POD Shipping Costs by Country: US $4.95, Germany $3.89

Every price on this site is the cost of one printed unit before shipping. For a seller posting to their own country that is most of the answer. For everyone else it is about half of it, because shipping a printed tee can cost more than printing it.

So we pulled the numbers: 7,697 shipping rates across 65 destinations, verified 18 September 2026 from two suppliers — Printify’s API and CustomCat’s published rate tables. The headline is not what most sellers expect. The destination matters far less than which factory fills the order.

Shipping one Bella Canvas 3001	First item	Each extra	Est. delivery
United Kingdom	$3.59	$1.99	2–3 days
Germany	$3.89	$1.19	1–2 days
United States	$4.95	$2.40	2–5 days
Australia	$6.69	$1.39	3–6 days
Canada	$8.59	$1.99	2–5 days
Rest of the world	$10.39	$4.00	10–30 days

That is the cheapest print provider in each destination, for the same blank, on the same day. Germany is cheaper than the United States. Australia, the destination every POD forum calls unaffordable, costs $6.69.

The catch: those are the prices if you choose well

The same shirt, to the same address, from a provider that is not local:

Bella Canvas 3001 to Germany	Provider	First item
Cheapest	Textildruck Europa (Germany)	$3.89
Printify’s preselected default	not offered to Germany	—
Australian provider	The Print Bar	$17.99

$3.89 or $17.99, for an identical garment going to an identical address. The cheap one is printed in Germany and the expensive one crosses the world first.

This is the part no round-up covers, because it takes pricing every provider to see it. The full table is on our shipping costs page, which updates from the API daily.

Inside the US, the gap is $38

You would expect domestic shipping to be a solved problem. It is not:

Gildan 18000 shipped inside the US	Provider	First item
Cheapest	Printify Choice, Dimona Tee, Monster Digital	$8.79
Dearest	T Shirt and Sons	$46.79

T Shirt and Sons is a UK printer. It will accept a US order and charge $46.79 to send it, on a sweatshirt whose blank costs $11.50. Pick that provider by accident — because it had the colour you wanted, or it was highest in the list — and shipping alone eats more than three times the garment.

It is not universal. Of the twenty most-compared blanks in our directory, six have every US provider charging the same rate. But twelve of the twenty carry a gap of $17.84 or more between the cheapest and dearest provider, topping out at $38.00 — so it is worth checking on any listing that matters.

CustomCat prices the same problem differently

Printify is a marketplace of factories, so its shipping is a spread. CustomCat prints everything itself and charges by shipping class, not by product or provider. Every lightweight garment in its catalogue ships at one rate; every heavyweight one at another:

CustomCat economy	To the US	International
Any lightweight garment (tees, tanks, long sleeves, kids)	$4.99 + $1.50 each extra	$9.25 + $3.00
Any heavyweight garment (hoodies, crewnecks)	$7.99 + $2.50 each extra	$16.25 + $8.00
11oz mug	$4.99 + $3.00	$11.00 + $6.00
15oz mug	$7.49 + $3.00	$12.25 + $6.00

There is no provider to pick and nothing to get wrong, which is the whole trade. You cannot make CustomCat’s shipping cheaper by choosing better, and you cannot make it $46.79 by choosing badly either.

On the two blanks where we hold every Printify provider, the two suppliers land within a dollar of each other:

Shipped inside the US	Printify (cheapest of 11 providers)	CustomCat economy
Gildan 5000 tee	$4.95	$4.99
Gildan 18000 sweatshirt	$8.79	$7.99

Four cents apart on a tee; eighty cents the other way on a sweatshirt. The supplier you choose barely matters here. The provider you choose within Printify still does.

One caveat on that comparison. CustomCat’s economy is its cheapest of four tiers — the same lightweight garment on its Ground service is $12.99 — and CustomCat publishes no delivery estimate, so this is a like-for-price comparison rather than a like-for-speed one. See the same blank, a different supplier table for the rest.

What the median seller pays

Across all twenty blanks, taking the cheapest Printify provider available in each destination — CustomCat quotes only the US and a single international bucket, so it cannot fill a table like this:

Destination	Blanks priced	Median first item	Range
United Kingdom	11	$3.59	$3.59–$7.79
United States	20	$4.95	$4.95–$8.79
Canada	20	$8.79	$7.09–$13.19
Germany / France	20	$9.54	$3.89–$18.49
Australia	20	$12.99	$6.69–$22.79
Rest of the world	20	$10.39	$10.39–$15.59

The UK figure covers eleven blanks rather than twenty, because UK providers do not carry the whole range — treat it as indicative rather than a market rate.

Australia’s $12.99 median is worth reading properly. It is high because most providers quoting Australia are shipping there from somewhere else. The cheapest local option on a tee is $6.69. The median is the price of not choosing.

Three things this changes about pricing

A flat worldwide shipping rate is a slow leak. If you set one rate that covers your domestic cost, every international order pays the difference out of your margin. On a tee that difference is $5.44 between the US and the catch-all international zone. On a Gildan 18000 ordered from a badly matched provider it is over $14.

The second item is where the money is. Additional items in the same order, from the same provider, ship at roughly 40–45% of the first item’s cost. A Gildan 18000 is $8.79 for one and $2.09 for the second. Two separate orders cost $17.58 to ship; the same two items in one order cost $10.88. That is the entire argument for bundles, and it is worth more than most discount codes.

The days are Printify’s own delivery estimates. An earlier version of this post called them the wait before dispatch; Printify’s API documentation defines the field as delivery time, so the column is now labelled that way. The point stands and is sharper for it: a local Australian provider delivers a tee in an estimated 3–6 days, while the default choice estimates 10–30. In Q4 that difference decides whether the parcel arrives — see the Q4 calendar.

How to actually use this

1. Check which provider your listing uses. Most sellers accept whatever was preselected when they created the product and never look again.
2. Match the provider to where your buyers are. If a quarter of your orders go to the EU, a European provider on that listing pays for itself immediately.
3. Price shipping by destination, or build it into the product price per market. One global number is a guess that always rounds against you.
4. Check the second-item rate before designing a bundle. It only applies within the same provider and the same product type.

Our profit calculator takes a blank cost and a listing price; add the shipping figure for your main market and the picture changes for most international listings.

What this data is, and what it isn’t

Two suppliers, sourced differently and both stored with the date they were read. Printify’s rates come from its catalogue API — it is the only supplier in our directory publishing per-country shipping in a form anyone can query. CustomCat’s come from the rate tables it publishes on its own site, transcribed by hand, covering the 35 of our CustomCat-priced products whose shipping class we can pin down without guessing.

So this is two suppliers, not the market. Gelato exposes shipping methods but quotes prices only inside a full order, and the rest publish nothing we can read. Printful charges flat rates by region and publishes them on its own shipping page — worth checking alongside these figures, especially if Printful is your main supplier. The shape of the finding, that the fulfilment location drives the cost more than the destination does, applies everywhere.

Comparisons use each supplier’s cheapest standard tier: Printify’s standard, CustomCat’s economy. CustomCat’s faster Ground service and Printify’s express options are not compared against each other. Shipping is what the supplier charges you, not what you charge your customer.

Bottom line

Shipping a printed tee costs $3.59 to $4.95 in a market with a local printer, and two to three times that when the order crosses a border it did not need to cross. The destination is rarely the problem. The provider assignment on your listing usually is.

See every destination and provider in the shipping cost tables, or check what the blanks themselves cost in our product catalogue.

Rates are the cheapest standard tier in USD for one order — Printify’s standard from its API, CustomCat’s economy from its published tables — verified 18 September 2026. See how we source prices.