Most new print on demand sellers price a shirt by guessing: pick a number that sounds competitive, maybe add a couple dollars because the design took a while, and move on. Then two months later they run the actual math and find out half their "sales" were barely break even once Etsy's cut and the blank cost came out.
The short answer
Price a print on demand shirt by dividing your true, all in cost by one minus your target profit margin, not by guessing at a round number. If a shirt costs you $15 all in and you want a 40% margin, the formula is $15 ÷ (1 − 0.40) = $25.00.
For most print on demand sellers, start from a 30% to 40% target margin and build the price from your real costs; drop toward 20% only if you're deliberately running a high volume, low margin strategy and can absorb thinner cushions on returns and slow weeks.
What actually goes into the cost of a print on demand shirt?
Your real cost per shirt is higher than the blank's sticker price. It's the blank itself, the print cost (which varies by method and coverage), the platform's fulfillment fee, inbound shipping to the customer, and a share of your fixed costs like software subscriptions.
Sellers who price off just the blank and print cost consistently underprice, because those are the two numbers their provider shows them most prominently. The ones that get missed:
- Marketplace fees (Etsy, Shopify app fees, or similar)
- Payment processing on top of marketplace fees
- Returns and reprints, which run higher on apparel than on most product categories because of sizing and color expectations
- A design's unsold inventory risk if you're not purely print on demand for every variant
None of these show up on a single invoice. They show up in your bank balance at the end of the month, which is why so many sellers feel like they're busy but not profitable.
What does Etsy actually charge on a sale?
If you sell through Etsy, here's the current fee structure for a US shop, based on several 2026 fee breakdowns. Etsy updates these periodically, so check etsy.com/legal/fees for the authoritative number before you finalize your pricing.
| Fee | Amount | Applies to |
|---|---|---|
| Listing fee | $0.20 per listing | Charged when listed, and again every 4 months or on resale |
| Transaction fee | 6.5% | Item price plus shipping and gift wrap |
| Payment processing | 3% + $0.25 | Total amount charged to the buyer |
| Offsite Ads (under $10,000/yr sales) | 15%, optional | Sales that come from an Offsite Ad click |
| Offsite Ads (at or above $10,000/yr sales) | 12%, mandatory | Sales that come from an Offsite Ad click, capped at $100/order |
| Currency conversion | 2.5% | Only if listing and payout currencies differ |
Stack the first three together and Etsy typically takes somewhere around 10% to 15% of your final sale price before any Offsite Ads fee applies. On a $25 shirt with $4.99 shipping, that's roughly $1.95 in transaction fee, $1.12 in payment processing, and $0.20 in listing fee, around $3.27 total, or about 11% of the order.
That 11% to 15% has to come out of your margin before you even touch the cost of the blank. A lot of sellers do their pricing math as if Etsy's cut doesn't exist, then wonder why the bank balance doesn't match the "profit" column in their spreadsheet.
Markup vs margin: the mistake that quietly kills your profit
This is the single most common pricing error in print on demand, and it's not a rounding error, it's a different formula entirely.
Markup is profit divided by cost. Margin is profit divided by the selling price. They sound similar and they are not the same number.
Say your all in cost is $15 and you want a 50% markup. You'd price the shirt at $22.50. Feels right: cost plus half the cost again. But run the margin on that sale: $7.50 profit divided by $22.50 selling price is 33.3%, not 50%.
If what you actually want is a true 50% margin, you need the price to make profit equal half of the selling price. That means solving cost ÷ (1 − margin), or $15 ÷ 0.50 = $30.00. The gap between $22.50 and $30.00 on a single shirt is real money, and it compounds across every order you ship.
Use margin, not markup, when you're setting a target. Markup feels more intuitive because it's "add a percentage of what I paid," but margin is what actually determines how much of each sale you keep.
The formula, and a few worked examples
The formula is: price = cost ÷ (1 − target margin)
Using a $15 all in cost per shirt:
| Target margin | Price | Profit per shirt |
|---|---|---|
| 20% | $18.75 | $3.75 |
| 30% | $21.43 | $6.43 |
| 40% | $25.00 | $10.00 |
| 50% | $30.00 | $15.00 |
Round to a price that reads well. $25.00 rounds cleanly to $24.99 without meaningfully changing your margin. $21.43 is an odd number nobody uses at checkout; round it to $21.99 and you've actually improved your margin slightly rather than eroded it.
Your all in cost has to include more than the blank and the print. Fold in Etsy's roughly 11% to 15% cut, your estimated shipping subsidy if you offer free or discounted shipping, and a conservative allowance for returns, before you run the formula. A $15 "cost" that only covers the blank and the print, while ignoring a $3 to $4 average fee and shipping hit, is really closer to $18 to $19, and your margin math needs the real number to mean anything.
What's a reasonable margin for print on demand?
Most guides aimed at POD sellers put a sustainable target in the 20% to 40% range, with 40% treated as a solid benchmark once you've accounted for marketing spend and overhead. Below 20%, there's little room left to run ads, absorb a slow season, or cover an unusually high month of returns and exchanges, which happen more often on apparel than on most product categories because of sizing.
Where you land in that range depends on your strategy. A high volume shop competing mostly on price might deliberately run closer to 20% and make it up in order count. A smaller shop selling a distinctive design on a premium blank has more room to sit at 35% to 40%, because the buyer isn't comparison shopping on price alone.
Should you price to match competitors?
Check competitor pricing after you've built your own number, not before. A competitor's $19.99 listing tells you nothing about whether they're actually profitable at that price, what blank they're printing on, or whether they're subsidizing low prices with ad spend to build market share they can't sustain.
Use the comparison to answer one question: is my margin-based price wildly out of line with what buyers are actually paying for something similar? If you're $10 above the going rate for a comparable print and blank, that's worth investigating, maybe your design or presentation needs to justify the gap, or maybe you're overcosting somewhere. If you're in the same range, keep your number and move on.
Does better presentation let you charge more?
Within a given niche, yes, to a point. A listing with clean, accurate photos of the actual blank and color you're shipping tends to convert better and support a higher price than a listing with a flat mockup that looks nothing like the real garment, because buyers are pricing in their confidence that what arrives matches what they saw. This is the one place we'll mention what we build: Drop Studio exists because the mockup is doing real selling work in that gap between "I like this design" and "I trust this will look right on me," and a mockup that undersells the actual product leaves margin on the table regardless of how well you priced the shirt.
Common pricing mistakes to avoid
- Pricing off the blank cost alone and forgetting fees, shipping, and returns
- Confusing markup with margin, which systematically underprices every shirt
- Copying a competitor's price without knowing your own cost structure
- Ignoring Offsite Ads once you cross the $10,000 annual threshold, where the fee becomes mandatory on ad-driven sales
- Never revisiting prices after a provider raises base costs or Etsy changes its fee structure
- Treating "profitable on paper" as the same thing as "profitable after fees," when the two numbers are often several dollars apart per shirt
Run the math once, write down your real all in cost, and apply the formula. It takes fifteen minutes and it's the difference between a shop that looks busy and one that's actually making money.