Print on Demand Greeting Cards: Margins by Supplier

Print on demand greeting cards cost between $1.00 and $3.19 a card at the suppliers ranking for this search, plus $4.49 to $7.95 to ship one from the suppliers built for US buyers, and that shipping line is the whole business. Sell a single card on Etsy for $6.50 with $4.99 shipping charged and Gooten, Printful or Printify's cheapest provider leaves you about $3 to $4 after Etsy's fees. Sell the same card with free shipping and every supplier on this page loses you money, between 76 cents and $1.61 a card. The product that works is the pack of ten, where shipping is paid once and the per-card cost drops 30%.

The Reddit thread ranking first asks whether to use print on demand or print at home. There's a third route the thread's title doesn't name, which is ordering fifty from a card printer at $1.44 each and mailing them yourself with an 82-cent stamp, and it has the lowest delivered cost on this page along with the only upfront bill.

Every price below is from the supplier's own product page, Etsy's fee pages and USPS, loaded 15 September 2026. Where a supplier doesn't publish a price, I've said so instead of taking one from a listicle, and the last section shows why.

What Each Supplier Charges Today

Four of the ranking suppliers publish a per-card price on the page. Gelato, which ranks second, doesn't. Its page describes 130 lb stock, four sizes and 250 partners in 32 countries and says you'll see the exact price after you upload a design, so it's absent from every table here through no fault of its cards.

Two rows need a note. Printify is a marketplace of printers rather than a printer, so the same catalogue holds a $1.00 card with $5.19 shipping and a $2.97 card with $16.79 shipping, and which providers show as local depends on where you're looking from. Both rendered as "outside the US" for me, which may not be what a US seller sees signed in. The FinerWorks row is a card printer that also drop-ships, priced for one card as a comparison and for fifty as the route it's actually built for.

The Printful row carries the only review data on the page, 4 stars from 137 reviews, and the two I read from this year were a UK buyer whose card arrived "creased and bent" in a thin envelope and a US buyer whose 5 x 7 came from Latvia and took three weeks. Printful's own page says European orders ship matte with a heavier envelope and US orders ship glossy with a lighter one, so the product differs by continent as well as the delivery time.

The Same Card On Etsy, Five Suppliers

Here's a $6.50 card, one per order, US buyer, sold through Etsy Payments with shipping charged at $4.99. Etsy takes $0.20 to list, 6.5% of the order total including the shipping, and 3% plus 25 cents on the same total, which is $1.54 on an $11.49 order and leaves $9.95 to cover the supplier.

The right-hand column is the one the ranking pages don't show. With free shipping, Etsy's cut on a $6.50 order is $1.07 and $5.43 remains, and the cheapest card-plus-postage on the page is $6.19. There's no supplier on that list that delivers a single greeting card for under $5.43, and I'd be surprised to find one anywhere. Free shipping on a single card is a loss on every row, and it's a loss before you've paid for the design, the listing photos or your time.

Charge shipping and the picture is a real if thin business. Three to four dollars a card on the three suppliers built for it, with nothing upfront. If the buyer arrived through an Etsy Offsite Ad, add 15% of the order total to Etsy's side, $1.72, and Gooten's $3.11 becomes $1.39. The full Etsy stack, including when that ad fee stops being optional, is in how to sell digital downloads on Etsy, and it applies to a card the same way.

The shirt version of this table has a 44-cent row for the same reason, and it's in merch on demand. Cards are worse, because the shipping is a bigger share of a smaller price.

The Ten-Pack Is The Product

Gooten's page prices the 5 x 7 card at $1.85 alone and $13.00 for ten, which is $1.30 a card, 30% under the single. Shipping is $4.99 either way. So a ten-pack costs $17.99 delivered to the buyer, $1.80 a card, against $6.84 for one card delivered alone.

At $34.99 for ten, the buyer pays $3.50 a card, roughly half the single-card price, and you keep four times what a single card would have left you. Free shipping stops being a loss and becomes something you can offer. The cards in a pack are usually one design or a set of related designs, which also means one file, one mockup and one listing fee, and a product a buyer can't get from a supermarket rack.

I'd build the shop around packs and keep the single card as the sample. The single exists so a buyer can see the print quality for $6.50 plus postage before they buy ten, and its job is to not lose money, which with shipping charged it manages.

