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How Does Merch by Amazon Work: Step By Step Guide
Merch by Amazon
sell your design product, reaching million of customers with no upfront
investment or cost to you.
The Amazon Print on Demand Process:
·
You create the shirt
with Amazon’s specifications
·
Set the price
·
Amazon creates the
product listing
·
You make a sale
·
Amazon ships it to the
customer
·
You’re paid a royalty
Let’s get into the
details so I can show you how to create a
successful Merch by Amazon business.
Starting A Merch By Amazon Business
§ How to Apply For
Merch By Amazon
§ How to Complete
the Request Invitation Form
§ How to Get
Accepted Into Merch by Amazon
§ Creating
Designs/Outsourcing
§ Keyword Optimizing
Your Merch By Amazon Listings
What is Merch by Amazon?
This is a print on
demand (POD) platform that allows
anyone to sell Merch on Amazon by simply uploading a design. The program
has expanded from just t-shirts to an entire line of clothing including
standard and premium tees, long sleeve shirts, sweatshirts and hoodies.
The Merch by Amazon
program launched at the end of 2015. This program was originally designed to
help App developers monetize their Apps.
The way the entire
program works is simple.
·
Once you have an
account, you upload your art onto the platform.
·
From there, you pick
what product you want to sell.
·
Once you have uploaded
your design onto the product type, pick which colors look best on that product
·
Give it a price and a
title
·
Publish it on Amazon
From there, your
product is now live and searchable on the Amazon platform. You earn
money via a royalty for every product that is purchased on Amazon.
Merch by Amazon used
to be open to everyone. As the program got more popular, they had to turn the
system into invite only where you had to apply for an account.
But applications are being approved within a
few days up to a week or so. Keep in mind that as the program grows, Amazon
needs to build more facilities to store all the printers that run 24/7 to print
our designs.
How To Apply For Merch by Amazon
Signing up for Merch
by Amazon is a very easy process. — it should take you no more than 10
minutes to go through the application process.
Step 1: Gather the
following information to sign up:
·
Business contact
information
·
Bank account and
routing numbers
·
Social security number
or other tax identification number
Step 2: Request an Invitation. Head over to https://merch.amazon.com/landing
you will see an orange request invitation button:
How To Apply For Merch by Amazon
Signing up for Merch by Amazon is a very
easy process. — it should take you no more than 10 minutes to
go through the application process.
Step 1: Gather the following information
to sign up:
·
Business contact information
·
Bank account and routing numbers
·
Social security number or other tax identification number
Step 2: Request an Invitation. Head over to https://merch.amazon.com/landing you will see an
orange request invitation button:
Step 3: Sign in to your Amazon account. It can be your buyers account, your
sellers account, or a brand new account that you created specifically for Merch
by Amazon.
Step 4: Begin the application. It will ask you to fill out your
company profile, banking information, and then take a quick tax survey.
Step 5: Take the tax questionnaire. If you’re not from the USA, Merch
by Amazon may withhold up to 30% of profits for tax withholding.
Step 6: complete the request invitation
form.
If you don’t have a company set up for
Merch by Amazon (you probably don’t), then just use your first and last
name. Make sure that all the details you put in here are your REAL
contact information so that Merch knows you are filling these
forms out honestly and will accept you to the program.
Finish up these few pages and then take
the tax questionnaire.
https://merchinformer.com/avoid-30-tax-witholding-non-us-amazon-sellers/
Now that you have all your contact and
tax information out of the way, you simply need to complete the
request invitation form.
How to Complete the Merch by Amazon Request
Invitation Form
There are 3
sections you need to fill out for a completed invitation form. Depending on
your business and past experience you might need to fill out the form
differently.
1. Industry Type: The
drop down menu has a few options for you to choose from. If you have filled out
the application with your personal name, I would recommend picking a novelty
T-Shirt business. If you used a company name, simply pick small business in the
drop down.
2. Organization Name: This
is where you will enter your business name of your personal name. If you
entered in a personal name on the first page of the application, then enter the
same here. Otherwise, use your business name in this box.
