How much can you make selling print on demand on Etsy?

In this case study I made over $2,252 from Etsy selling print-on-demand coffee mugs — without ads and without holding any inventory.

Do you need to run ads to sell POD on Etsy?

No. These sales came from Etsy's own free traffic — no paid ads. Products are made to order, so there's no inventory risk beyond Etsy's small listing fee.

What products work best for print on demand on Etsy?

Gift products with a message — like coffee mugs from mom to son or coworker to coworker — are among the top sellers on Etsy.

Do you still sell print on demand on Etsy?

No. I left Etsy after my second account suspension. The method in this case study worked and the numbers were real, but a business that one automated email can switch off overnight isn't a business I want to build on. I moved everything to Amazon.

Can you automate print on demand listings on Etsy?

Not with PODtomatic — it uploads to Amazon, Walmart and Shopify only. Back in 2019 it did most of the Etsy listing work for me, which is what this case study describes, but that's no longer how the tool works.

Is Etsy or Amazon better for print on demand?

Amazon, for this model. There's no per-listing fee — $39.99 a month covers unlimited products, and I have almost 600,000 in my account. Amazon also suspends for specific reasons you can answer with a plan of action, which I've done successfully every time. Etsy suspended me twice with nothing I could act on.

Print on Demand on Etsy: How I Made $2,252/Month — And Quit

Read this first: this is a case study from December 2019, and the numbers in it are real. But I don’t sell on Etsy anymore — I left after my second suspension, and PODtomatic no longer uploads to Etsy at all. I’ve kept the original write-up intact because the method still teaches something useful, and added what actually happened next at the bottom.

Print-on-demand products such as coffee mugs, shot glasses, travel mugs, and tumblers have been selling really well on Etsy.

If you find gift products on Etsy, you’ll see that most of the top-selling products contain a message on them.

(Like coffee mugs with a message from mom to son, father to daughter, coworker to coworker, etc.)

I started selling print-on-demand products on Etsy last October.

I started with coffee mugs in different niches. No shot glasses, travel mugs, or tumblers – yet. Just coffee mugs.

There is a listing fee on Etsy, so I wanted to start testing with what I thought it would easiest to sell, which is a coffee mug.

Since then, I’ve made over $2,252 from this marketplace.

Without ads. Without any inventory. All the products are made to order.

In this article, I’m going to describe my success in selling the print-on-demand products on Etsy – and how you can repeat it.

How I do Market Research on Etsy

When I first started selling print-on-demand products on Etsy, most of the products I’d listed were my top-selling products on Amazon.

I have my old selling stats from Amazon. So it was easy for me to make my first sale.

If you’re selling something on other marketplaces, it’s easy to duplicate your top-selling products on Etsy and make your first sale – fast.

But no worries if you’ve just got started.

You can make that first sale fast, too. Selling print-on-demand products on Etsy isn’t difficult.

Let me walk you through how to do it.

Start with market research.

When I do research on Etsy, I want to learn what people are looking for.

I usually do an Etsy search using popular keywords like “Mother’s day gift”, “Father’s day gift”, “Engineer gift”, “Nurse gifts”, “Christmas gift”, “Dog Mug”, etc.

If you want to find what people are buying, there’s no need to get a spy tool. Just go to Etsy and search for something.

I was surprised when I saw the products that popped up in the search results.

Most of the top-selling products are personalized products.

People here like products with their names, their family member’s names, their dog names, etc on them.

If you search Etsy with using keyword “Dog Mug”, you’ll see results like this:

The top 12 products are personalized products. They don’t have just the name on them – people can also customize the images on the product.

People can select a dog breed, the number of dogs, and even the hair style, shirt, etc. of the people on the mugs!

This is really cool. There are many positive customer reviews for these items. It shows that people here really like unique products.

*Anyway, I did this for research purposes only. I don’t sell personalized products personally. *

It takes too much time (for me) to create an order manually, and I don’t like to deal with people who want to make changes to designs.

So I just keep searching for other products on Etsy and find what I can do.

I like these products:

These are 7 of the 8 products at the bottom of the first page. They are “dog breed” coffee mugs.

Canaan Caucasian Shepherd Greater Swiss Mountain American Eskimo Entlebucher Mountain

etc.

Do you know these breeds?

These are very niche products. If dog lovers search Etsy for the dog breed they have, these products will usually pop up at the top of the search results.

Let try searching with the keyword “Canaan Dog Mug”.

You see? The mug from this seller is in second place (excluding the ads). This seller also buys ads for their store, so it seems he or she is doing well with selling print-on-demand products.

I’m not sure whether his or her dog-breed mugs are selling well or not. So I’ll go to the store page to check stats like sales and customer reviews.

(For privacy reasons, I’ll blur out the store name.)

