricing plugin in place, a meat counter needs:
- One product per cut, priced per kilogram, with a weight field the customer types into and a price that recalculates live as they do.
- Minimum, maximum and step per cut. A 300 g minimum on mince keeps micro-orders above the cost of packing them; a 5 kg maximum protects the case; a 250 g step matches how you actually portion rather than how a text field behaves.
- Variations for cut style, each with its own price per kilogram and its own wastage percentage — the 42% swing from the lamb example has to reach the price list.
- Stock counted in kilograms, validated against what is already in that customer's cart, so two Saturday-morning orders cannot sell the same loin twice.
- Date-scheduled price rules for the meat calendar — lamb at Easter and Eid, turkey in December, BBQ cuts through summer — set in advance instead of edited at midnight.
- A price per kilogram on every surface that shows a price, recalculated whenever a promotion runs.
Points four and five are worth checking feature by feature before you buy: weight-based stock in particular is where by-weight plugins differ most, and a plugin that prices by weight does not necessarily count stock by weight.
What about cuts you can't pre-weigh?
Charge an estimate and reconcile afterwards — a whole chicken, a dry-aged côte de boeuf or a rolled roast has no final weight until it is cut. Three models exist, and the choice is mostly a payments question rather than a catalog one.
- Charge the estimate and absorb the variance. Simplest, and workable when you can portion within a tight tolerance. You eat the difference in both directions.
- Charge the estimate, then refund or invoice the difference. Accurate, and it costs you a manual step plus a payment fee on every order that moves.
- Authorise the card and capture the final amount after weighing. The cleanest model for the customer, and the one most constrained by your payment provider — authorisation holds expire, and the capture amount is usually allowed only within a limited margin above the authorised figure.
Whichever you pick, publish it on the product page in plain language before the customer commits. Catch-weight billing surprises are the one category of dispute where being technically right does not help you at all.
FAQ
How much sellable meat comes from a beef carcass?
Roughly 40% of the live animal reaches a customer as boneless trimmed beef, according to SDSU Extension. Fed beef dresses at 62–64% of live weight, and retail cuts run 55–75% of carcass weight depending on fatness, muscling and cutting style — about 65% for a typical boneless trimmed cut-out, which turns a 1,200 lb steer into a 750 lb carcass and 490 lb of boneless beef.
Should bone-in and boneless cuts be priced differently?
Yes, and by more than most price lists allow for. Virginia Tech Extension's lamb example takes one 45 lb cold carcass to about 38 lb of bone-in regularly trimmed cuts or about 22 lb of closely trimmed boneless cuts — so bone-in returns roughly 73% more sellable weight from the identical animal, and boneless needs a substantially higher price per kilogram to earn the same money.
What is a wastage percentage in an online butcher shop?
It is the share of the ordered weight lost to bone, trim or processing before the parcel is packed, configured per product. Setting it lets the store display both the ordered weight the customer pays for and the actual weight they will receive, and carry both figures through the cart, the order confirmation and the packing bench.
How do I stop customers ordering amounts I can't cut?
Use per-product minimum, maximum and step-interval settings on the weight field. A 300 g minimum keeps small orders above the cost of packing them, a maximum protects display-case stock from a single order, and a step matched to how you portion — 100 g for mince, 250 g for steaks — stops requests you would have to round anyway.