3. Additional Information: You
want to include all the relevant information that helps you stand out from the
other applicants like websites and print on demand designs you’ve done in the
past.
Additional information is where you want
to include all the information we mention below.
How
to Get Accepted Into Merch by Amazon
You want to
give Amazon as much information as possible for them to accept your invitation.
You don’t need to be a graphic designer. Just be as transparent as possible to
help them know you’re a serious seller.
Here’s the best way to make sure your
application is selected:
§ If
you have print on demand experience, link to other designs you have up on
different websites.
§ Link
to your personal website. Amazon loves when people sold on other platforms or
have an audience.
§ Explain
how you will promote and sell to Amazon’s audience and customers?
§ Create
5-10 original designs to show on your application
§ Include
trademarks you may own.
§ Licenses
to art you may have
Remember, none of this is NEEDED to get
accepted to the program, it just gives you a head start and a
better chance. You can create the additional designs yourself or read
below about outsourcing.
Merch by Amazon Dashboard
Walk Through
It’s
important that you get familiar with everything here, where to look for certain
things, and how everything works together.
The first thing you will see when
you login is a page that looks like this:
What
are the Merch by Amazon Tier Levels
When you
first get access to your account, you will have 10 design slots available. Once
you have made 10 sales and have filled up the majority of your slots, you get
tiered up. Tiering up allows you to upload more designs per day, as well as
increase the total number of designs live for sale on Amazon.
These are the Merch by Amazon Tier
levels:
§ Tier
1 = 10 Designs
§ Tier
2 = 25 Designs
§ Tier
3 = 100 Designs
§ Tier
4 = 500 Designs
§ Tier
5 = 1,000 Designs
§ Tier
6 = 2,000 Designs
§ Tier
7 = 4,000 Designs
§ Tier
8 = 8,000 Designs
This means that you can put up 10
designs total on the system before you will not be able to upload any more.
Creating
Your First T-Shirt Design
The create
page is where you will want to go when you have some designs you want to
upload. The process is fairly straight forward that we will go into detail
below.
You have a drop down menu
to pick what product type you want to upload, and a mock up to
see how your design looks on each product prior to publishing.
You can use
software like Photoshop, Illustrator or GIMP to create designs.
These are the design requirements for Merch by Amazon:
§ 15″W
x 18″H with transparent background
§ 300
ppi (i.e. 4500 x 5400 pixels)
§ Export
artboard as an sRGB
§ File
must be less than 25MB
They also
make it easier for you to create designs by providing their own pre-made
templates for you to use.
§ Adobe Illustrator(1.2MB)
§ Adobe Photoshop(4.9 MB)
§ GIMP(1.4 MB)
Managing
Your Merch by Amazon Inventory
The manage
tab is where you will be able to keep track of all the t-shirts you have up on
Amazon. This will tell you which ones are “Live”, as well as what the design is
that you have uploaded.
It will give you information such as
what date you uploaded the design, what
price you attached to the product, the status, and then any actions
you may want to do such as editing or deleting a product.
You will see
a status on each of the shirts. There are many different statuses that might
show.
Once you
upload your first t-shirt, you will see that the shirt appears to be in the
“Under Review” status. This is completely normal as the system does its work.
From there, it will then go to “Started
Processing” and then to “Processing”. This means that your t-shirt has passed
review and is now being pushed live onto the Amazon marketplace for people to
purchase. Once it goes Live, the status will change to “Live” and you will be
able to click the hyperlink which takes you to the shirt listing that customers
see and purchase from.
Analyzing
Your Sales Stats
Once you
have a few products up on Amazon that start selling well, you’ll be navigating
to the “Analyze” tab from the Dashboard a lot!
This will
show you what products sold, on what days, and at what price. It will also let
you see what kind of royalty you are getting paid. You might notice that there
is a tab at the top of this page called “Earnings”.
This is where you should click when earnings finalize to show you how much you are going to be paid! I would recommend checking this tab at least once per day to see what you have sold.
Learning
Resources
At the very top of the page, you will see the resources tab. This is probably the most important tab out of everything you will see in the dashboard. Why you might ask? Because this is where the content policy and best practices documents can be found!
