SIGNING UP FOR AN ACCOUNT

Merch by Amazon was a massive popular program when it first launched. Due to the extremely population, Amazon quickly tighten the registration terms to new applicants. The only way to join Merch by Amazon is signing up to a waiting list and requesting for an invitation. The waiting time can be different between users, normally from 3 weeks up to 3 months (or even maybe your request will be rejected).

The best thing you can do is heading to here and request an invitation. While waiting fot the account, following the steps below to gain as much knowledge as you can. Then you will be ready to start your business by the time your account has approval.

Once your account goes live, you will be able to login and fill up your information. Then, you will see something similar to this:

This is your Dashboard where you can upload designs, promote your products, analyse sales…

But before getting to know the Dashboard, you need some things to get started with Merch by Amazon:

• Alive Merch by Amazon account
• Photo Editor/Design Software: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrated
• Your creativity, your ideas

Merch Tiers

All Merch accounts will have a tier depending on the sales of each account. Here’s Merch Tier list:

• Tier10: 10 designs
• Tier25: 25 designs
• Tier100: 100 designs
• Tier500: 500 designs
• Pro: By Invitation Only

At starting point, you will be at Tier 1 corresponding to 25 designs. That means you are ability to upload 25 designs. After selling 25 t-shirts of any design, your account will be upgraded to next tier.

It is ensured that you don’t want to be stuck at the first tier and sell no t-shirt. Therefore, the first 25 designs seem to be critical to your success. Carefully research for these 25 shirts will help you jump to the next tier. After first tier, you will have more ideas and of course you will be able to create better designs for your customers.

PLANNING FOR YOUR BUSINESS

Before creating and uploading designs, you first need a plan for your Merch account. You should know what exactly t-shirts you are selling. Asking these questions will help you to have good ideas:

• Who are your target customers?
• What will be illustrated in your t-shirt? (images, quotes or both)
• What shirts are the hottest sellers?
• How do you come up with design ideas?
• Is there any similar design to your idea? How is it selling?
• How will you create your design?

By answering these questions, you will be clearly know what you need to do and what ideas you will follow for your t-shirts. Like mentioned above, you could create whatever you like, but there is no guarantee for them to have sales. Without any advertisement, how can you get your customers? So, let’s make a completed plan starting with doing market research.

RECOGNIZING MERCH T-SHIRTS

Before starting doing any research, you need to know which t-shirt is from Merch or not. Once you recognize a Merch t-shirt, you can check the best selling rank to see if it going well on Amazon.

There are few tips for finding Merch t-shirts. All Merch listing will have mutual things: same size chart, white tag and a same sentence in description.

• Size chart: All t-shirts of Merch has the same size charts which are the basic chart of Amazon

• Visible white tag: A t-shirts of Merch will have a white tag like this:

• Same sentence in description: All Merch t-shirts should have a same sentence in description: Lightweight, Classic fit, Double-needle sleeve and bottom hem. That will help you in searching Merch t-shirts by including this sentence with the searching keywords.

 Note: any listing with a model wearing a t-shirt will not be from Merch.

AMAZON BEST SELLERS RANK (BSR)

After finding out which one is from Merch, you need to know how they are selling by checking the Best Seller Rank of the shirt.

The rank will be displayed on the listing, in product description. If using Amazon mobile app, this part is on “Features and Details” section.

The Amazon Best Sellers Rank will show how well the t-shirt is selling. The lower this number, the more sales it gets. If a listing does not have rank, that means that 0 t-shirt have been sold. Anything ranked 50,000 or lower is selling few items every day.

The purpose to do this is using the designs for inspiration, not to copy and paste to your own one. Finding a t-shirt with low rank will help you to know what customers are interested in. You could decide to follow that idea and create a similar design but using different vectors, different fonts. Or you can make a different one that makes you believe your customers will purchase for it.

