Spite House Games — Margin breakdown

Researched profile. The figures here are modelled by us from public information, published with the sources they were drawn from. How we research.

Margin breakdown

Every cent of an $8.87 order, from the printer to what is left — and the largest single line is not the product, it is moving it.

Four printers in China quote this deck publicly, at minimums a first order could actually meet. The spread is wide because “a deck of cards” covers a lot of paper stocks and box finishes, so the figure used below sits mid-range rather than at the floor.

COGS — what the deck costs to make

Quote	Region	MOQ	Lead time	Unit cost
Guangzhou Miyi Printing Co., Ltd	Guangdong, CN	500 sets	not quoted	$0.50–1.00 / deck
Shenzhen Gold Sun Color Printing Co., Ltd	Guangdong, CN	300 pieces	not quoted	$0.70–3.00 / deck
Guangzhou Zhongtian Paper Product Co., Ltd	Guangdong, CN	500 pieces	not quoted	$0.12–0.99 / deck
Tianjin Caile Printing Co., Ltd	Tianjin, CN	100 pieces	not quoted	$0.01–0.55 / deck
Freight and inbound — a placeholder, not a quote	CN → US	—	—	$0.50 / deck

The freight line is the one figure here that nobody published. It is our placeholder, and the first thing to replace with a real quote — at these prices it moves the margin by more than the printing does.

• Cost of goods: -14% of revenue — About $0.75 to print plus $0.50 to land, against an $8.87 average order. The print half is a published quote; the freight half is ours.
• Amazon referral fee: -15% of revenue — Amazon’s published Toys & Games rate — a flat 15% with a $0.30 minimum and no price threshold, so a cheap product gets no relief.
• FBA fulfilment: -31% of revenue — $2.56 for a small-standard unit under $10 on 8,000 units of a $6.97 deck, and $3.45 in the $10–50 band on the rest. Amazon charges more to move this product than the printer charges to make it.
• Advertising: -12% of revenue — Computed, not observed. A $0.70–1.00 Toys & Games click at a 10–14% conversion rate costs $5.00–10.00 per ad-attributed sale — a 56–113% ACoS on an $8.87 order — so ads can only ever carry a slice of this catalogue. At 10–20% of units that is 8–17% of revenue.
• Margin: 28% — Before returns and overhead, both set to zero here. This is a ceiling on profit rather than profit, and the two missing lines are the ones a real operator would feel first.

The shape of it is unusual: on most products the factory is the largest cost and the marketplace takes a slice. Here it is the other way round. Fulfilment alone is more than twice the cost of goods, because Amazon prices moving a box by its size and weight rather than by what is in it — and a deck of cards costs about the same to pick, pack and ship whether it sells for $6.97 or $19.99.

Which is the argument for the $12.99 and $19.99 re-cuts. The same object, the same fulfilment fee, at nearly three times the price — every dollar of that increase lands almost entirely in margin.

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