You will want to make sure you read over
all this information. It can get pretty dry but it’s VERY important to your
long-term success in the program. The content policy can be found here: https://merch.amazon.com/resource/201858630.
How
to Calculate Merch by Amazon Royalties
You want to go to this page: https://merch.amazon.com/resource/201858580
Managing
Your Account
To see your
company profile, payment info, banking info and tax information you need to go
to My Account.
Other than that, this pretty much wraps
up the dashboard. Once you are familiar with everything, the dashboard is easy
to use and straight forward.
Understanding Copyrights/Trademarks
There are 2
crucial aspects you must understand.
Amazon BSR
(Best Sellers Rank), and Copyright/Trademark. These are not always the flashy
and exciting topics people like to talk about, but without at least a small
understanding of these two things, you might as well just skip reading this
entire article.
Copyright/Trademarks are Important!
Copyright
and trademark are terms you may have heard before but have no idea what they
are. Both copyright and trademark are intellectual property protection but
they protect different types of assets.
Copyright protects mostly literary and
artistic materials and works, whereas a trademark protects names,
slogans, logos and company brands.
Think of it
this way. You can copyright your shirt design about entrepreneurship, which
means that someone else would not be able to sell that particular design.
However, if you wanted to use the brand
name “StartupBros” you wouldn’t be able to as this brand is protected by
a trademark.
When putting
up designs on Merch by Amazon, or any other print on demand site, you must
NEVER put up designs that are copies of other people’s work. This is a breach
of copyright and WILL get you banned from these platforms. Amazon does not want
to have bad sellers on their site. They don’t want to spend time and resources
dealing with this, so don’t risk your account.
Copyright is
something that you won’t have to worry too much about in this business. As long
as you’re not ripping off other people and stealing their art, then all is
right in the world.
Trademark,
however, is something you will be thinking a lot about. Since these are
recognizable expressions that people have protected, you may run into some
issues on Amazon Merch. The first being that there are a lot of words and
sayings that you simply cannot use on your account because they have been
previously protected. Some of the protected trademarks might seem crazy (E.g.,
“Aged to Perfection” has a live trademark), but you still can’t use them. Be
careful!
Make sure
that ALL text (and variations) of your designs are run through one of the
following sites. I prefer to use USPTO because that is the government database,
and at the end of the day, going to be the most accurate:
·
USPTO
Please spend a few minutes looking at
them before you move on to the exiting parts of this tutorial as I cannot
stress how important this is in keeping your account safe!
Understanding
Amazon Best Sellers Rank (BSR)
Amazon shows
you how well each product on their site is selling through a metric called BSR.
A number is assigned to each product relative to the number of sales that item
is receiving in a particular category.
This number
fluctuates based on how other products are selling in that same category, so
BSR moves up and down according to sales volume. Every Merch by Amazon
listing is put into the Clothing category. After selling in this category for a
number of years, you start to learn how BSR equates to sales.
A 100k BSR in Clothing is going to be different than a 100k BSR in power tools. If you want to find the BSR of a product, go to the page on Amazon where that product is listed, scroll down to the product description, and you will see this box:
Two Ways to Research Niches
(Increasing Your Chance Of Success)
This is THE
most important step for selling on the Merch by Amazon platform. Once you are
familiar with BSR and copyright/trademark, it is crucial that you master this.
Without mastery (and it will take actual work), you will fail. If you put
in the work, learn the ropes, then this becomes one of the most fun, and easy
parts of the business!
Just to
really hammer it home…
You MUST do
your research properly or your chances to succeed are slim to none.
Years of
selling Merch through this platform, I have followed a very simply strategy.
Find out where customers are spending money, look at the competition, and then
provide better products for the current demand.
It sounds
straight forward, but when it comes to clothing, this is actually a lot easier
than you might think.
I want to
find where customers are buying. Once you can nail down what people actually
want, you can see what the current market holds. Then come out with
something that is going to be more visually appealing at a fair price (Amazon
customers are price sensitive).
All of this is accomplished by looking
at certain keywords and best sellers rank.