BEAWARING THE COMPETITORS

What will happen if you follow a good ranked t-shirt which is on top 100,000 BSR? You should enter the keyword and search in Amazon, you will see a list of hundreds competitors who have similar designs. Would this be a good idea?

In most cases, the answer is NO.

That shirt could have low BSR rank but it doesn’t mean if going for same idea, your product would be competitive and optimal. And of course, you still need to face with other sellers to get a sale. The goal is to come up with at least 25 designs, around ranked 100,000-150,000 to use as inspiration.

Then, when you have over 25 designs, it’s time to create your shirts and upload to your Merch account.

But, it takes you long time to catch an idea that you want to follow. So you can use Merch tool such as SpyAMZ to minimize the time on research. With the giant quantity of data (7 million t-shirts and still increasing), SpyAMZ is the most useful tool for Merch sells and merchants on catching the hottest trends and doing their market research.

CREATING YOUR PRODUCT

If you already have your idea and design, it’s time for you to create your artwork and upload to your account. Amazon provides templates for different designing softwares:

• Adobe Photoshop Template
• GIMP Template
• Adobe Illustrator Template

You can easily download them from the Dashboard.

It will be more convenient for you. You just need to replace the sample image by your one. Add anything you want (images, vectors, quotes) and make sure to use high quality versions. Remember to save your artwork as PNG file. Besides, you can also save PSD file (if using Photoshop) to edit your design anytime you want or re-use the layouts or elements.

If you want your designs look more professional or you have trouble in using designing software, you also purchase for pre-made designs of other designers. And then direct to Create tab on your Merch account to upload your t-shirts.

Merch by Amazon Designs Resources:

In order to get benefits from your research and new ideas, you need to make your idea become greatest designs. There are some design resources that can help you on making your artwork:

Free Vectors:

Vector files are images that can be scaled to any resolutions without losing any quality. They will help you to enhance your design. There are some websites that can provide you nice vectors:

• Vector4Free
• OpenClipArt
• Vector.me
• FreePik

Note: Remember to read the Creative Commons License for the image you are likely to use.

Free Fonts:

For the quote ideas, the fonts used are also very important. They need to be good-looked, well-designed and can demonstrate the meaning of your quotes. You can find a huge list of free fonts (typefaces) that you can install and use.

• Dafonts
• 1001FreeFonts
• Fontspace

Again, make sure you check the licensing rights/copyrights before freely using these fonts on your designs.

Finally, if you already had your designs, then direct to Create tab on your Merch account Dashboard to upload your t-shirts.

Remember to fill all the information of your t-shirts: T-shirt type, colours, price and add product details. You need to make sure all your descriptions are optimised to reach your customers through organic search. Then, when you submit your product, congratulations, you are now having your t-shirt completed on Amazon. After about 1-2 hours, it should go live and become searchable. Your mission now is just sitting and waiting for your first sales.

WRAPPING UP

There you go everyone! With the full and complete ultimate guild to start with Merch by Amazon, you know what to do now to get passive revenue stream with Merch. Remember that Amazon is a giant site with millions of traffic everyday, the best part is you do not need to do any advertising to promote your products. The more designs you upload, the more money you can get. Always do research to ensure your artworks are able to make money.

Good luck with your Merch game!

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If you have any questions, feel free to contact us via email: hi@spyamz.com

Good question. Merch by Amazon is a place where you can upload your designs, Amazon will produce the product based on sales demand and your designs, then ship them to the customers who bought it on Amazon.com. Your designs can be: T-shirts, Hoodies, Sweaters, Long-sleeves, Short-sleeves, Shirts…

This is a print-on-demand service, which means they print the t-shirt after the sale was made. Amazon will handle the production procedure, also the logistic process and storage, you won’t need to worry about products, materials, factory, warehouse, tailors, unsold stuff or any of them. It’s risk-free (or at least very-tiny-small risks). The only thing’s gonna waste you is time and your thinking brain.