You can see that this seller has made over 3,543 sales on Etsy since 2017!

This is a pretty good number.

Most of the products in this store are non-personalized products, and this seller can make many sales passively.

You can check the customer reviews at the bottom of the store’s page. When I did it, this is what I found:

(Again, I’ll blur out some details to maintain this seller’s privacy.)

It seems like people like other products from this seller. Not the dog-breed mugs.

I’ll check to see which products have many reviews, try to understand why people buy them, then try to come up with some new product ideas.

I do this process for other top-selling stores. I’ve gotten many great ideas by doing product research this way.

Anyhoo…

After doing product research on Etsy for a while, I found that many shops sell print-on-demand products that contain a phrase with a NICHE word on it.

For example:

Keep Calm, I’m a [NICHE]. Best [NICHE] ever. Trust me, I’m a [NICHE].

Just replace [NICHE] with any profession, family member name, dog-breed lover, etc.

I like selling print-on-demand products this way, too.

All I have to do is find popular phrases that people will buy, and let my designer create unique designs for different niches.

Then, I use these designs to create unique gift products such as personalized coffee mugs, shot glasses, travel mugs, tumblers, pillow cases, etc.

I put tons of products in my account in a very short time.

That’s what I do when I research products on Etsy.

List products almost 100% automatically using PODtomatic.

Selling print-on-demand products using the low-hanging style is a numbers game.

It’s like the spaghetti method. - “Throwing ideas against the wall to s*ee *what sticks.”

We have to list as many products as we can, in many different niches. We check which products can be sold, and try to scale using the stats we have.

That what I do when I sell print-on-demand products on Amazon and Etsy.

I have almost 100,000 products on Amazon. (As of 2026 that number is closer to 600,000.)

Now I have over 2,000 products on Etsy, and this number is growing every day.

But I don’t do it all by myself. I asked my programmer to build an automated listing tool called PODtomatic.

(I know I’m biased, but I think this tool is awesome.)

At the time, it did about 90% of my Etsy work — creating the products, mockups, titles, descriptions and keywords, and setting the prices. I just added a few options and hit publish.

2026 update: PODtomatic no longer supports Etsy. It uploads to Amazon, Walmart and Shopify — and it now does the whole job rather than 90% of it, including finding the niches and creating the designs, which back in 2019 I was still doing myself.

All I have to do is add some product options and click “Publish”. It takes me about 20 seconds to list a product on Etsy.

I list 50 products a day on Etsy, so it takes me from 15 to 20 minutes to get this done.

When I get an order, I just have to click the “order” button in the system. The order info is sent to CustomCat automatically.

(It is now — order fulfilment runs without me touching it.)

When the product is shipped, CustomCat, which is a supplier, will send the tracking info back to the system. The system will then fulfill the Etsy order automatically.

I don’t have to do anything. Just focus on product research and creating good products.

This is the key that helps me make over $2,252 on Etsy in the past 30 days.

Honestly, I wouldn’t be able to do it if I had to list the products manually.

The Results

So far, the results have been pretty good.

In the past 30 days, I made $2,252 from 2,243 products. I’ve had 6,523 views, 3,260 visits and made 141 sales. My conversion rate is around 4.3%.

The point is, I started this business in late October. It took me about a month and a few minutes per day to obtain these results.

I’m really okay with this.

Hopefully, next year, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day will be even better!

I’ve already added almost 1,000 products related to these special days to the PODtomatic system. They will be published soon. :)

What actually happened next

I wrote the section above in December 2019, full of plans for Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. Here’s how it really went.

Etsy suspended me. Twice. The second time I stopped trying to get back in. There was no explanation I could act on and no reply to my appeals — just a year of work switched off by an automated email. If you’re in that position right now, I wrote up everything I know about Etsy suspensions.

So I moved the whole thing to Amazon. The products were print-on-demand designs, so they were never really tied to Etsy in the first place. The same catalogue went straight across.

That turned out to be the better business by a distance. No per-listing fee — $39.99 a month covers unlimited products, which is why I now have close to 600,000 in my Amazon account rather than 2,000. Far more traffic. And when Amazon has suspended me, two or three times over the years, it told me exactly why — late shipment, order defect rate — so I could write a plan of action and get the account back. I have, every time.

PODtomatic changed too. It dropped Etsy and now uploads to Amazon, Walmart and Shopify, and it does the parts I was still doing by hand in 2019: finding the niches, picking the quotes, creating the designs, writing the metadata with AI.

So: was the $2,252 real? Yes. Would I tell you to go and repeat it on Etsy today? No.

The method in this case study — pick niches nobody’s fighting over, list at volume, let the numbers work — is sound, and it’s exactly what I still do. I just do it somewhere that can’t erase the business overnight. Here’s the same system running on Amazon, and here’s how the automation side works in 2026.