Fifty Cards And A Roll Of Stamps

The Reddit poster's real question is whether to let a supplier post each card or to make them at home. The answer I'd give is neither, and it's the FinerWorks row read the way the printer intends.

FinerWorks' grid prices its 5 x 7 folded card on economy matte at $3.19 for one, $2.87 at five, $1.60 at 25, $1.44 at 50, and on down to $0.96 at a thousand. Fifty cards at $1.44 is $72.00, and its economy shipping for cards starts at $7.95, so the box lands at your door for $79.95, or $1.60 a card, each in its own white envelope. A First-Class Forever stamp is $0.82. Mail the card in its own envelope and the delivered cost is $2.42.

Sell that stamped card at $6.50 with $1.50 shipping charged and Etsy's fees on the $8.00 order are $1.21, leaving $6.79, and $4.37 after the card and the stamp. That's 61 cents more than the best print-on-demand row and $1.26 more than Gooten's, for a card that goes out the same day in an envelope you chose. Give the shipping away and it's still $3.01, which is the only free-shipping single card on this page that makes money.

Two honest caveats. Rigid or square envelopes can carry a USPS surcharge I didn't check, so a 5 x 7 in a standard envelope is the safe shape. And the $79.95 is real money for fifty cards you haven't sold, which is exactly the risk print on demand exists to remove. Fifty is small enough that I'd take it for a design that's already had a few single-card orders, and not before.

The Listicle Prices Are Not The Vendor Prices

Two of the pages ranking here are supplier roundups, one by PrintKK and one by Merchize from April 2024, and I checked their numbers against the vendor pages on the same day.

Some of that is drift, since Printful's card and shipping both rose between Merchize's fetch and mine. Some of it is that "starts at" hides the volume tier the number came from. None of it is close enough to price a listing with. If you take one thing from this piece, take the habit of opening the supplier's product page on the day you set your price, and the checklist for vetting a supplier you've never heard of is in Shirtee print on demand review.

Questions

Which greeting card print-on-demand service is the best? For a US seller, Gooten, on the numbers. Lowest delivered single-card cost among the US-printed options, a ten-pack that cuts the per-card price 30%, envelope included, 1.5-day production. Printify's $1.00 card beats it on price if a provider near your buyer is offering it when you're signed in, which I couldn't confirm. Printful is the one with public reviews and the one whose reviews mention Latvia.

Do greeting cards sell well on Etsy? I don't have Etsy's category numbers and I'd distrust anyone who quotes them without a source. What I can say is that the fee structure makes single cards a poor product and packs a decent one, so the shops that do well are selling sets and occasions rather than one card at a time.

What is the most profitable print-on-demand item? Per unit, not cards. A shirt leaves more dollars per sale than a card because the shipping line is a smaller share of the price, and the shirt maths is in the merch piece above. Per hour of design, a card set can compete, because one illustration becomes a ten-pack.

Where can I print on demand greeting cards? Gooten, Printful and Printify's catalogue for hands-off fulfilment, FinerWorks for singles or a box of fifty, and Gelato if you want production in 32 countries and are willing to upload before you see a price.

Is selling greeting cards profitable? A single card with free shipping, no. A single card with shipping charged, about $3 with nothing upfront. A ten-pack, $9 to $18 on Etsy at the prices above. Fifty cards and a stamp, over $4 a card after $80 up front. Profitable is the wrong word for any of them until the design sells, and none of the suppliers can help with that part.

How do you print your own greeting cards to sell? Order them from a card printer in the tier that makes sense, fifty at $1.44 from FinerWorks in the example above, and post them yourself. Printing at home on a desktop printer means buying card stock, envelopes and ink by the box, and I haven't priced that route because the FinerWorks tier undercuts what I'd expect it to cost before you've bought the printer.

What I'd Do

List one design as a ten-pack at $34.99 with free shipping on Gooten, and the same design as a single at $6.50 plus $4.99 shipping so the sample doesn't lose money. Watch the single. When it has sold a handful of times, order fifty from FinerWorks, mail those yourself, and keep the ten-pack on Gooten for the buyers who want ten.

Never ship a single print-on-demand card free. That's the one line on this page that holds for every supplier I could price, and it's the line the ranking pages leave out.