Pricing and Selling T-Shirts Online | Etsy T-Shirt Business Tips

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Hey Friends! Dave here with Transfer Express, and today we’re talking all about pricing your t-shirts.

With blank apparel costs rising and custom printed t-shirts being a hot product across online marketplaces like Etsy, we’ve heard tons of conversation around pricing strategy and wanted to share a few tips we’ve picked up along the way that can help you and your growing t-shirt business.

So let’s dive right in.

My first suggestion when you’re wondering about your own pricing is to do a little research and check the competition. I don’t mean just random t-shirts across Etsy, but go to Etsy and search what you’ll be selling, or what you think your customers would search to find your products.

So for this example, let’s say we want to release some patriotic t-shirts and so we can just search ‘USA t-shirts” or “Fourth of July t-shirts” into the search bar right here in Etsy.

Our search turns up not only some sweet inspiration, but 10, 15, up to 28 bucks here depending on the style and design. So there’s our pricing range. But before we move any further, let’s take a look here at some of these lower priced options, because what you see here on the search screen is not what you’re going to pay. As you can see, the price listed has a little plus sign right next to it when we get to the product page because you’ll typically find a onesie or youth size listed as an option with the lowest price.

But when you go to select an adult size, now we’re looking at real pricing. Here in the mid to high teens, and that’s more realistic for a t-shirt. Of course, this varies from niche to niche, and some audiences or topics can be more expensive than others, with this specific example being fairly generic with simple artwork, these may be priced lower than other graphic tees.

Of course, you can harness that option pricing trick for yourself, packing in smaller sizes or youth, baby and toddler options - but some customers find this misleading. It’s up to you whether you want to try and get them to click with a low, low price, or if you want to be more honest about your pricing, options and sizing and split those cheaper apparel options over to their own listing, of course with that little Etsy listing fee.

Another option you can use to try and get your customers to click is using a sale to get this green pricing. All you have to do is swing over in the marketing tab in your shop manager and setup a sale using the sales and discounts selection. We most commonly see the ‘percentage off’ feature used to give that nice slashed out price with a “30% off” or “15% off” next to it.

Now, my go-to pricing strategy for selling t-shirts retail or on-demand is cost times 2. So essentially take all of the costs associated with the production of the t-shirt and double it, giving you (in most cases) more than enough profit for your time. So, for example, if we pay $5 for our blank t-shirt, and our print costs $1.50 per shirt, that’s $6.50 total in cost, which means I wouldn’t sell this shirt for less than $13. Which, if we plug this into our research case we just did for those patriotic tees, we would fit perfectly in the market we’re looking to sell to, with even some wiggle room- maybe to even include free shipping if we charged an extra $5 or 6 bucks on top for a retail price of $18 or $19 dollars for the shirt.

Mentioning free shipping is a great way to start talking about impulse buys. As any ecommerce pro will tell you, you want to reduce any point of friction when you’re trying to close an online sale, so those extra steps, clicks and yeah, even added taxes and shipping fees, can make your customers pause and reconsider the purchase before they click that checkout button. With everyone and their mom so used to Prime shipping from Amazon, simple, up-front pricing with shipping included seems to be the way to go.

Etsy, is one of the marketplaces where you can still find exceptions to this rule. The audience here is looking for handmade products from small, sometimes home-based businesses and understand that the majority of products listed here will have added shipping fees. If you want Amazon you go to Amazon, if you want to support small businesses, you go to Etsy.

We’ve been working on quite a bit of some Etsy-based videos this year, from best practices, to how to ship t-shirts, taking product photography or mockups and even trending apparel… so if you’re looking for more info for your Etsy store, we have all of those videos, too.

We’re dedicated to helping you and your t-shirt business thrive.

Of course if you have tips of your own, let us know and be sure you’re subscribed to our Transfer Express YouTube page to stay up to date on all of the t-shirt business tips we’re dropping every single week! Until next time, I’m Dave - happy pressing!