Print-on-demand looks deceptively simple: pick a design, list it on Etsy or Shopify, and let a supplier print and ship each order. But the retail price you set is not the money you keep — production cost, shipping, and marketplace fees all take a bite before anything counts as profit. This calculator does that subtraction for you, so you can price with real numbers instead of hoping the margin works out.
How it works
The engine takes four numbers: your retail price, what your supplier charges to produce one unit (base cost), what it charges to ship that unit, and the percentage your marketplace or payment processor takes. It first works out the marketplace fee in dollars by applying that percentage to the retail price, then subtracts base cost, shipping, and the fee from the retail price to get profit per item. Margin is simply that profit expressed as a percentage of the retail price, and total cost per item adds base cost, shipping, and the marketplace fee together so you can see everything that left your pocket in one number.
Every dollar figure is rounded to the cent at each step, the same way an order confirmation or payout statement would round it, so the numbers you see match what you'd actually find in a supplier invoice or a marketplace payout.
Worked example
Take a $25 t-shirt with an $8 base cost, $4.50 shipping, and a 9.5% marketplace fee (a reasonable stand-in for Etsy's roughly 6.5% transaction fee plus about 3% payment processing).
- Marketplace fee: $25 × 9.5% = $2.38
- Total cost per item: $8 + $4.50 + $2.38 = $14.88
- Profit per item: $25 − $8 − $4.50 − $2.38 = $10.12
- Profit margin: $10.12 ÷ $25 × 100 = 40.48%
That t-shirt clears just over ten dollars per sale — a healthy margin, but only because the $25 price point absorbs the fee comfortably. Drop the price to $18 without changing costs and the same math gives a much thinner cushion, which is exactly why this calculator is worth rerunning every time you test a new price point.
How to interpret your result
A positive profit per item with a margin in the 20–40% range is generally considered healthy for print-on-demand, per Printful's own guidance on the category — thinner margins are common on basic, highly competitive products like plain t-shirts, while non-apparel items such as mugs or phone cases often support wider ones because their base cost is lower relative to retail price. If your margin comes out below that, or negative, the fastest levers to pull are usually raising the retail price or switching to a lower-cost supplier or blank, since shipping and marketplace fee percentages are largely outside your control.
Treat this number as gross profit per unit sold, not your take-home pay. It doesn't subtract the time you spend designing and marketing, any monthly app or platform subscription fees, optional advertising spend, or returns and chargebacks — all of which reduce real-world profitability further. It's a per-item pricing check, run it before you commit to a retail price, not a substitute for full bookkeeping.
Methodology & sources
The formula: marketplaceFee = retailPrice × (marketplaceFeePercent / 100), profit = retailPrice − baseCost − shippingCost − marketplaceFee, margin = profit ÷ retailPrice × 100 (reported as 0% when retail price is $0, to avoid a divide-by-zero result), and totalCost = baseCost + shippingCost + marketplaceFee. All dollar figures are rounded to two decimal places at each step.
Marketplace fee percentages vary by channel and change over time, so always confirm the current schedule before pricing a real product — Etsy publishes its transaction and payment-processing fees on its official fees and payments policy page, and Printful's guidance on healthy print-on-demand profit margins is a useful benchmark for whether a given margin is competitive. This tool applies a single combined percentage for simplicity; real payout statements may break that cut into several separate line items that add up to roughly the same amount.