How to price your handmade products
The formula is short. Getting the cost right before you apply it is the part that decides whether the price is a business or a subsidy.
Work out what one item costs — materials divided by the batch it came from, plus packaging, plus your time, plus a share of your monthly overhead — then divide that cost by one minus the margin you want. Across the five crafts below that lands between $3.35 and $15.10 of cost per item, and the biggest single component is almost never the materials.
Most handmade products are underpriced, and it is almost never because the maker does not know arithmetic. It is because the cost they started from was incomplete. Materials are visible and easy to add up; the hour you spent, the insurance you pay monthly and the cut the platform takes are none of those things, and all three come out of the same price.
The worked example on this page is a candle, but nothing about the method is craft-specific. Materials cost $3.25 an item and the maker's time costs $3.60 — 40% of the total. Price from the materials alone and you have not built a business, you have bought yourself a job that pays nothing.
What follows is the cost structure first, then the formula, then the three things that most often get left out of it. If you already know the shape and just want the numbers for your own batch, the craft pricing calculator takes the batch figure your craft calculator gives you and does the rest.
The same method across five crafts
Every figure computed from one batch of each, at $18.00 an hour, 50% wholesale margin and a 2× retail multiplier. The material costs differ enormously; the structure does not differ at all.
What each part of the cost is really worth
The batch cost divided by the sellable items it yields. The only figure most makers count, and usually not the largest one.
Leave it out and the item appears to cost $5.40 instead of $9.00, and the wholesale price that falls out drops to $10.80. That gap is your wage.
Insurance, stall fees, listing fees, hosting, the equipment you replace. Small per item and relentless per month — ignoring it makes this one look like $7.80.
Taken off the top of every sale, so a $36.00 listing returns $32.15. Below $10.28 the sale costs you money.
What actually moves the number
Doubling the batch above and letting the per-item time fall as it realistically does takes the cost from $9.00 to $8.10 without changing a single supplier. Materials per item barely move; setup and cleanup are almost a fixed cost per batch, and spreading them is the cheapest saving available. Work out your own resize on the batch size calculator.
Everything above uses $18.00 an hour. Halve it and every price on the page falls; treat it as zero and the whole exercise stops meaning anything. Pick a number you would accept from an employer and put it in before you look at the result.
A percentage plus a fixed fee per sale is the usual shape, and the fixed part bites hardest on cheap items. Fill those two fields from your own current fee schedule rather than from anything you read a year ago — marketplaces change them without warning.
A retail price with no wholesale headroom cannot be sold through a shop, because the shop needs to double your wholesale price and land at or below your own retail. Setting wholesale first and multiplying up is what keeps both prices possible.
A box, a label, tissue and a warning sticker come to $0.95 on the worked example — a real share of the total, and one that arrives in a separate order from a separate supplier, which is precisely why it gets forgotten.
The three that get left out
Count the whole batch — melting, mixing, curing checks, labelling, packing, listing photography — then divide by the items. Counting only the pour is how twelve minutes becomes four.
A batch that yields ten sellable items out of twelve has a material cost per item a fifth higher than the recipe suggests. Enter the sellable yield, not the mould count.
Free shipping is not free; it is a discount taken out of the same margin. Either put it in the cost or price it separately, but do not do neither.
A net margin under 30% leaves nothing for a refund, a breakage in the post or a quiet month, and none of those are rare. 50% wholesale doubled into retail is where most craft businesses end up because it survives all three.
Price your own batch
Take the material cost your craft calculator gives you, add your time, your overhead and your fees, and see the cost, the wholesale floor and the retail price it supports.
Open the craft pricing calculator →Estimates, not advice. Every figure on this page is computed from published reference values and standard measures, so your own inputs, equipment and conditions will move it. Nothing here is professional advice — talk to a qualified professional before acting on it.