[Income Report] The Slow Half of My Print on Demand Year
Six months. 975 units sold. Roughly $9,750 in profit before the subscription fee comes out.
That averages a little over $1,600 a month, and the average is the least useful number in the whole report. My best month did double my worst. My biggest catalog produced my smallest month. If you are selling print on demand right now and watching your own numbers bounce with no obvious reason, that pattern is probably not you doing something wrong.
I wrote up the store's first six months here. This is the six that came after, and they behaved completely differently.
What I did with these six months
One thing, repeated: keep posting.
Every month I added more products to the Amazon store, and every month I added at least one product type I had never listed before. Not new designs on the same shirt. A different item entirely, so the same design ideas could land in front of a different kind of buyer.
That is the whole strategy for the half year. The catalog went from 155,000 products live in January to 268,000 by the end of June. Nothing clever, no relaunch, no new tactic. More surface area, month after month.
Etsy got treated completely differently, and I want to be honest about why.
Back in January I took the designs that were already selling on Amazon and pushed them onto Etsy too. Then I basically stopped. No new uploads, no maintenance, nothing. Etsy is a different game where each listing costs you and volume is not the lever, so throwing thousands of products at it does not work the way it does on Amazon. Building it properly would have meant splitting my attention, and I would rather run one system well than two badly.
So Etsy has been sitting there on its January inventory for six months. That is not a strategy. That is a store I parked, and the numbers reflect it.
The numbers
Amazon first, since that is where the work went.
- January — 155,000 products live, 117 units, about $1,170
- February — 175,000 products live, 107 units, about $1,070
- March — 184,000 products live, 175 units, about $1,750
- April — 200,000 products live, 189 units, about $1,890
- May — 223,000 products live, 172 units, about $1,720
- June — 268,000 products live, 101 units, about $1,010
That is 861 units and roughly $8,610 across the six months.
Etsy, running on designs I uploaded in January and never touched again:
- January — 32 units, about $320
- February — 19 units, about $190
- March — 21 units, about $210
- April — 14 units, about $140
- May — 11 units, about $110
- June — 17 units, about $170
114 units, roughly $1,140. A parked store still paid for itself, which is the part of print on demand I still find slightly unreasonable.
The $10 per unit is what is left after Amazon takes its cut and the supplier bills me for printing and shipping. It is not what lands in my account untouched.
What the $10 does and doesn't include
What's already taken out?
Amazon's cut of the sale, and what the supplier charges me to print the item and ship it to the buyer. That happens per unit, so the figure holds whether I sell one or two hundred.
What's still sitting outside it?
The flat $39.99 a month for the Amazon seller account, which comes off the total rather than off each sale, so roughly $240 across these six months. Etsy's own listing and transaction costs sit outside the Etsy figures the same way.
So is it profit or revenue?
It's a working number, not an accountant's. Close enough to plan with, not close enough to file.
Put the two stores together and it is 975 units and about $9,750 over six months.
A catalog does not pay you evenly. It pays you when the buyers turn up.
So what do six months of this actually say?
Three things, and the first one explains most of the rest.
This business is seasonal, and the swing is bigger than people expect. January and February are the dead months. Everybody just spent their money in December. My February did 107 units on a catalog of 175,000 products, and there was nothing wrong with the store. The buyers were simply not shopping.
Which means comparing one month to the month before it tells you almost nothing. A drop from December to January is not a problem to solve. A rise from February to March is not a win to celebrate. You are reading weather and calling it climate.
📅 Hold the season still. Line February up against last February, not against January. Any other comparison is mostly measuring the calendar, not your store.
The comparison that actually carries information is the same month against the same month a year earlier. February against last February. Q4 against last Q4. That is the only way to see whether the thing you built is working, because it holds the season still and lets you look at the store.
Second: my worst month came on my biggest catalog. June had 268,000 products live, the largest the store has ever been, and it sold 101 units. Fewer than January, on 113,000 more products.
That would be alarming if I read it as cause and effect. It is not. June is a slow month, and I had also just done my biggest single upload of the half year, which means most of those 45,000 new products had been live for a couple of weeks and had not been found by anyone yet. New listings do not sell on day one. They need time to get indexed, to get shown, to collect the tiny bit of history that makes Amazon willing to show them again.
So the catalog and the income run on different clocks. What I add this month is not for this month.
Third: the base is moving, even if a single month hides it. Look past the swings and the floor of this half year sat around 100 to 190 units a month. The floor of the store's first six months sat around 82 to 140, and that was with a catalog a quarter of this size. Slow months now clear what decent months used to.
That is the actual return on posting more. Not a spike. A floor that stops dropping as far.
What I am building is not this month's income. It is what Q4 is allowed to be.
Because the real read on all of this is still ahead. Last Q4 the store did 542 units in December on 65,000 products. It is now sitting on four times that catalog, with more product types, going into the season where people actually buy. If the extra surface area is worth anything, that is where it shows up, and if it is worth nothing I will have six months of numbers saying so.
Either way I get an answer instead of a guess.
Until then the job does not change. Keep adding products, keep adding new types of product, keep the system running, and stop reading meaning into a slow Tuesday in February.
Keep building,
Nick T
