It's easy to look at a $25 hoodie sale and assume most of that is profit, especially since you never touch inventory or shipping directly. The reality is more layered than that, and it's worth walking through an actual example so the number stops feeling mysterious.
Say you're selling through Printify, connected to an Etsy storefront, at a $42 retail price for a mid-weight hoodie (a realistic price point for this product category once you account for base costs).
- Base hoodie cost (blank + printing) from your chosen provider: roughly $22-26, depending on the provider and hoodie style
- Etsy listing fee: $0.20, a small flat fee per listing regardless of whether it sells
- Etsy transaction fee: 6.5% of the total sale price, around $2.73 on a $42 sale
- Payment processing fee: roughly 3% + a small flat fee, around $1.55
- Etsy offsite ads fee (if applicable to your shop): 12-15% of the sale, only charged if the sale came through an Etsy-placed ad — around $5.50-6.30 when it applies
Adding the base cost, listing fee, transaction fee, and payment processing together (leaving offsite ads out for a non-ad sale), you're looking at roughly $26-30 in total cost against a $42 sale — leaving somewhere around $12-16 in actual profit, which is closer to 30-38% margin rather than the 100% it might feel like at a glance.
The offsite ads fee is the one that surprises people most, because it's not something you opt into per sale — Etsy can automatically enroll smaller shops in offsite ads, and if a sale happens to come through one of those ads, that 12-15% fee applies whether you wanted the ad or not (larger shops above a certain revenue threshold can opt out; smaller shops generally can't).
None of this means POD hoodies are a bad product — a 30-38% margin on a product with zero inventory risk and zero upfront cost is genuinely solid. The point is knowing the real number so your pricing, your promotions, and your expectations are built on what you actually keep, not on the sale price alone.