How Much Does It Cost to Sell a Print on Demand T-Shirt on Etsy?
“Etsy takes about 10%” is the answer you will usually get, and it is technically true and practically useless — because on a print-on-demand shirt the marketplace fee is the smallest of the costs, and there are two lines that only appear on some orders and change the answer entirely.
Here is every cost on one shirt, in the order it lands.
Full walkthrough of the template used in this guide.
All figures below are labelled assumptions. The fee schedule shown is the one the tracker ships with; rates change and vary by seller country, so confirm current rates on Etsy’s fee page before pricing anything.
The costs that hit every single order
Shirt listed at $24.99, free shipping to the buyer.
| Cost | Amount | Why it exists |
|---|---|---|
| Supplier base cost | $9.50 | Garment + printing |
| Supplier shipping | $4.75 | Provider ships to the buyer; you offered free shipping, so it is yours |
| Transaction fee (6.5%) | $1.62 | Charged on item price plus any shipping you charge |
| Payment processing (3% + $0.25) | $1.00 | Etsy Payments; the flat fee bites hardest on cheap items |
| Listing fee | $0.20 | Charged at publish and again on each renewal, which a sale triggers |
| Total | $17.07 |
Leaving $7.92 — a 31.7% margin. That is a healthy POD shirt.
Notice the shape of it: Etsy’s own fees are $2.82, which is 11.3% of the sale and only 17% of your total cost. The supplier takes $14.25. Sellers who obsess over marketplace fees are optimising the small number.
The two costs that only appear on some orders
Offsite Ads commission. When Etsy places your listing in an external ad and that ad produces the sale, Etsy charges an advertising commission on the order. Above a revenue threshold, participation is mandatory. On this shirt:
| Line | Normal order | Offsite Ads order |
|---|---|---|
| Sale price | $24.99 | $24.99 |
| Supplier base + shipping | −$14.25 | −$14.25 |
| Etsy fees | −$2.82 | −$2.82 |
| Offsite Ads commission (15%) | — | −$3.75 |
| Net profit | $7.92 | $4.17 |
| Margin | 31.7% | 16.7% |
The same shirt clears 47% less. It is still profitable, which is the important part — but a shirt priced so tightly that a normal order clears 15% would be a loss on an Offsite Ads order, and you would only discover that at the end of a quarter.
Your own ad spend. Etsy Ads, Pinterest, whatever you run. The trap here is counting it only against the orders it was attributed to. Total monthly ad spend divided by total monthly orders — including the organic ones — is the number that describes the business. At a blended $1.20 an order, this shirt drops from $7.92 to $6.72.
The full stack on one order
| Line | Amount | Running |
|---|---|---|
| Sale price | $24.99 | $24.99 |
| Supplier base cost | −$9.50 | $15.49 |
| Supplier shipping | −$4.75 | $10.74 |
| Etsy transaction fee | −$1.62 | $9.12 |
| Payment processing | −$1.00 | $8.12 |
| Listing fee | −$0.20 | $7.92 |
| Blended ad cost | −$1.20 | $6.72 |
| Tax reserve (25% of net) | −$1.68 | $5.04 |
$5.04 out of $24.99. Just over 20% — and that is the good version, on a design with a healthy base cost, on an order that did not come through Offsite Ads and did not get refunded.
What a refund actually costs
This is the line most POD sellers have never quantified. A refunded shirt that has already been produced is not a sale that returned to zero — the print provider charged you and will not reverse it. You are $14.25 down, plus the fees you may not recover.
At $7.92 of profit per clean sale, one refund costs you roughly two good sales. Which makes a 2% refund rate quietly equivalent to a 4% cut in profitable volume, and makes the “excluded from profit but the cost still counted” behaviour in your order log something worth getting right rather than approximating.
What to do with these numbers
Price for the Offsite Ads order, not the normal one. If the worst realistic version of an order still clears a margin you would accept, every other order is upside. If it does not, you have built a business that is punished for growing.
Watch the flat fees on cheap products. The $0.25 processing fee and $0.20 listing fee are $0.45 regardless of price — 1.8% of a $24.99 shirt but 4.5% of a $9.99 sticker. Low-price POD products are structurally worse than their headline margin suggests, and the reason is arithmetic rather than strategy.
Prune dead listings. A design that has never sold is still charging you a listing fee on every four-month renewal. Twenty dead listings is $12 a year for nothing — trivial in isolation, but it is also twenty listings’ worth of attention that is not on the six designs producing your revenue.
For the whole cost model across platforms, including how this changes on Shopify or Amazon Merch, see the print on demand profit calculator guide. To work backwards from a margin you want to a price that delivers it, see how to price a POD t-shirt for a 30% margin. And if you are choosing between print providers, the supplier comparison covers the $14.25 half of this table, which is the half that matters most.
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The Print on Demand Profit & Order Tracker holds the Etsy fee schedule above as an editable preset — 6.5%, 3%, $0.25 — alongside presets for Amazon Merch, Amazon Seller, Shopify, eBay, TikTok Shop and your own site, so every order row calculates its own fees from the platform you sold on. Change a rate in one cell and the whole year recalculates. 8 tabs: Settings & Fee Presets, Product Catalog with live margin per design, a 300-row Order Log with refunded and cancelled orders excluded from profit automatically, Ad Spend & ROAS with a Scale / OK / Kill verdict, Best & Worst Sellers, Monthly P&L, Dashboard and a Tax & Deductions log. Sample data pre-filled. Excel + Google Sheets. Instant digital download — $14.99.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the total percentage Etsy takes on a print on demand sale?
On the fee schedule used throughout this article — 6.5% transaction, 3% + $0.25 payment processing and a $0.20 listing fee — a $24.99 shirt loses $2.82, which is 11.3% of the sale price. That rises to roughly 26.3% on any order that arrives through Offsite Ads, because the advertising commission is charged on top. Confirm the current rates on Etsy's own fee page before you build a price around them; percentages and flat fees both change and vary by seller country.
Do I pay the listing fee again when the shirt sells?
Yes, in effect. The listing fee is charged when you publish and again when the listing renews, and a listing renews automatically after four months or immediately after a sale if auto-renew is on. So on an active, selling design you are paying it roughly once per sale, which is why it belongs in the per-order cost rather than being treated as a one-off setup cost. On a design that never sells, you are paying it every four months for nothing — which is its own argument for pruning dead listings.
Can I avoid the Offsite Ads fee?
Only if your shop is below Etsy's revenue threshold, where participation is optional and can be switched off. Above that threshold participation is mandatory and the commission applies to any sale that comes through an Etsy-placed external ad within the attribution window. Since you cannot opt out, the correct response is to price so that an Offsite Ads order is still profitable rather than to hope those orders stay rare — the worked example below shows what that order actually clears.
Does the refund of a POD order cost me anything?
Usually yes, and it is worse than a lost sale. If the item has already been produced and shipped, the print provider has charged you the base cost and shipping and will not reverse it, so a refunded $24.99 shirt in the example below costs you $14.25 out of pocket rather than simply returning you to zero. That is roughly two clean sales to recover from one refund, which is why a refund column that removes the order from your profit total — but keeps the cost — matters more in POD than in almost any other model.