Why splitting an order across colours costs your customer more

This is arithmetic, not opinion, and it decides whether your quotes win work.

How branded work is priced

Two charges sit on top of the product.

A setup fee for each print position. Origination, screen setup, whatever it is called. It is charged for the position, not for each unit, which is why branding is expensive on small orders and cheap on large ones.

A per-unit print charge that falls in quantity bands. More units, lower rate per unit. The band that applies is the one the quantity on the line falls into.

Both of those depend on how the order is grouped, and grouping is a decision your website makes for the customer whether or not anyone thought about it.

The same order, entered two ways

A customer wants 100 golf shirts, one logo, one position, left chest. They want 40 navy, 35 white and 25 charcoal, across a spread of sizes.

That is one order for 100 units in the customer's head.

The setup fee is the bigger of the two effects on a job this size. Charging it three times where one applies is enough on its own to lose the order.

We have deliberately not put rand figures in that table. Setup fees and band rates differ by branding method, by position and by supplier agreement, and a made-up number would be worse than none. Put your own figures into it and the shape does not change.

Why most websites get it wrong

Not through carelessness. It follows from a design decision nobody revisits.

A normal online shop is built for someone buying one thing. Pick a colour, pick a size, add to cart. That works for retail, where a shopper buys one shirt.

It fails for this trade, where a buyer wants a spread. Ordering 100 shirts across three colours and five sizes through a retail cart takes fifteen separate add-to-cart actions, and the cart ends up holding fifteen lines. If the pricing then treats those lines as separate, every one of them is priced in a low band and the setup fee logic has fifteen opportunities to go wrong.

Most buyers do not do fifteen actions. They give up and send an email, which is why so many promotional-products sites generate enquiries rather than orders.

What a site has to do instead

Capture the whole order as one thing, in one action.

In practice that means a grid: colours down the side, sizes across the top, a quantity box for every combination. The buyer fills in the boxes and sends the lot as a single request. One order, one setup fee, the right band.

Three details make the difference between a grid that works and one that annoys people.

• Show stock in every box. A buyer typing 40 into a box holding 12 units is heading for a phone call. Showing the number as they type avoids it.
• Sort sizes the way a clothing buyer expects. Alphabetical order gives 2XL, 3XL, L, M, S, XL. It looks broken to anyone in the trade.
• Show the next band while they type. When the total is close to a break, saying so turns a 90-unit enquiry into a 100-unit order more often than any discount does.

How to check your own site in two minutes

Open a garment on your site and count the quantity boxes.

One box. Every colour and size is a separate purchase, and a spread order fragments into as many lines as the buyer has combinations.

One row of boxes, one per size. Better. The buyer can enter a size breakdown, but only for one colour at a time, so an order across three colours is still three passes.

A full grid. The whole order goes in once.

We checked four South African promotional-products sites in September 2026. Two had a single quantity box against eight available sizes. One had a size row for one colour at a time. One had a multi-step flow where colours are chosen first and quantities afterwards. That is the state of the art, and most of it fragments a bulk order.

Questions people ask

Is a setup fee charged once per order or once per colour?

Once per print position, on the order. The trap is that a website which treats each colour as a separate purchase creates several orders where the customer intended one, and the fee then applies to each.

Do quantity bands count the whole order or each line?

The band is decided by the quantity on the line being priced. Split 100 units into three lines and each line is priced in a lower band, so the unit price is higher on all three.

Does this apply to unbranded stock?

No. Without branding there is no setup fee and no print band, so splitting an order costs nothing extra. It only bites on branded work, which is most of the value in this trade.