A busy print-on-demand shop with nothing much in the bank is how design-driven sellers lose money: the sales number climbs, but it’s gross — and gross is a story about revenue, not about what you keep. This workbook is for the other half of the business: knowing which of your designs, on which products, on which platforms, actually make you money once every fee is netted out.
Want a taste first? The free POD Profit Calculator nets one listing right in your browser. This workbook does your whole catalog.
What a print-on-demand sale really nets
A $28 shirt can net you $7.64 on one platform and a couple of dollars on another. An $18 mug that sells beautifully nets barely a dollar and a half once the base cost and the shipping come out. None of that shows up in a storefront dashboard, which is built to celebrate sales, not to net them.
The Profit Calculator nets it for you. One row per listing — a design on one product on one platform. Fill the sale price, base cost, fees, and shipping, and your net profit per sale and your margin compute automatically. One formula handles both platform models:
- Integrated (Etsy, Shopify + a print partner): you set the price and pay the costs — sale price minus base cost, shipping, and fees is your net.
- Royalty (Amazon Merch, Redbubble, TeePublic): the platform pays you a cut that’s already net — enter the royalty and there’s nothing to subtract.
That’s how one grid can compare an Etsy listing and an Amazon Merch listing honestly, side by side.
Which designs actually make money
The Design Dashboard is the answer the whole file exists to give. It rolls up every sale by design — units, net profit, and net per unit — across every product and platform, and flags each design Best seller, Steady, Underperformer, or Dead design relative to your top earner. Below it, a platform rollup shows where your catalog really earns: which platform moves the most units, and which one keeps you the most money. Feed your winners; retire the dead designs cluttering your shop.
Price so the money shows up
Most sellers price by copying the top listing and hoping. The Pricing Planner works the other way around: enter your cost stack once, set a target profit per sale or a target margin, and it back-solves the exact price to charge — plus your break-even, so you never list a product that quietly loses money. The Platform Comparison does the same for placement: lay one design across every platform, net each out, and the highest is flagged, so “where should I list this?” becomes a number instead of a guess.
Own it, don’t rent it
This is a file you keep — sitting between a blank spreadsheet (free, but you build every formula yourself) and a monthly analytics subscription (overkill, and gone the day you stop paying). Buy it once and use it across every design and platform, forever. It opens in Excel, Google Sheets, and LibreOffice, and ships with a native Google Sheets version you copy to your Drive in one click — no import, nothing to rebuild.
When your shop outgrows a spreadsheet — real inventory, restocks, and orders across channels — it graduates cleanly to Ardent Seller, the living version of this workbook: your designs and products become tracked items, your sales become transactions, and your true profit is computed for you across the whole operation. There’s a free plan to start.
What’s included
A 7-tab workbook — Read Me, Profit Calculator, Design Dashboard, Sales Log, Platform Comparison, Pricing Planner, and Platform Fee Reference — plus five PDF guides: a Start Here guide, a Profit & Pricing guide, a Design-Catalog & Platform-Strategy guide, the Platform Economics Reference, and Printable Tracker Sheets. It’s an instant digital download, pre-loaded with a worked example you overwrite with your own designs.
Every fee, base cost, and royalty in the examples is illustrative — platforms revise their rates often, so you enter your own current numbers. This is a business reference, not financial, accounting, or tax advice, and is not affiliated with or endorsed by any print provider or marketplace.