In short for TL-DR:

• You upload your T-shirt design and set the price.
• Amazon approves it, making it as an Amazon product.
• People buy it.
• Amazon makes it, ships it to people.
• You have the money. Sounds fun!

“Easiest money I’ve ever made.”

But not that easy. Your T-shirts will be one of the Amazon products, among millions of others. Which means to survive in the crowd, it will require pricing, product description, categories, even marketing campaigns for it, and more. Amazon handled the backend logistic, shipping, but to get your stuff sold, it’s up to yourself.

You can easily distinguish Merch by Amazon products from others by the following indicators:

• The listing will always have a sizing chart.
• There will be a visible white tag on the main image.
• There won’t be a person wearing the shirt in the primary photos of the listing.
• [Unofficial] Have this line in the product description: “Lightweight, Classic fit, Double-needle sleeve and bottom hem”

There are some other T-Shirt print-on-demand services out there, like CafePress and Zazzle. However, they do not have such giant pool of designing materials and professional customer service like Merch by Amazon. I am not sure about the exact amount of their items, but it’s more than 8 millions.

Branding with Amazon is great. Once you sold items via Merch, Amazon will keep your brand online and show it to many places on the site, helping populate your brand’s name effortlessly.

Also, Merch by Amazon helps your team reach further and interact with the larger pool of customers that you’ve never imagined before. This is one of the best benefits come from Merch by Amazon.

Not only that, your items published via Merch by Amazon are likely to have Amazon Prime tag along and it will be displayed with other best merchants on the platform, increasing your brand’s popularity and trust. Moreover, your T-shirts can aim to the A-Class customers of Amazon – the Primers, having the better chance for sales.

As I’ve mentioned above, Amazon covers the producing and shipping process, so you do not need to worry about finding a manufacturer and a shipper of yourself. So your cost, risk and time of running the business will be minimized and even earns you a hell of money. Woohoo!

Merch by Amazon is easy, risk-free and beneficial indeed. Be caution, there must be always some drawbacks. Your T-shirts should be treated as an Amazon product, which means they will fight against millions of others on the platform, so what you need to do will clearly be:

1. Grab the hottest and most trending ideas and turn them into T-shirt. Ideas are what that counts at Merch by Amazon;
2. Set the price for the items;
3. Build a description based on Amazon requirements;
4. Make it as creative and attractive as possible, suit best for SEO;
5. Run effective Marketing campaigns for them. You will need to be wise and smart on this field to do it right.

You’d better spend your time on these works when Merching. Now let’s go deep and start your journey.

“To Merch by Amazon, and Beyond”

To sell anything, the first thing you need is an account for merchants/sellers. To get it, please request an Invitation at Merch by Amazon. Amazon will sort out everything and send you an official Invitation to join their Merch. It’s up to your luck. No one can tell exactly the time you will get the invitation, might be a few days, or even months. Nonetheless, everyone gets their invitation.

To request one, please follow this friendly orange button and click “Request Invitation“. Fill in your information and kindly wait for the response.

In the meantime waiting, step forth ahead. Be active and collect all the ideas, hottest trends you can mine and turn them into T-shirts. Remember to personalize your own items, spread your own culture.

It’s good to have your own opinion about fun, trend and idea, but to stand brightly among other, you must learn from the opponents. This will increase the chance your T-shirt having sales.

First of all, you must make clear of these factors:

1. Your Keywords and look-alikes, comes from your ideas and hottest trends;
2. Relevant T-shirts are selling on Amazon, analyze them;
3. Your targeted customer areas and audiences;
4. Your style, directions, purposes and niches;
5. Trademark and Copyright checking, don’t get yourself killed right at the first place;
6. Other competitors: the sellers with the same niche.