Method
1: Researching Niches by Keywords
Navigate
over to Amazon and enter in anything that comes to mind followed by “T-Shirt”.
Hit the
search button.
Always
remember that niches inspired by passion are the absolute best sellers and
place you want to be.
What might
be a passion for you may not be a passion for others though. Always remember
that to succeed in this type of business, you need to be providing what a
customer wants, NOT what you want.
We will use “BBQ” as an example.
This brings
up many product pages of results. You see right away that there are plenty of
different and pretty clever designs out there. If you were to scroll to the
bottom of this page, you would see that there are 7 pages full of results. This
is not showing ALL the results because there are more than 3,000 t-shirts in
this niche.
So we know a
lot of these shirts in the BBQ niche are up on Amazon, but is anyone actually
buying these, or spending their money here?
Just because
there are a different products does NOT mean that they are selling well.
This process is probably one of the most
time consuming and boring aspects of research, but it is important that you get
a full view of a niche before you make a decision.
Steps
to Research
·
Come up with 20 different categories or niches that you think
people might be interested in.
·
Open those up category pages up on Amazon.
·
Start going to each page and navigate to the product description
in each of the listings. Look for the qualifying BSR range to make sure the
shirts are selling.
·
Ask yourself is, “Can I do better?”. Do you think you can offer
this market a better design?
·
If Yes, add it to your list of products excel sheet for design
and creation.
· Rinse and Repeat
Can you make
the design funnier, or more appealing to your target audience?
Use Excel
spreadsheets for this and have lists of hundreds of different Amazon URLs after
searching through 10s or even hundreds of Amazon pages to see where the demand
was.
Some of
these t-shirts are actually selling decently if you open them up and check out
their BSR. It would be really simple to open up an image editing program and
create something better that said “Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em”.
If you get to the point where you have
thousands of designs online, each selling 1 a day or even 1 per week, the
process scales up and you start making great money.
Method
2: Researching Niches Via Brands
What if
you’re having a hard time coming up with some initial keywords to actually
search on Amazon?
This is
where I like to do searches by brands.
This
leverages the research of other people, to tell you where there is money to be
made.
The way we
do this is by looking at brands that are selling well on the platform, and see
where else they branched off into.
Take the example screenshot of BBQ
shirts for example. You will see this Amazon BBQ listing:
Right above
the title of the shirt, itt says “Funny Saying t-shirts”.
This is the
brand name that this shirt is under. You can create whatever brand name for
your shirts as you want with the Merch by Amazon program. You can find out what
other niches are in this brand.
Click on the
brand name at the top of the page and it will show you all the designs so you
can hunt out some niches.
There are 19
other shirts listed under this brand. Scroll through the list to find some new
niches you may not have thought of before. I never thought “troll hair” was a
niche, but I see here that it is. Remember to keep opening all the shirts in a
new tab to see if they are selling by checking out the BSR. Keep adding to the
spreadsheet you are building up!
Some brands have a LOT of t-shirts under
them. Check out this brand, Tripple G Mav.
There are over 20,000 shirts under this brand. What a great place to do some
more research!
Follow the two research methods that I
laid out above with both keyword and brand research. Go through pages and pages
of designs until you have a solid foundation of say 100-200 killer niches. If
you can repeat this process over and over again, you can eventually get into a
steady 5 figures a month as long as the designs you create are good. If they
are good, you know the market is hungry!
Speed Up The Research -
Stop Wasting Hours Opening Links
The above is
the exact steps that you can use to build up initial earnings from Merch by
Amazon. To keep scaling (because everything is working properly), you need to
be able to free up some time.
We created our own software that would
take this exact research process, and automate it as much as we could. After
many months of keeping quiet, we released our tool to the public and Merch Informer was
launched in October of 2016.
·
Merch Informer pulls up all the best selling shirts for any
keyword in order of best sellers rank.
·
Save and download the links, images, descriptions, and prices
from a list of favorites.
·
The Advanced Competition Checker module
gives you detailed information about your competition and who else you’ll be up
against.
·
Merch Hunter allows you to figure
out the best selling shirts on Amazon. It displays the top 1,000 best selling
shirts on Amazon in order of BSR.
