How to Sell Prints on Etsy: Size Is the Real Cost

The packaging costs more than the product

An A3 print, with working figures.

The print is four dollars. Everything required to move it safely is twelve.

That is the opposite of jewelry, where the product is expensive and the postage is trivial, and it is different again from candles, where weight is the problem. Here the problem is size.

What that means for price

A twenty five dollar print works, just about. It is thin enough that one damaged parcel removes the profit from several orders, and there is no room to advertise it.

Above about thirty five, the arithmetic becomes comfortable, and the reason is the same as everywhere else on this blog: your costs are fixed, so almost every additional dollar of price is yours.

Free toolEtsy Pricing CalculatorEnter your paper, packaging and postage costs to find the price that leaves the margin you want.

Tube or flat mailer

The decision that changes your cost structure, and it is worth making deliberately rather than copying what you saw someone else do.

Tubes protect well and cost more to send, because a cylinder is bulky and carriers charge for the space it occupies. They also arrive with the print curled, which some buyers dislike and which occasionally produces a message about it.

Rigid flat mailers keep the print flat, look more considered on arrival, and cost less to post because they are thin. They also protect corners badly if the carrier is careless, and a bent corner is a full replacement.

Most sellers settle on flat mailers up to about A3 and tubes above it. Below that size the flat mailer is cheaper and better received. Above it, the mailer becomes unwieldy and the tube wins.

Free toolEtsy Fee CalculatorEtsy takes about 9.5% of whatever you charge for shipping. See what that costs on an oversized parcel.

Printing yourself or using a print house

Two routes, and the honest comparison is not about cost per print.

Printing yourself gives you control, immediate turnaround and better margins per unit. It also means buying a decent printer, managing ink and paper stock, and absorbing the wasted prints that come with colour matching.

A print house removes all of that and takes a cut. Per print you earn less, and you also carry no equipment cost, no stock, and no reprints when a nozzle clogs.

The deciding question is volume. Below a few prints a week, a print house is almost always cheaper once you count the printer, the ink sitting unused and the time. Above that, printing yourself starts to pay for the equipment.

A third route is print on demand, where a provider prints and ships directly. Your margin is thinner and you handle nothing, and the arithmetic works the same way as any other print on demand product: fixed provider cost, so price is the lever that matters.

Photographing something flat

Prints are the hardest thing on Etsy to photograph, and it is worth being specific about why.

A flat object has no depth. Photograph a print straight on and you get an image of an image, which is exactly what it is and completely unconvincing. There is nothing for the eye to hold onto.

Framed prints reflect. Glass mirrors your window, your ceiling light and you. Shooting at a slight angle helps and also distorts the artwork, so the fix is soft light from a large source rather than a change of angle.

Colour has to be right. A buyer is literally purchasing a colour. If your photograph runs warm and the print arrives cooler, that is a return, and no amount of description prevents it.

Buyers cannot judge size. A4, A3 and A2 mean nothing to most people. This is the single most common cause of disappointment in the category.

The three photographs that fix most of it:

• The print flat, shot straight down in even light, colour accurate, no glare
• A scale reference, either held or beside something familiar
• The print framed on a wall, in a real room

That last one is the one that sells, and it is the one almost no seller can take, because it requires a frame, a wall worth showing and the light to shoot it in.

Say exactly what the buyer receives

Prints generate more pre purchase questions than most categories, and every one you answer in advance is a message you never get.

Sizes, in both systems. A3 and 297 by 420mm and 11.7 by 16.5 inches. Buyers use all three.

Paper stock and weight. 200gsm matte, giclée on cotton rag, whatever it is. Print buyers who care are well informed and this is what they check.

Whether a frame is included. It usually is not, and a listing image showing a framed print creates the assumption that it is. State it plainly, every time, in the description and ideally on the image itself.

Whether there is a white border. Some buyers want one for framing, some do not.

How it ships. Rolled in a tube or flat in a mailer. It changes what arrives and people ask.

Two things to get right before listing

Rights to the artwork. If you did not make it, you need a licence that permits commercial resale, and a commercial licence on a stock image is not always enough for print sales. Etsy's Creativity Standards also require items to be based on your own original design.

AI disclosure, if it applies. If generative tools created the artwork, Etsy expects the AI box ticked and the attribution set to Designed by rather than Made by. The AI disclosure rules are covered here, and they matter more in this category than most, because a print is the artwork rather than an object with artwork on it.

The short version

Price above about thirty five dollars. Below that, the packaging and postage take too large a share to survive a single damaged parcel.

Measure the packed parcel, not the print, because prints are priced by size rather than weight.

Say the size three ways, say whether a frame is included, and say how it ships.

And spend the effort on the room shot, because a print laid flat on a table is accurate and a print on a wall is what someone actually wants to buy.