How do you sell printables without Etsy?
·Founder, Stakk
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22 September 2026
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7 min read
You export a print-ready PDF, you put it behind a checkout, and the buyer downloads it and prints it at home. The work that decides whether it sells sits in two places: the file being genuinely ready to print on the paper the buyer owns, and the checkout delivering it without an account or a wait. Where you list it changes what you pay, and the sharpest difference is that Etsy's listing fee is charged whether the item sells or not. Checked 13 September 2026.
Printables are the plainest digital product there is. No app, no login, no software the buyer has to learn. That is the whole appeal, and it is also why the format details matter more than they sound like they should. A file that prints at the wrong size, or lands as an editable document the buyer cannot open, produces a refund request rather than a repeat customer.
A printable is anything the buyer is meant to print on ordinary paper: wall art, a chore chart, a weekly meal planner, budget sheets, invitations, gift tags, worksheets, labels. The expectation is that they open the file and hit print. Most buyers also expect more than one sheet for anything above a few dollars, so if the product is a system, ship it as a system: the planner, the shopping list that pairs with it, a blank version, and a cover sheet saying what each page is for.
Which file format and paper size should a printable be?
A flattened PDF, with the fonts embedded so nothing shifts on a machine that does not have your typeface installed. Do not send the source document from whatever you designed it in, because the buyer probably does not own that program, and if they do they will be editing your artwork rather than printing it. Design at 300 DPI so the print is sharp rather than soft, and keep any image you place at that resolution too.
Ship two paper sizes in the same download, every time. US Letter is 8.5 by 11 inches and A4 is 210 by 297 millimeters, they are not interchangeable, and your buyers are on both. A file built only for Letter prints with a white band down one edge in most of the world, and a file built only for A4 crops on a US printer set to fit.
For anything with a border or a background color, keep the artwork inside a safe margin rather than running it to the edge. Home printers cannot print edge to edge, so a design that bleeds off the page comes out with a white frame around it no matter what the buyer does. If the design genuinely needs to reach the edge, say so in the listing and include a version sized for trimming.
What makes a $7 printable different from a $37 one?
Three things, and none of them is more pages for the sake of more pages.
Scope. The $7 product solves one thing: a single tracker, one piece of art, one set of labels. The $37 product is a complete kit around a job, such as a full home binder with a dozen linked sheets, a cover, dividers and a how-to page.
Editability. A print-only PDF is worth less than one where the buyer can type their own names, dates or amounts into form fields before printing. A fillable PDF is the same file with text fields added, and it is the single upgrade buyers ask for most.
Sizes. Wall art priced above the impulse range usually ships in a ratio set rather than one size, so the buyer can put it in a frame they already own. That is a real reason to charge more, and it is easy to explain in a listing.
What does not justify a higher price is file count alone. Forty near-identical sheets read as padding, and buyers notice.
How does the file actually reach the buyer?
Instantly, on the confirmation page, and again by email. Anything slower than that reads as a problem even when it is not, because the buyer is used to a download starting the second the payment clears.
Two practical rules. Keep the total download small enough to open on a phone, since plenty of people buy on a phone and print later from a laptop. And if the product is more than a handful of files, zip them into one archive with folders named for what is inside, rather than presenting eleven separate download buttons.
Write the printing instructions into the PDF itself as a first page, not only into the listing description. The listing is read once, before the purchase. The file is what the buyer opens three weeks later when they have forgotten to set the scale to 100 percent.
What does it cost to sell printables in each place?
The percentages look similar. The structure underneath them is not, and that is where the money goes.
| Where you sell | Monthly | Per sale | Card processing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Etsy | None | $0.20 a listing plus 6.5% of the order | On top, rate varies by country |
| Gumroad | None | 10% + $0.50 | On top |
| Payhip free plan | None | 5% | On top |
| Payhip Plus | $29 | 2% | On top |
| Systeme.io free plan | None | 0% | On top |
| Stakk | None | 10% + $0.50 | Included |
| Whop | None | 2.7% + $0.30 | Included in that rate |
Two of those need reading twice. Gumroad's own fees article states 10% + $0.50 and then says plainly that this does not include credit card processing, so the real cost of a sale there is higher than the headline. Payhip's pricing page puts its free plan at 5% and notes that Stripe and PayPal still charge their own fees on top.
Is an Etsy listing fee different from a transaction fee?
Yes, and for a printables shop it is the difference that matters most.
A transaction fee only happens when something sells. Etsy's own fees page puts that at 6.5% of the total order amount. The listing fee is $0.20 and is charged when you list the item, in Etsy's words regardless of resulting sales, and a listing expires after four months, at which point renewing it costs $0.20 again.
So a shop with a wide catalog pays a bill before anything happens. That is not an argument that Etsy is expensive overall, because Etsy brings buyers who are already searching, and that is worth something a checkout on your own domain cannot price. It is an argument for knowing which of your costs are triggered by a sale and which are triggered by a calendar.
Our own arithmetic on the two figures Etsy publishes. The percentage is the number people compare; the flat listing fee is the one that runs whether the shop has a quiet month or a busy one.
Can you sell printables directly on Instagram or TikTok?
Not inside either app. Both route a digital sale out to a checkout you own.
Meta's Commerce Policies put downloadable digital content under prohibited content, so a printable does not belong in an Instagram Shopping catalog at all, and separately Meta discontinued payment processing in Shops in September 2025. The working route on Instagram is ordinary posts, a link in bio and ads pointing at your own page, which is what the Instagram Shop breakdown goes through in detail.
TikTok Shop prohibits virtual and digital products in the US unless the seller has been approved into an invite-only Virtual Goods category, and printables are not on its permitted list. In the UK, digital downloads are listed as unsupported outright. The TikTok Shop rules are worth reading before you build a shop around them.
When is Stakk the wrong choice for a printables shop?
When price is the whole decision, we lose. Systeme.io has a permanently free plan with no transaction fee at all, and Whop charges 2.7% + $0.30 with no monthly cost, which is less than our 10% + $0.50 at every price point. If you are selling a $4 sheet and want the cheapest possible path, go there instead. Stakk is also the wrong choice if you want buyers to find you: we are a checkout, not a marketplace, so nobody browses Stakk looking for a meal planner the way they browse Etsy.
What those two do not have is the shape of the offer. On Stakk the order bump rides the same charge as the product, so a $12 printable with a $9 add-on is one payment carrying one fee rather than two, and the post-purchase upsell afterwards is one tap against the card already on file. Both ship on every account with nothing behind a higher tier, which is unusual: the post-purchase upsell is the most reliably paywalled feature in the category, usually at $99 a month. That layout came out of funnels that ran for agency clients before Stakk existed.
Ready to put your printables behind a checkout?
Stakk is 10% + $0.50 a sale with card processing included and no monthly fee, so a quiet month costs nothing and there is no listing bill running in the background. You connect your own Stripe account, which means the payment lands in an account you own and there is no platform balance waiting to be released. Upload the PDF, set a price between $1 and $999, add the bump, and the download is live. Stakk has no subscription billing, no course hosting and no call booking, so if your printables are the front of a membership you will need something else for the membership half.