The Real Cost of Running Your Own Merch Store

The pitch for running your own merch is simple. You keep everything. It sounds right until you write the whole thing down.

The costs that show up on a statement

Start with the platform. A storefront subscription runs every month whether you sold anything or not. Payment processing takes a percentage of each order plus a flat fee. Design software is another subscription. None of them care how your month went.

Then the physical side. Blanks, which cost more bought a dozen at a time than by the case. Ink or transfer film. The pieces that print wrong, because everyone prints some wrong. Poly mailers, labels, tape. Postage, which is rarely what the customer paid at checkout. Reprints and returns, which come out of your side every time.

The cost nobody puts in the spreadsheet

Your hours. Answering where is my order. Chasing a size that sold out. Driving to the post office on a Tuesday. Sorting a bulk order the night before a game. That time is real even when nobody invoices for it, and it is usually the largest line in the whole exercise.

Add it up honestly and the picture is consistent. Most brands running their own merch net less than 20 percent once the platform, the processing, the blanks, the mistakes, the postage and the hours come out. A good month looks better. A month with one bad print run looks much worse.

Which is where the number comes from

That figure is worth sitting with, because it is where the fully managed storefront starts.

We design the store, print every order in-house in San Diego, pack it, ship it to the customer, and answer every email that comes back. You keep 20 percent of every sale, paid every Monday. Our 80 percent pays for the design, the production, the fulfillment, the shipping and the service. There is no subscription for you to carry, no inventory to buy, and no box of unsold larges in the garage.

Twenty percent of a sale you did no work for is a different proposition from twenty percent of a sale you did all the work for.

The risk moves too. If a print run goes wrong, we reprint it. If a package goes missing, we deal with the carrier. If a customer writes in on a Sunday, we answer. None of that reaches you, and none of it comes out of your share. The terms are written plainly on the rate sheet.

If you are already selling merch and the numbers feel thinner than they should, the arithmetic above is usually why. See how a managed storefront works.