Print-on-Demand Profit Calculator

How print-on-demand profit works

In a print-on-demand (POD) business you design products and a third-party supplier such as Printful or Printify prints and ships them only when a customer orders. You never touch inventory. In exchange, four separate parties take a cut of every sale before you see any of it.

The fee structure

Platform or marketplace fee: charged by Etsy, Shopify or Redbubble as a percentage of the sale price.
Etsy charges 6.5% transaction fee plus 3% + $0.25 payment processing.
Redbubble and the other artist marketplaces work the other way around: they set a base price and you name a markup above it.

Payment processing: usually 2.9% to 3% plus a fixed 25 to 30 cents, charged by Stripe, PayPal or the marketplace itself. On a $29.99 shirt that fixed quarter is 0.8% of the sale. On a $6 sticker it is 4.2%, which is why sticker shops live or die on multi-item orders.

Production cost: what the POD supplier charges you per item. A basic t-shirt runs about $12 to $15, a mug $8 to $12, art prints $4 to $10.

Advertising cost: if you run paid ads on Facebook, Pinterest or Etsy Ads, divide the total spend by the number of sales it produced. Not by total sales, only the ones the ads brought.

Profit formula

Platform cut = sale price × platform fee %
Payment cut = sale price × payment fee % + fixed fee
Net revenue = sale price − platform cut − payment cut
Profit = net revenue − production cost − advertising cost per sale
Margin = (profit ÷ sale price) × 100

Worked example

A $29.99 t-shirt on Etsy, $12 production cost from Printful, no ads:

• Platform fee at 6.5%: $1.95
• Payment processing at 3% + $0.25: $1.15
• Net revenue: $29.99 − $3.10 = $26.89
• Minus production: $26.89 − $12.00 = $14.89 profit, a 49.7% margin

Now put $2 of Etsy Ads behind every sale and the profit falls to $12.89 and the margin to 43%. Push it to $8 and you are at $6.89 and 23%, which is where most people discover their “profitable” shop was really an advertising business paying itself minimum wage. The break-even line the calculator prints is the one to watch: at $12 production and $8 of ads, a shirt has to sell for $22.38 just to come out even.

Target margins

Anything from 25 to 40% is healthy for print-on-demand. Twenty percent is about the floor for staying competitive on a marketplace once ads are involved. Below 15% the honest options are raising the price or cutting the ad spend, and raising the price works more often than sellers expect, because a $32 shirt and a $28 shirt convert about the same on a design somebody actually wants.