The Merch by Amazon Process

The Merch by Amazon process I, amongst many others follow, revolves around improving upon t-shirt designs which are selling well and jumping on trends before they begin. You will know you are succeeding with Merch by Amazon when about ~30% of the shirt designs you have uploaded have sold or are currently selling. Believe it or not, this is a great percentage and may end up decreasing as you tier up due to the many t-shirt variations you will be creating and less researched niches.

The process I follow revolves around doing heavy research on profitable niches or phrases, creating or outsourcing designs, and then ranking these designs highly with relevant keywords. I will go more into detail on these topics in later sections.

After completing this tutorial, you may finally receive the boost you needed to begin your Merch career. Do not be disappointed with your slow start, as nearly everyone will generally start off slow in the first month due to the limited number of shirts you can upload on Amazon. Regardless of how you do in your first month, you should see drastic improvements in your net profits in the second or third month.

In my first month on Merch, as clueless as I was, I was able to make around $70. By the end of the second month with more experience, marketing tricks, and blog post readings, I was nearly making $500. The third month was not as a drastic jump but by the end of the fourth month, after hiring a designer, I had reached the $1000 per month goal, even after subtracting from the expenses for my designer. Therefore, I believe by the fourth month with continual effort and with the information provided in this book, you should be able to easily achieve $1000 or more per month.

If you are a beginner (less than 25 shirt designs uploaded), I would recommend starting with niches that you are extremely familiar or passionate with and then create 2-3 designs based upon those niches. Use your own judgment when researching for design ideas and always make sure the design you are creating has a relatively good chance to sell. You do not have to do much research in general when creating a design based on a niche that you are passionate about because little people can compete with the knowledge and familiarity you may be able to bring to a creative and unique t-shirt idea. More on this is in the Design chapter.

Tiering Up Quickly

The entire process I teach here is also the best way I have found to tier-up the quickest on Merch. If you don’t already know, every month or so Amazon looks at how many shirts you’ve sold and uploaded and determines whether you are eligible to rank up and sell more shirt designs. The number of designs you can upload to Merch daily is also limited depending on your tier as well, so it is essential to tier-up as fast as you can. This goes without saying, but the more designs you have uploaded, the more profit you will make.

The tier list for the number of shirts available to sell and required to sell to tier-up is as follows:

• Tier 1 = 25 designs
• Tier 2 = 100 designs
• Tier 3 = 500 designs
• Tier 4 = 1000 designs
• Tier 5 = 2000 designs
• Tier 6 = 4000 designs
• Tier 7 = 8000 designs

Note that the tier list may change as it has in the past. To tier-up quickly, I would recommend for at least 20-30% of your designs (if you are tier 1 - tier 2) to be trending (non-evergreen) designs as these are more likely to sell. Evergreen designs are Merch designs which sell year-round, whereas trending designs are Merch designs which will only sell or see most of its sales within a certain time frame. An example of this can be cat t-shirts (evergreen) and Christmas t-shirts (trending), in the sense that Christmas t-shirts are “trending” because they only sell around November and December. Trending shirts, however, are great for tiering up as they sell quickly and have huge demand, which will thus allow for you to climb out of tier 1 or tier 2 quickly.

Other methods for tiering up quickly are simple changes to your Merch design uploads. You should begin with pricing your shirts at a competitive but below average level and you should see sales within a few days ($11.99 - $14.99). Lastly, remove designs which haven’t sold in two-three weeks if you are in tier 1 as they have likely lost a lot of selling potential (unless they are for future trends). In addition, you can improve upon your designs and keywords, but this will be covered in more detail in their appropriate chapters. If you are still struggling with climbing out of earlier tiers or want to look at how to exponentially increase your Merch profit, check out the Selling Your Designs chapter for more advanced tactics.

In earlier stages of your Merch career, usually tier 1 and 2, you will be limited to uploading only two designs daily. If these shirt designs do not sell quickly, you will struggle to reach the $1000 per month goal within 4 months. It is thus extremely important that you continue reading to learn how to research for profitable Merch designs.