·
Movers and Shakers was created to
identify trends before they took off was implemented.
Using the BBQ example from earlier, you
can see what it would look like inside the software. You can use all of this
information to create long and detailed spreadsheets with the click of a button
and then send them to my designer. Virtual assistants, which we will
discuss soon, is the easiest and quickest way to grow this Merch by Amazon
business.
As a thank you
to the community:
USE COUPON CODE STARTUPBROS FOR 20% OFF
Amazon is a big data company. We
can then use this data to find unknown or super easy to rank for keywords
specifically in the clothing market.
Creating Designs and
Outsourcing
Now that you
have an idea of how the entire research process works, you now need to get some
designs to upload onto the platform. You can either create them yourself, or
you can outsource them.
When I first
started, I had access to Photoshop, but am by no means a designer. In fact, I
can basically type sentences, and drag and drop and this was enough to get my
first 100 designs online and selling. These did not look great, but people
thought they were funny and purchased them. Anything I was not sure how to
create, I loaded up YouTube and watched some tutorials.
If you are
going to create your own designs, you can use:
§ Photoshop ($9.99/month)
If you have
neither PS or Illustrator, GIMP is a free option that works similarly. There
are loads of tutorials that will teach you the basics of any of the design
software listed above.
Please note that when you are creating these
designs, they need to be 4500X5400 pixels large, and a 300 DPI.
Outsourcing is King!
My go to place for hiring people is
generally Upwork.
It turns out, people are willing to
create excellent work for around $4 per design. Here is the exact script that I
am now using (modified slightly from my original):
This script
gets a lot of people applying to design for you.
I give each
person that applied and had a good portfolio a link or two from the research we
did in the previous step. If the quality work is good and has not been copied
and is in their own unique style, then start hiring them for longer term jobs.
Remember
that when you give them a link from Amazon you want to receive something back
that is for the same niche, but different artwork. The goal is to create a
better product than what is currently being sold.
If you’re hesitant to outsource design
work, read this guide on using upwork to outsource
design work.
Keyword Optimized Listings
If you have designs ready to go, there are only a few more steps you need to take to have your product available to hundreds of millions of people on Amazon.
The
uploading process for Merch by Amazon is very straight forward:
·
Upload the image
·
Select some colors
·
Select a price
·
Fill out listing information (price ,brand, title, bullet
points, and description)
Price
Price
determines whether your product will sell well or not. Shoppers will take one
look at your design and decide if they like it or not. Your first goal is to
have the best design possible that is catchy and will grab their attention.
The next
thing that customers consider when buying clothing is the price! They shop on
Amazon for the convenience, but also because they are known for their great
pricing on products.
One of the easiest ways to determine if
you are pricing in the middle of the pack is to take all the prices on the
first page of results, add them together, and then divide them by the total
amount of listings on the page. This is what you would want to target as your
price point.
Brand
Name
If you want
to build a clothing brand, then by all means put your brand into this slot.
However, branding can actually have an effect on how well your piece of
clothing will rank.
I generally
put all my Merch by Amazon products into different brands that have keywords
related to the niche I am uploading in. If your t-shirt was about loving BBQ
and eating great food, I might enter the brand name “BBQ Lovers Anonymous”.
Just make sure that the brand you want
to enter is not trademarked and you can make up all sorts of combinations to
put your shirts under.
Title
The title
the most important aspect to actually ranking your product within Amazon
search. This is where keywords will play an important role. To talk about keywords,
we need to have a short discussion about competition and niching down.
Let’s say
that you are creating a design about “Cats” around Halloween time. When you go
to upload that t-shirt, you want to actually look at what other designs are
selling and price accordingly.
When you get to your title though, you may just decide to put something in such as “black cat t-shirt” and be done with it. This is one of the biggest mistakes new people to the platform make!
Taking a
look at that on Amazon.com, you can see that if you were to name your product
“black cat t-shirt” you would be competing against over 10,000 results on
Amazon. This would be VERY hard to rank, and more than likely, you would get
drowned out by players who have been selling for a while. Your chance at sales
comes by being able to niche down.
