542: The UGLY Truth About Print On Demand That No Guru Will Tell You

Podcast: Download (Duration: 13:23 — 15.6MB)

The ugly truth about print on demand is that the margins are much thinner than any guru will admit. A quality Printful shirt costs about $16.25 plus $4.69 shipping for a total of $20.94, so hitting even a $5 profit means selling at $26, and hitting $10 means charging $31, which is out of reach for anyone who is not a celebrity or influencer. On this solo episode of the My Wife Quit Her Job podcast I walked through the real numbers of running a print on demand business, and this post is the organized version of that breakdown.

Print on demand is easy to start, and that is exactly why so many people fail at it. There is no inventory, no fulfillment, and no upfront capital, but the flip side is razor thin margins, limited product control, and direct competition from Temu shirts that land for about $7 including shipping.

Below is the honest math, the DTF printer alternative I switched to at Bumblebee Linens, and the specific negatives of print on demand that no guru will tell you.

Get My Free Mini Course On How To Start A Successful Ecommerce Store

If you are interested in starting an ecommerce business, I put together a comprehensive package of resources that will help you launch your own online store from complete scratch. Be sure to grab it before you leave!

Click Here To Download

Key takeaways

• The Printful math: a quality shirt is $16.25 plus $4.69 shipping = $20.94 all in. To make just $5 profit you have to price at $26, and to make $10 you have to price at $31. Very few buyers will pay that for a non celebrity brand.
• To net $100,000 a year at $5 per shirt, you need to sell 20,000 shirts a year, or about 55 shirts every day. That is a real business, not a passive side income.
• Buying a DTF (direct to film) printer flips the math. My Sublistar Star 4 printer paid itself off in about 3 months, and a shirt now costs me about $5 all in ($4 blank plus $1 ink), which is a 3x margin at a $15 sale price.
• You have to be familiar with Photoshop and a bit of scripting to run a DTF printer efficiently. I wrote my own Photoshop script that pulls orders from my site and packs designs onto the film automatically.
• Temu now sells fully printed shirts for about $7 including shipping (7 to 15 day delivery from China). A viral design will get copied on Temu inside a week.
• Common POD gotchas: 97 percent of Printful orders ship within 5 business days (about half in 3), product discontinuations force manual re-creation of listings, stock outs on popular sizes only surface after a customer orders, and most POD providers do not allow custom packaging or inserts without an upcharge.

What is the real profit margin on print on demand?

The real profit margin on print on demand is around $5 to $10 per shirt at retail prices most buyers will not accept, which is why so few POD stores scale into full time income. A quality Printful tee runs $16.25 with printing on one side, shipping adds $4.69, and your all-in cost is $20.94, so a $26 sale price only nets $5.

If you want a $10 profit, you have to charge $31, and most people will not pay that for a shirt from a brand they have never heard of. Cheaper Printful blanks exist, but the quality drops quickly, and quality is what saves POD from being a one-time-purchase business.

You do control retail pricing, but the market caps you. The most I have ever paid for a shirt is $40 at a concert, and that was a memento with emotional value. A pure design tee has no such premium.

How much do you have to sell to make a living from POD?

To net $100,000 a year in print on demand at a $5 per shirt margin, you have to sell 20,000 shirts a year, which works out to about 55 shirts every single day. That is a genuine ecommerce operation with real marketing spend, not a set-it-and-forget-it side income.

The math looks better at $10 per shirt (10,000 shirts a year, about 27 shirts a day), but hitting $10 per shirt means pricing at $31, which crushes conversion. So the math tightens either way.

This is why POD is a good first ecommerce experiment and a bad long term business model unless you either build a real brand or move fulfillment in-house.

Why I bought a DTF printer for my ecommerce store

I bought my own DTF printer (a Sublistar Star 4) in 2023 because print on demand margins on my custom linens were too thin to run a real business on, and paying for my own printer let me collapse cost of goods from about $16 down to about $5 per shirt. Everything printed after the payoff month is basically gravy.

DTF (direct to film) is the same technology many POD companies use behind the scenes. You print your design onto a special film, dust it with DTF powder, bake it in an oven for about 60 seconds, then heat press the film onto the garment. Print quality is dark, crisp, and holds up through many washings.

The Sublistar Star 4 runs about $6,000 to $10,000 depending on configuration. If you sign up for their newsletter, they occasionally run sales (they had a $3,000 deal in 2023). We recouped the printer cost in profit within about 3 months of ownership.

How the printed-in-house cost math actually breaks down

Doing it in house drops cost of goods per shirt from about $16.25 (Printful) to about $5 (in house) using US-blank shirts, or as low as $2 using bulk China-sourced blanks. That is a 3x to 7x margin improvement at the same retail price, which lets you either lower prices to sell more units or keep prices flat and buy ads profitably.

An apples-to-apples US blank tee runs about $4 or less in bulk. Bulk from China lands closer to $1 per shirt. Ink and DTF consumables run about $1 per shirt for a complex design with heavy solid coverage, and closer to 25 to 30 cents for simpler designs like our handkerchiefs.

That means the same shirt Printful charges $16.25 for costs me about $5 to produce, and I can list at $15 and still triple my money. At $15, far more people actually buy.

