Royalty pages tend to lead with the percentage, which is the least useful number on them. What matters is what the percentage is a percentage of, and platforms differ enormously on that while quoting similar-sounding headline rates.
Here is how to read any of them, including ours.
The only question that matters: percentage of what?
There are three plausible bases, and they produce wildly different money from the same headline number.
A percentage of the sale price. Rare, and generous when it happens, because it ignores costs entirely. Usually the number is small for that reason.
A percentage above a base price. The platform names a base covering its costs, you set a retail price above it, and you keep the difference (sometimes minus a cut). Your earnings depend on how much headroom you dare add, and adding a lot makes you uncompetitive.
A percentage of profit. Revenue minus the real costs of that sale, split. This is what we do, and it needs the most explanation, because "profit" is a word that can hide a great deal.
A 20% of sale price and a 50% of profit can be the same money or wildly different money. You cannot compare them without knowing the costs.
What comes out before profit
On a t-shirt sale, every one of these is real and unavoidable:
- The blank. Varies by garment and by size; larger sizes cost more.
- Printing. Usually bundled with the blank in a print-on-demand cost.
- Shipping. Somebody pays it. If the buyer paid it, it is revenue and a cost.
- The marketplace fee. A percentage plus a fixed amount, and on some marketplaces the percentage is charged on the shipping too, which people routinely forget.
- Payment processing, where it is charged separately.
Sales tax and VAT are not in that list on purpose. Those are collected from the buyer and passed to a government; they were never anybody's income and should not appear in a profit calculation at all. If a platform's maths treats tax as revenue, that is a red flag.
The thing to take from the list is that the fixed components hurt small orders disproportionately. A flat fee is a small percentage of a large basket and a painful one of a cheap single item, which is a large part of why very cheap products are hard to make work.
Questions worth asking any platform
- Is the percentage taken of sale price, of profit, or of something above a base?
- If it is profit, exactly which costs come out first? Ask for a worked example on a real order.
- Who pays for a reprint when an item arrives damaged or misprinted?
- Is advertising spend deducted from your share, and can you see it?
- What is the payout threshold, and how often does it run?
- What happens to your earnings if you stop uploading?
The reprint question is the one people skip and the one that reveals most. Misprints happen at some rate on every platform. Somebody absorbs that. If it is you, your effective rate is lower than the headline, and by an amount nobody will quote you.
The advertising question matters for the same reason. Ad spend has to come from somewhere, and a platform that advertises your product and deducts the cost from your share is offering a different deal from one that absorbs it, even at an identical percentage.
Getting paid, which is a separate problem
Earning and receiving are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where the friction lives.
Most platforms hold a balance until it clears a threshold, then pay on a schedule. Sensible, because payout rails cost money per transaction. But it means your first payment can be a while after your first sale.
Two things catch people out, both boring and both worth checking before you start rather than after you are owed money.
Tax paperwork. In the US, a platform paying you needs a W-9 on file and reports above a threshold. If you are outside the US, it is a different form entirely, and the withholding rate applied without one is punitive. This is not optional and it is much less annoying to do early.
Whether the payout rail reaches your country. This one is genuinely under-documented. PayPal, for instance, publishes a long list of countries where accounts exist and a much shorter list of countries where Payouts can actually send money. There are places where you can hold a perfectly normal PayPal account, pay for things with it, and never receive a payout. Check the specific operation, not the general availability page. We check it at signup for exactly this reason, having nearly told someone to add an account they could not have used.
What we do
We split profit with the artist, after the real costs of the sale: the blank, the printing, the shipping and the marketplace's fee. Tax is not treated as revenue. Reprints for our errors are ours. The payout page shows the arithmetic on a real order rather than a percentage in isolation, which is the only honest way to present it.
None of that makes us the right choice for everyone, and if you would earn more elsewhere you should go there. But you should be able to compare, and you cannot compare headline percentages. Ask what the percentage is of. If you want to see ours worked through, it is here, and joining is free.