Take a
minute on your title and think to yourself.
What would a customer search for if they were looking for this particular shirt? In the example I like to use about black cats, maybe it has some REALLY large ears to look spooky.
All of a
sudden just by changing up your title slightly, you are coming up with less
results while at the same time getting MORE relevant keywords into your title.
Now instead of competing with over 10,000 other people, there are only 217
results. I personally like to get under 1,000 results if possible.
The idea is
to niche down while at the same time adding keywords to your title. Adding more
keywords to your title will rank you for more terms, but don’t make it spammy!
If you are adding keywords to your title for the sake of adding keywords, it’s
a waste. It needs to make sense in the context of your design.
We are not done yet though. Remember in
the example I proposed, this was a t-shirt for Halloween? Here is a great tweak
where I add more keywords, and the competition drops!
Just like that, only 42 results, and more relevant keywords in the title. We can lower the competition we are facing by simply niching down to a relevant title for the particular design. This will ensure you stand the best chance for ranking your products in search and make money. This is exactly what you want to practice with every product you put up on Merch. It can take some extra time, but it will be well worth it in the end.
Bullet
Point
Bullet
points are the second most important aspect of ranking your listing in Amazon.
You want these to be keyword rich without keyword stuffing. To make sure this
happens, keep the keywords you use in your listing relevant to the design you
are uploading and write them out in full sentences! Take the time to read the
sentences you wrote out loud to yourself and see if they make sense. If they do
not, then it may be keyword stuffing.
Many new
people will take this space to simply describe their product.
Do NOT do
this!
Sure,
describing your product is great, but this is the one chance you actually have
to sell and close a customer. You have two bullet points to work with here, so
give it your best shot at marketing (with relevant keywords). The potential
customer will read these, so tell the customer WHY they want this t-shirt and
why they need to have it right now.
Just as a quick example, this might be what a bullet point would look like.
Notice how this does not just tell the
potential customer what is on the shirt, but you are taking the time to
actually sell it to them. The keywords get added (kitty, cute kitten, kitten
tee, Halloween costume, gift) but you are convincing them to purchase from you
at the same time.
Product
Description
The product
description has no bearing on where your t-shirts rank in Amazon. The product
descriptions may not be taken into account with ranking, but they ARE what
shows up to people searching your t-shirts on mobile devices.
They also show up as the meta
description in Google. So, you need to be filling out the product description
even though they say that this slot is optional. What I would recommend is to
make sure your product descriptions are optimized to give the
customer better information. That way, you are still selling the customer even
while at the same time getting in those keywords for potentially ranking in
Google.
Expanding Your Reach -
Scaling Up
Merch by
Amazon is one of the most straight forward numbers games out there. The more
designs you have up on the platform that are well researched and optimized, the
more money you will make. The majority of people are not willing to give it a
shot, which is better for everyone that does.
To scale as
quickly as possible, you need to either be able to design yourself (which takes
time if you are not already in the know) or you will need to be able to afford
to outsource your designs. At the very beginning I would recommend you do
at least 2-3 designs per DAY. Over the course of a month, this equates to
around 60-90 designs.
If you are
just getting into Merch by Amazon, you might be ready to call me out right
about now. Why would you create 60-90 designs when you only have 10 slots
available in Merch when you first start off!
There are so
many other platforms out there with traffic, that is why! The beauty of this
game is that you do not NEED to drive any traffic at all. You just need to find
where the audience is hanging out. Amazon is definitely where the biggest piece
of the pie is to be had, but other platforms are well worth it. While you are
waiting for more slots on Amazon, upload your other designs to some of these
platforms:
§ Printful + Etsy (one of the most
profitable integrations)
§ Zazzle
§ SunFrog
There are a
lot more out there that people are having success with. I would say the top 3
recomendations would be to first try out the Printful and Etsy integration.
This allows you to sell your designs through the Etsy platform without shipping
anything yourself.
Next, I would try out Redbubble as I
know many people doing well on that platform. It is a complete POD just like
MBA. Finally, TeePublic is a great one to try out as their upload process is
simple and easy to use.
