Print-on-demand is the easiest way to start an Etsy shop: no inventory, no upfront spend, upload a design and you're selling. It's also the easiest way to sell a hundred shirts and discover you made almost nothing. The reason is simple — POD stacks two sets of costs on top of each other: your print provider's, and Etsy's. Here's what the numbers actually look like in 2026.
The three layers between the sale price and you
Every POD order passes through three deductions before anything is yours:
- Base product cost — what Printify or Printful charges to make the item.
- Fulfilment shipping — what the provider charges to send it, which is usually not the same as what your buyer paid you.
- Etsy's fees — listing, transaction and payment processing on the full order.
Retail sellers only deal with the third layer. POD sellers deal with all three, which is why POD margins are structurally thinner than they look on a spreadsheet that only counts Etsy.
What the base cost really is in 2026
Printify is generally the cheaper of the two: a Gildan 5000 t-shirt starts around $8.80, and a Bella+Canvas 3001 around $10.98. A paid plan cuts those (roughly $5.92 and $8.77 respectively), but Printify raised its Premium monthly price from $29 to $39 in February 2026 — $24.99/month if you pay annually. Printful runs higher per item (a Bella+Canvas around $11.69 versus Printify's $9.04 on comparable products), with an optional Growth plan at $24.99/month that unlocks discounts and becomes free once you pass roughly $12,000 in annual qualifying sales.
Then shipping: a single US t-shirt costs about $3.99–$5.99 to fulfil, and international orders run $7–$15, sometimes over $20. All in, one US t-shirt costs you roughly $13–$15 on a free plan, or $11–$13 on a paid one — before Etsy has touched the order at all.
Note the trap in the subscription plans: a $39/month plan only pays for itself if your volume is high enough. At 20 orders a month it adds nearly $2 of cost to every single order.
Now add Etsy's cut
For a US seller in 2026, Etsy takes:
- $0.20 listing fee, which renews every time the item sells.
- 6.5% transaction fee on item price + shipping + gift wrap.
- Payment processing — 3% + $0.25 for US sellers, higher and with a bigger fixed component elsewhere.
Sell a shirt at $24.99 with $4.99 shipping — a $29.98 order. Transaction fee: $1.95. Processing: $1.15. Listing: $0.20. That's $3.30 to Etsy, about 11% of the order.
The full worked example
Same $29.98 order, Gildan 5000 on a free Printify plan:
- Money in: $29.98
- Base cost: −$8.80
- Fulfilment shipping: −$4.99
- Etsy fees: −$3.30
You keep about $12.89 — a 43% margin, which sounds excellent. But that's the best-case order. Route the same sale through Offsite Ads at 15% and Etsy takes another $4.50, dropping you to about $8.39 (28%). Sell from the UK, EU or Türkiye and you also pay a regulatory operating fee, possibly a 2.5% currency conversion fee, and VAT charged on top of your Etsy fees — each shaving the margin further.
This is why published figures land where they do: healthy POD net margins usually sit in the 20–35% range after product cost, shipping, fees and a realistic allowance for ads or discounts, and Etsy+Printify sellers commonly report $5–$8 per shirt in practice. If you're spending 15–20% of revenue on Etsy Ads, expect 15–20%. Premium items do better — a $44.99 pet portrait sweatshirt with a $14 production cost can clear $22 and roughly 49% — because the fixed costs are spread over a bigger sale.
Why cheap products are the real margin killer
Notice that $0.25 processing fee and $0.20 listing fee don't shrink when your price does. On a $29.98 order they're 1.5% of revenue; on a $12 order they're nearly 4%. Combine that with a base cost that barely moves and a $12 POD item can be genuinely unprofitable while a $45 one is comfortable. If your shop is a mix, the cheap listings are almost certainly subsidised by the expensive ones — and Etsy's dashboard will never tell you that, because it reports revenue, not per-product profit.
Where POD sellers lose track
The math above is clean because it's one order. Across a month it gets messy in ways that a spreadsheet quietly gets wrong: base costs change when a provider swaps or raises prices, shipping varies by destination, Offsite Ads attach to some orders and not others, refunds return most Etsy fees but never your production cost (the shirt was already printed and shipped), and non-US fees compound. Each is small. Together they're the difference between the margin you assumed and the one you got.
Check your own numbers
You can estimate Etsy's share of a single POD sale — including the country-specific rates and currency fees most tools skip — with our free Etsy fee calculator. That pins down one of the three layers in seconds.
The other two layers are yours, and they're where POD margins actually live. Seller Profit Lens handles both: it connects to your shop read-only, reads the fees Etsy really charged to the cent — Offsite Ads, VAT-on-fees, currency conversion and all — subtracts the base cost and shipping you enter per product, and reconciles to Etsy's own totals so you can see which designs genuinely earn and which ones are paying for the privilege of being printed. It's in free beta right now. Join the waitlist →