POD T-Shirt Pricing Guide
T-shirts are the highest-volume POD category and also the most price-competitive — this walks through base cost ranges, where buyers' price expectations sit, and how to land on a number that's both competitive and actually profitable.
By Marginory team · Online sellers with hands-on experience across Etsy, Shopify & PODUpdated Fee data verified against official platform documentation
Typical base cost ranges
| Shirt type | Typical base cost range |
|---|---|
| Basic cotton tee | $8-11 |
| Premium/soft-style tee | $11-14 |
| Tri-blend / performance fabric | $12-16 |
| All-over print | $14-20 |
Ranges are illustrative — check current pricing for your specific provider and shirt style, as base costs are updated periodically.
Where buyer price expectations sit
Most successful POD t-shirts sell in the $18-30 range. Pricing well below $18 often signals low quality to buyers (and leaves almost no margin after fees), while pricing well above $30 requires either a strongly differentiated design or an established brand to justify the premium in a category where buyers can easily compare alternatives.
Worked example across two channels
Base cost $10.50, target margin 25%:
| Channel | Fee rate | Required price |
|---|---|---|
| Etsy (no Offsite Ads) | ~9.75% | $21.03 |
| Shopify (own traffic) | ~2.9% | $14.79 |
Shopify's lower platform fee doesn't mean the sale is automatically cheaper for the buyer to reach — remember Shopify sales generally require you to fund your own traffic (ads), a cost this table doesn't include.
Design quality changes what you can charge
A t-shirt with a generic, widely-available design has to compete primarily on price. A t-shirt with a distinctive, well-executed design targeting a specific niche audience can command a meaningful premium — often enough to justify a higher price point without hurting conversion, since buyers in that niche have fewer close substitutes to compare against.