Merch
By Amazon Success Stories
If you have
made it through this much of the article, you probably have absolutely no
reason to believe me. I understand!
You really
do not get anywhere in life without at least trying, but I understand that some
people need to see proof.
Let me show
you 3 people who have found success through selling on the Merch by Amazon
platform over the last few years.
The first person I want to mention is my
girlfriend. At first, she thought Merch was a waste of time. Since she was in
Nursing school full time, she had no chance to actually upload t-shirts or see
any profits. Then one day during a hailstorm, her car was totaled and she was
left with 100k worth of student loans and no car. Once she kicked into high
gear, she has been able to get a new car and is paying down her student debt a
LOT faster. I have been writing a monthly case study on her
account on the Merch Informer blog. Here are her earnings:
The second is from a guy named Scott. I
actually ran into Scott years ago when I was building up my affiliate website
business. It took me a while, but when we were chatting over Skype one day, I
finally convinced him to give Merch a try. He actually started out a lot
similar to what I did. He created about 50 text based designs himself, and as
soon as he saw that he was getting a few sales, it was outsourcing from then on
out. I would say it has been worth it.
Finally, we
have Greg. I always preach that in order to hit these big numbers you simply
must be willing to put in the time and effort. What happens if you put in the
minimal effort though? Just enough to learn the ropes and get some sales?
Well, when I
was thinking about Greg, I asked him what I should say since his numbers are
much lower than the two screenshots above. Here were the first words out of his
mouth:
“This is what you can achieve with just 3 hours a week”
Wrapping this up...
If you made
it to the end of this article, congratulations! That about wraps up the basics
of how to start a business selling T-Shirts online.
If you take
the time to go through everything and start, while remaining dedicated, you can
leverage the millions and millions of buyers on Amazon to build up a 6 figure
clothing company in an incredibly short time span.
It really
has never been this easy but with this new print on demand platform that many
people are still unaware of, now is the time to take advantage of it. If you do
not have any of the startup costs required, then spend a little bit of your
time to learn how to design yourself.
That is
where the majority of the cost is anyway. There is ZERO inventory to hold, ZERO
customer service to provide, and only upside on how much royalties can be
earned.
Think of
this opportunity as being able to start your own E-commerce brand with the
force of Amazon behind you.
I really
appreciate the StartupBro’s community allowing me to bring this new method to
everyone. If you have any questions, drop them in the comments and I will swing
by to answer them! Good luck!
Generate revenue outside of your app
Merch
by Amazon helps you increase revenue through the sale of branded products
designed by you and produced, sold, and shipped by Amazon.
Merch
by Amazon is a simple way for you to get started selling branded merchandise
from a product page on Amazon.com. There is no risk or out-of-pocket cost to
you. Simply set up your Merch by Amazon account, upload the artwork for your
product, and click submit. With Merch by Amazon, you can give your players a
fun, new way to interact with your brand and help take your fans to the next
level.
Benefits of Merch by Amazon
Generate
revenue in a whole new way
With
Merch by Amazon, you can make money through the sale of branded products
designed by you. You earn a royalty for every product sold with no
out-of-pocket cost to you.
Take
advantage of Amazon's expertise
Merch
by Amazon is built on Amazon.com’s worldwide sales, distribution, logistics,
shipping, and customer service. Amazon takes care of the details so you don’t
have to.
Take
your fans to the next level
With
Merch by Amazon, you can easily convert game characters or imagery into
products your fans will love to wear. With branded products, your game becomes
bigger than the devices it’s played on.
Get
started
Request
an invitation
Merch
by Amazon is in high demand, so request your spot today!
Design
your product
Create
a product your fans will love and upload your logo or artwork here
Set
your own list price
Set
your list price to be competitive and profitable.
Documentation and resources
Program materials license agreement
Request a Merch by Amazon invitation
How does it work?
Simply upload your artwork, choose a product type and color, and
add a product description. We'll create a product page on Amazon and when
customers buy your product, we'll handle production, shipping, and customer
service — all with no upfront costs.
How are royalties calculated?
For full details
on how Amazon calculates your royalty, please visit our Royalty Calculation page.
