Free Tool
Print on Demand Profit Calculator
Work out what you actually keep on a print-on-demand sale once your supplier's base cost and shipping, the marketplace's transaction and payment fees, your coupons, and your ad spend have all come out — plus the retail price you'd need to hit the margin you want.
| Retail price | $0.00 |
| Discount / coupon | $0.00 |
| Shipping charged to buyer | $0.00 |
| What the buyer pays you | $0.00 |
| POD supplier base product cost | $0.00 |
| POD shipping cost | $0.00 |
| Supplier cost subtotal | $0.00 |
| Listing fee | $0.00 |
| Marketplace transaction fee | $0.00 |
| Payment processing (% + flat) | $0.00 |
| Ad spend | $0.00 |
| Total costs and fees | $0.00 |
| Net profit per sale | $0.00 |
| Sales per month | Net profit per month |
|---|---|
| 10 sales | $0.00 |
| 50 sales | $0.00 |
| 100 sales | $0.00 |
Assumptions: the marketplace transaction fee and the payment processing percentage are both charged on the discounted item price plus the shipping you collect, which is how Etsy currently works — if your marketplace charges only on the item price, set the shipping-charged field to 0 and add that shipping into the retail price instead. Fee rates change over time and payment processing differs by country, so every rate here is an editable input rather than a hardcoded figure: check your own seller dashboard and update them. One listing fee is charged per sale (Etsy re-charges $0.20 when a sale renews a listing); set it to 0 if that doesn't apply to you. Sales tax and VAT are ignored on the assumption the marketplace collects and remits them, and no income tax is deducted — see the Tax Set-Aside Calculator for that. Ad spend is treated as an average cost per order, not per click. Monthly figures simply multiply the per-sale profit by the volume and assume the same product, price and discount throughout. All amounts are shown in US dollars; the arithmetic works identically in any currency.
How do you calculate print on demand profit?
Print on demand looks like a high-margin business right up until you count everything that comes out of a sale. A $24 shirt with a $9.50 base cost feels like $14.50 of profit. It isn't. Add the supplier's shipping charge, the marketplace's cut of both the item and the shipping, the payment processor's percentage and its flat fee, the listing fee, and whatever you spent on ads to win that order, and a large slice of that $14.50 is gone before the money reaches your bank.
The calculation runs in a fixed order. Start with the retail price, subtract any coupon or sale percentage, and add the shipping you charge the buyer. That total — not your listed price — is what the marketplace sees, and it's what the percentage fees are applied to. Then take out your supplier's base product cost and their shipping charge, which together are your real cost of goods. Then take out the platform's fees: the transaction fee percentage, the payment processing percentage and its per-order flat fee, and the listing fee. Finally subtract your average ad spend per order. What's left is net profit per sale, and dividing it by what the buyer paid gives you net margin.
Two numbers matter more than the profit figure itself. The first is your break-even retail price: the price at which profit is exactly zero. Because the percentage fees scale with price and the supplier cost, listing fee, flat payment fee and ad spend don't, break-even is your fixed costs divided by the share of each dollar you keep after the percentage fees. Anything you list below that price loses money on every single order, no matter how many you sell.
The second is the price you need for a target margin. Working backwards from "I want 30% net" is far more useful than nudging a price up and down and re-checking. The calculator solves it directly, and it will tell you when a target is unreachable — if your percentage fees and target margin together exceed 100% of the sale, no price works, and the fix is a cheaper supplier or less ad spend, not a higher price.
Two traps catch most sellers. Coupons come off the top and hit margin much harder than they look: a 20% coupon on a thin margin can wipe it out entirely, which is why running one across a whole shop is worth modelling first. And ad spend is a genuine per-order cost — if you spent $150 on ads last month and got 100 orders, that's $1.50 off every order, whether or not the ad directly caused it. If you sell on Etsy specifically, the Etsy Fee & Profit Calculator covers the fee side in more detail for non-POD products.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good profit margin for print on demand?
There is no official benchmark, and it depends on your product and how much you spend on ads. What matters is that the margin is big enough to survive a bad month: once supplier cost, marketplace fees, payment processing, discounts and ad spend are taken out, a very thin margin can flip negative the moment you run a coupon or your supplier raises base prices. Use the target-margin field in the calculator to set the margin you want and read off the retail price that delivers it.
Should I charge shipping separately or offer free shipping on print on demand?
Mathematically it makes little difference to the marketplace — Etsy and most other platforms charge their transaction fee on the shipping you collect as well as the item price, so "free shipping" simply moves the same money into the item price. Enter the shipping you charge the buyer in the shipping field and your supplier's shipping charge separately, and the calculator will show you the net result either way.
Why is my print on demand profit lower than my supplier's profit calculator says?
Most supplier-side calculators subtract only the base product cost and their shipping charge. They don't know about your marketplace transaction fee, payment processing percentage and flat fee, listing fee, the coupons you run, or what you spend on ads to get the sale. Those five items are usually the difference between the figure your POD dashboard shows and what actually reaches your bank account.
Does this calculator include tax?
No. It works out profit before income tax, and it assumes any sales tax or VAT collected by the marketplace is passed straight to the tax authority rather than kept by you. If you're registered for VAT or sales tax on your own account, treat the result as your gross profit and set your own money aside for tax — a qualified accountant in your country can tell you what rate applies to you.
This prices one product. The toolkit runs the whole shop.
The calculator above tells you the margin on a single item at a single price. The Etsy Seller Bookkeeping Toolkit is the set of plug-and-play spreadsheets for the rest of it — a fee and profit calculator with a 10-item comparison sheet so you can price your whole catalogue side by side, a monthly income and expense tracker, and an order and inventory tracker with low-stock alerts. Works in Excel or Google Sheets.
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