How print on demand pricing is built, why the cheapest unit price is rarely the cheapest order, and how to work out whether a product will actually make money.
Print on demand pricing looks complicated because it is quoted in pieces. Once you know what the pieces are, comparing suppliers takes about five minutes and you stop being surprised by the total at checkout.
The three parts of an order
- The garment. Driven by brand, weight and fabric far more than by which supplier you use. A heavyweight organic tee costs multiples of a basic one everywhere.
- The decoration, charged per print area. This is the line people forget. A front print and a back print are two areas and cost roughly twice one. A stitched chest logo plus a printed back is also two.
- The shipping, set by destination and weight. Hoodies cost more to post than t-shirts for reasons no supplier controls.
That is the whole bill with us. No setup fee, no monthly subscription, no cut of your sale price. UK prices include VAT at 20%, and your invoice breaks out each part.
Why cheapest per unit is usually not cheapest
A supplier can always show a lower garment price by quoting a lighter blank, a single print area, or a rate that assumes a monthly fee you have not counted. Two cheaper-looking quotes can land more expensive once shipping and the second print area are in. The only fair comparison is the total for one real order of the thing you actually sell, delivered to the address you actually ship to.
The bigger trap is overseas pricing. A unit price that undercuts a UK maker by a pound or two stops looking clever when the parcel takes a fortnight, attracts a customs charge, and generates a refund request. A refunded order costs you the garment, the postage and the customer.
Working out your margin
Take your retail price, subtract the three parts above, and subtract whatever your sales channel charges. What is left is the real margin, and it is usually thinner than people expect on a single-item order because shipping is a fixed cost spread over one thing. This is why multi-item orders matter so much to on-demand sellers: the second item in a parcel carries almost no extra postage and is therefore far more profitable than the first.
There is a margin calculator on our homepage that does this for a few common garments if you would rather not do the arithmetic.
When bulk is genuinely cheaper
Bulk wins when you already know the sizes and the design will not change: a team kit-out, an event, a proven repeat seller. It loses when you are guessing, because the saving per unit is smaller than the cost of the units that never sell. Test on demand, then bulk the winner. We quote larger runs rather than charging the catalogue rate, so ask if you have one.