Royalties
You earn a royalty on every product sold. Your royalty is based
on your product's purchase price less any applicable tax, and less Amazon's
costs. Amazon costs include materials, production, fulfillment, customer
service, returns, exchanges, and resources required to detect and prevent
fraud. Fulfillment costs include picking and packing your product when a customer
orders it and shipping your product to the customer—including shipping for
Amazon Prime and Free Shipping eligible orders. For the US, the purchase price
includes taxes that are calculated and added at checkout (the below calculation
example does not include those). For Europe and Japan marketplaces, the
purchase price displayed on the product detail page (and in the below
calculation example) is already inclusive of taxes.
Standard T-Shirt Examples - US
Purchase
price |
$15.99 |
$17.99 |
$19.99 |
$21.99 |
$23.99 |
$25.99 |
Royalty |
$2.21 |
$3.72 |
$5.23 |
$6.74 |
$8.25 |
$9.77 |
Standard T-Shirt Examples - UK
Purchase
price |
£15.99 |
£17.99 |
£19.99 |
£21.99 |
£23.99 |
£25.99 |
Royalty |
£2.89 |
£4.24 |
£5.60 |
£6.95 |
£8.31 |
£9.67 |
Please note, youth clothing is exempt from VAT in the UK. Since pricing
is the same for all fits and royalties are based on the purchase price of a
product before taxes, royalty amounts will be higher for UK kids sizes.
Content Policies
All designs submitted
through the Merch program must adhere to our content policies. Additional
information is below.
We do not allow the
following content. This list is not exhaustive and the content policies may
change over time. Merch reserves the right to determine the appropriateness of
listings on its site, and may remove any listing at any time. If you supply
content in violation of these content policies, we may take corrective actions,
such as immediately suspending or terminating Content Creator privileges,
removing listings, terminating the business relationship, or permanently
withholding payments.
1. Illegal or
Infringing Content
- Content that does not comply
with federal, state, or local laws in the geographies in which your
listings are available.
- Content incorporating
intellectual property (such as trademarks, copyrights, or the name or
likeness of others) that you do not have the right to use.
You can use these
resources to check for registered trademarks.
- United States : USPTO
- United Kingdom : UKIPO, EUIPO, TMDN
- Germany : DPMA, EUIPO, TMDN
- France : EUIPO, TMDN
- Italy : EUIPO, TMDN
- Spain : EUIPO, TMDN
- Japan : J-Plat Pat, TMDN
2. Offensive or
Controversial Content
- Content that promotes, incites
or glorifies hatred, violence, racial, sexual or religious intolerance or
promotes organizations with such views.
- Content that graphically
portrays violence or victims of violence.
- Content depicting children or
characters resembling children in a sexually suggestive manner.
- Youth sized products that
contain adult content, profanity and/or sexual references.
- Content related to human
tragedies and natural disasters.
- Content that is misleading or
deceptive with risk to cause harm.
- Content using profanity to
attack a group or individual.
- Content that promotes illegal
activity.
- Sexually obscene content.
- Inflammatory content.
3. Other Content Not
Allowed
- Solicitations for customer
reviews.
- Content giving the impression
sales proceeds will be donated to other organizations or used for charity.
- Content that references
product, fulfillment, or delivery attributes.
- Other content that might lead
to a poor customer experience. See the Guide to
Merch Product Quality for examples of content that's
typically disappointing to customers.
Download product templates
Templates are
organized by print dimensions. For example, all t-shirts, sweatshirts, long
sleeve t-shirts and the back of pullover hoodies are in one template. The front
of the hoodies is in a different template because it requires a different
artwork dimension.
- 4500px by
5400px - t-shirts, sweatshirts, long sleeve t-shirts and
the back of pullover hoodies
- 4500px by
4050px - front of pullover hoodies and zip hoodies
- 485px by
485px - PopSockets grips
- 1800px by
3200px - iPhone and Samsung phone cases
- 2925px by
2925px - tote bags and throw pillows
Artwork should be:
- PNG format with transparency
- sRGB color space
- Less than 25 MB