Merch By Amazon Guide (Extra Passive Income)

byFrasierCB

193 followers

Updated 7 years ago

Hello all! I'm Frasier and today, I noticed that there wasn't much information on Merch By Amazon on WA. So I decided that I'll write an informative blog to educate you guys on what it's all about and how can you benefit from it as a side hustle.

What is Merch By Amazon?

That's a great question that you ask. Merch By Amazon is a print on demand website. It allows you to create and upload designs to t-shirt and other apparel for free.

That's right, it's FREE.

This means that you don't have to hold inventory, order shirts and redirect them to other fulfillment centers or do anything else that costs money.

The main idea is that you create a design, upload it to Merch By Amazon, update the listing with keywords and information and then it'll be uploaded to Amazon's marketplace for everyone to see. You get to set the prices on these designs, for example price a t-shirt at $19.99 USD and you'll get around $5 USD in royalties if the design gets purchased.

Organic Traffic is Amazing

The beauty of this is that you will get sales through organic traffic thanks to Amazon. The real challenge is finding decent keywords/topics to design about. Once you know a keyword that's trending, you get on board with it and start designing a shirt or two for it. Then put them up and forget about it. Maybe, that's a topic I will write more about later on if people are interested in it.

My Personal Experience

I'll just tell you my experiences from start to finish on Merch By Amazon so that you will have some sort of expectations for it.

• Got an e-mail from Merch By Amazon that I applied back in 2016 and I got it a year later in 2017. I was late to the party as it was launched back in 2015. At the opening of Merch By Amazon, there was a huge amount of people joining the program. It was so crazy that they had to close it off and made it invitation only and had to approve accounts in batches instead.
  
• At the time, I was not doing much and wanted to give Merch By Amazon a go. So I checked out the courses made by "gurus" and eventually found decent Facebook groups to join for information on how to leverage Merch By Amazon.
• The potential to make a lot of money with Merch by Amazon is huge as I was seeing a lot of sales from top players in the game.
• I started off with only 10 design slots that needs to be fulfilled. I did my research on keywords and figure out what's trending and then I created a few designs based on my research. I think it was the 6th shirt I uploaded got its first sale at 3 am. I happened to wake up at that hour and saw the sale and I was pretty damn excited.
• Within 10 design slots, I have sold sold like 3-4 shirts in total which has ranked me up to 25 t-shirt slots.
• I have sold sold a shirt during the 25 slots period, I was not on point with keywords and there was a massive throttle of sales on Amazon.
• This was the moment where I shouldn't get my hopes too high on Merch By Amazon. So I started uploading my designs to other print on demand websites such as RedBubble, Zazzle etc. I have sold actually made more money on RedBubble than Merch By Amazon which is funny.
• I then got upgraded to 100 design slots on Merch By Amazon, I have sold fulfilled all the slots now and I have sold made a few sales here and there but not enough to pay the bills myself.
• Then I found this WA community and decided to educate myself through the lessons and build up my website while I'm waiting for a new rank up to 500/1000 on Merch By Amazon.

So yeah, I started all this back on 30th of March. I have sold learned a lot about myself and found a lot of great people along the way when it comes to designing t-shirts and hustling. I haven't sold a lot of designs but it doesn't stop me from designing more stuff for it.

I have sold put Merch By Amazon and other websites on hold and I will come back to it with a new clear mind and buckle down on the research/designs. It does take a bit of a time and effort to go through this process but once you put the designs up and they get sold. They're up on Amazon forever. If your design doesn't get sold, it will be removed in 180 days (used to be 90 days). Of course, if it doesn't sell for a while. You can always take it down and re-upload a new design to target different customers.

Numbers Game

That's why I was keen on fulfilling all the design slots as it's a numbers game at the end of the day. They're all different designs that focuses on different niches/keywords and targets customers of certain interests.

RedBubble is an easier alternative

RedBubble is much easier as it allows you to upload 200 designs per day (I haven't done that myself personally) and they don't get removed. RedBubble is much more interesting as it allows you to upload a design that can be used on many products from mugs to duvet covets to t-shirts to stickers. Stickers are personal favourite of mine, I can jack the profit margins from 20% to 100% and there are some people that will buy them no matter what. One time, someone bought an A-Line dress at like $63 USD dollars right? I got $12 profit from it and it was super crazy because it was a crappy design I did that talks about high school graduation.

You don't have to be an expert at designing!

I have seen a lot of people from various Facebook groups saying that customers often have poor tastes for some reason and they always buy their crappiest designs the most instead of their best designs. In saying that, I can relate to this. I did keyword research on camping and found a funny quote for it. So I did a basic text along with a vector pic of a campfire. The next day, it got sold and I was completely baffled by that.

The moral of that story is that it's always good to remember the motto K.I.S.S (Keep It Simple Stupid). You don't have to be an expert when it comes to designing stuff. As long as you got the right information, keywords and the design to go with it. You will be able to make a few sales along the way. Remember, you are helping yourself to create a few streams of passive incomes from these print on demand websites. Put the designs up and forget about it, don't stress too much about it and do other things.

Trademarks

One thing to keep in mind when it comes to designing stuff. You need to be aware of copyrights and trademarks. Basically what I mean by that if you create a design like Mickey Mouse which belongs to Disney. If you upload that on Merch by Amazon, you will receive a strike on your account and will take the t-shirt down. Do enough of that, your account will be disabled for good. Same goes for RedBubble.

Now here's the scary part. I am often on the hunt for trademarks and making sure that my text designs are not using anyone's trademarks. There are a lot of greedy people out there who are constantly filing for new trademarks on common words such as "I'm Crazy", "Classy", "Bride", "Soccer Mom" and so many others. Good news is that there is a Facebook group that are focused on protesting against these trademarks so that we all have a fair chance of selling our designs throughout the whole internet. Anyway, include one of these common trademarked words in your listing/designs and you will get a strike, no matter how dumb it is. You could appeal it to the Amazon and fix the problem together but yeah it pays to do your research before doing a design.

Conclusion

My gosh, that was a big brain dump of information for me to write about Merch By Amazon along with other stuff. If you're still on the fence about it, you may as well sign up for the program as it takes a while for them to accept new people. By a while I mean a few months. You could be lucky and get accepted the next day but you never know. Here is the link to Merch By Amazon's landing page: https://merch.amazon.com/landing

As for completing the application about your background and experience. I have sold seen people with no experience or a website have gotten in. You guys should be fine as we're all writers and have our own websites here haha.

I just wanted to inform people that this such program exists and it's a great way for people to generate a new passive income on top of everything else. There are a lot of successful people out there at top of their game and are making a good amount of money per month. The top players have at least 2000 designs uploaded and like I said, it's a numbers game at the end of the day. The more designs you have up, the more exposure of your designs to the customers to look at and purchase.

Let me know if this allowed, I have sold checked the rules and I think it's all good for me to post this. I will say this just in case, I do not gain anything in terms of commissions/referrals from the link. I wrote this blog with an intent of letting you guys know that this platform exist and they can make some money with it on the side. If you have some spare time on the side, go for it and I wish you the best of luck with it.

If people are interested, I can create another blog that goes in depth on how to make a good use of Merch By Amazon as well as RedBubble. I'm super grateful that I found this community and its resources. So this is why I want to give something back to the community and hopefully you guys can benefit from it.

Feel free to ask me any questions and I'll try my best to answer them. I'm off to have dinner now!

To your success,

Frasier.