The hidden work of running a DTF printer

DTF printers take real weekly maintenance, and running one efficiently at volume means being fluent in Photoshop and comfortable with a bit of scripting. The machine is messier than a desktop inkjet, needs cleaning at least once a week, and the print head clogs if you skip periodic cleaning cycles or leave it idle for too long.

I have ruined a couple of print heads learning this the hard way. The rule is that a DTF printer is not a machine you use occasionally. Consistent use is required or the heads clog and you pay to replace them.

Efficient production also requires packing many order designs onto one film sheet so you do not waste material. I wrote my own Photoshop script that pulls the day’s orders off my website, aligns them, packs them tightly, and sends them to the printer. Without something similar, throughput drops fast and film waste eats your margin gain.

Product and design limitations of print on demand

Print on demand ties you to a narrow catalog of blanks, and no POD company will print on merchandise it does not stock, so anything custom is off the table. If a customer wants a specific branded towel or an odd substrate, you cannot fulfill it through POD, but with your own printer you can print on almost anything, including canvas shoes.

Some POD providers restrict where a design can go on the garment. Custom Cap (the provider my kids use for kidincharge.com) does not allow prints on garment sleeves. Owning the printer removes every one of those rules.

Print quality is also inconsistent across POD networks. Printify, for example, is many different contractors under one interface, so the same order placed with two providers can look noticeably different. When we ordered 50 shirts through a POD provider for my daughter’s school team, about 20 percent came back with poor print quality, and by the time they were refunded there was no time left in the season to reorder.

The annoying operational issues of print on demand

Print on demand is not truly set-it-and-forget-it. My kids’ store at kidincharge.com is four years old, and in that time countless products have been discontinued, each of which forces us to rebuild the listing from scratch on the POD site. Multiply that across 50 or 100 or 1,000 products and it is a real time cost.

Stock outs are the other constant. Providers regularly run out of medium size shirts (the most common size), and you only find out when a customer has already ordered on your site. One holiday season we had to scramble to a different shirt brand with no time to check the print quality first.

Branding is limited too. Most POD companies do not allow custom inserts, and any that do charge extra, which further squeezes an already thin margin. Since printed apparel has almost zero barriers to entry, brand is what separates a POD store from a commodity, so this restriction hurts.

Print on demand vs in-house printing (DTF) at a glance

Why Temu is the biggest print on demand threat right now

Temu is the single biggest threat to print on demand shops in 2024 because it sells fully printed shirts direct from China at about $7 including shipping, which is a third of what your POD store has to charge to make a profit. Delivery takes 7 to 15 days, and buyers keep ordering anyway.

The other Temu problem is design theft. If you build a design that starts to sell, expect a copy of it on Temu inside a week at a price you cannot match through a POD provider. In-house printing is the only way to bring your unit cost close to competitive, and even then you win on shipping speed and quality, not price.

Print on demand is still fine as a way to dip a toe into ecommerce and validate whether people want your designs. If you plan to make life-changing money selling printed merchandise, you almost certainly need to do more of it yourself.

Frequently asked questions

Is print on demand still profitable in 2024?

Print on demand is still profitable but only at a small scale, because the $5 to $10 margin per shirt at $26 to $31 retail limits both volume and marketing budget. Most POD stores that scale past hobby income either build a real brand with premium pricing or move fulfillment in house.

How much money can you actually make with print on demand?

To net $100,000 a year at a typical $5 per shirt margin you need to sell about 20,000 shirts a year, or 55 shirts every day. That is a real ecommerce operation with real marketing spend, so treat POD like a business, not a passive income scheme.

What is a DTF printer and is it worth the investment?

A DTF (direct to film) printer prints your design onto a special film that you powder, bake, and heat press onto fabric, producing dark crisp prints that survive many washes. At a $6,000 to $10,000 price point it pays back quickly if you already have volume, and my Sublistar Star 4 paid for itself in about 3 months.

Which is better for margins, Printful or Printify?

Printful gives more consistent quality and shipping because it is a single-supplier operation, while Printify is a marketplace of many contractors where results can vary significantly between providers even on the same order. Margins are similar on both, so choose Printful for consistency and Printify only if a specific product is exclusive to it.

Can print on demand compete with Temu on price?

No, print on demand cannot compete with Temu on price because Temu sells fully printed shirts for about $7 including shipping direct from China, and no POD provider can get anywhere near that cost. The only ways to compete are in-house printing, faster shipping, higher print quality, and building a real brand that justifies the premium.

Do you have to know Photoshop to run a POD or in-house printing business?

You can start a POD store with almost no design skill by buying or commissioning designs, but running an in-house printer efficiently requires Photoshop (or similar) fluency to pack designs onto film without waste. Scripting Photoshop to auto-pull orders from your site becomes worth the effort once you are printing more than a few shirts a day.

What are the biggest hidden downsides of print on demand?

The biggest hidden downsides of print on demand are constant product discontinuations that force listing rebuilds, hidden stock outs on popular sizes that only surface after a customer orders, inconsistent print quality across providers, restricted branding and packaging, and long fulfillment windows that hurt during holidays. All of these get worse the larger your catalog grows.

Ready To Get Serious About Starting An Online Business?

If you are really considering starting your own online business, then you have to check out my free mini course on How To Create A Niche Online Store In 5 Easy Steps.

In this 6 day mini course, I reveal the steps that my wife and I took to earn 100 thousand dollars in the span of just a year. Best of all, it's absolutely free!