There are a lot of ways catching trends and ideas:

• Traditional way: Surfing hundreds of pages of Amazon T-shirt and find yourself as many ideas as you can. This proves not so good efficiency and the rate of return is also low, you cannot observe the item ranks either. However, this way is free.
• Merching Service: Use a 3rd party service to collect the images, ranks, available date, price, categories, pricing charts, ranking charts, and many other useful data. They also come with the huge pool of T-shirt items which was mined from Amazon platform. What you need is just log into the service and roam for ideas and trends. However, this costs.

We have several Merching service out there, such as SpyAMZ, MerchInformer, MerchSensei. Above all, SpyAMZ proves exceptional performance with fast data mining speed , a giant pool of T-shirts, up to 7 millions and rising. Furthermore, it provides useful data analysis and idea catching helper like: Best ranks list, Sudden Increase, Random – Shuffle T-shirt, Detailed price and rank charts, Trademark checking, and more.

SpyAMZ is the best tool available for sellers/merchants with Merch by Amazon. It’s incredibly effective and helps you catch the hottest trends at once. Sell with SpyAMZ, win with SpyAMZ. It’s not just the design, but also a part of your marketing strategy.

Once you get all you need, let’s move on to the execute phase. It’s best to have a professional designer to work with you, save you some time with the drawing. Or if you don’t have one, or prefer to do it yourself, you must master your skills with Photoshop, GIMP, or Pixlr online editor. These tools are the best buddy for you to create your own unique and breakthrough T-shirt design!

After finishing your designing work, you might need to go back and check again on your design to meet specific requirements from Amazon. Please click here to learn more about those requirements. 

Other factors you should consider such as T-Shirt template, Colors, Sizes and Positioning. You might choose up to 3 colors for your items and a correct size chart that people could easily look up. As a starter, Amazon will give you 10 designs at max. This amount will gradually expand as you continue your business on Amazon. There are some sale targets to reach and the slots will open more for you once reached.

Every item has a price. And it’s up to you to set that price. Pricing is also a part of Marketing works, so the pricing is one of the most critical jobs while Merching with Amazon. You must base on your aimed audience and niches, marketing plan and phase to define the price. Be competitive with others merchants and price it wisely.

Also, you might need to learn about Pricing and Royalties from Amazon. How much will you receive when a T-shirt was sold, based on its price? This is the real amount of money you have for each sale. With it, you can come up with the awesome plan and maximize your revenue!

With SEO, everyone wants their products to be recognized and found on the search engines. Here, the search engine will be Amazon, there should be some differences, but in general things are pretty much the same. Therefore, a Product Description is very important

You can visit this guide and learn how to win with ASO – Amazon Search Optimization. You might need an optimized Product Description and specific category. Also, make it as effective as possible, and aim to the right target of customers. Once your items appear at the right search result, you have completed most of the way.

Once available on Amazon, your item is good to go now. If you’re new to Merch by Amazon, I suggest you private your item first. You can test it and try buying the T-shirt. Once you’re satisfied with everything, set it to Public and start selling your product!

But it’s not over yet. To make your brand grow bigger, you must run marketing for your items and merchants. Populate them, approach the right and wider audience areas, promote them via multiple channels. The better you run, the higher ranks the items climb. Good luck with sales

Your business has started and been running for a while. You should need some time for self-evaluation. It’s wise to know what to keep and what to drop. Firstly, you can gather the overview of your business and item’s situations, to maintain their path or head for a new way. Also, you can figure out the weaknesses and strengths to unleash your full potential.

Moreover, keep an eye on other sellers and the market trending to seize chances before others. SpyAMZ could help you do it nicely.

Final Words for Merch by Amazon

It’s all about design and seizing chances. Merch by Amazon is a market where you can sell your clothing design in the easiest and most effective way. Just research, forecast the trends, design, upload it to Amazon, run marketing and get things sold. It does not only make your brand become more famous, but also brings you a lot of money you desire. Merch by Amazon is low-risked, creative and fast money earning. It’s a good place for you to start your business. Good luck for your T-shirts

By the way, do not forget to visit SpyAMZ for latest, real-time-updated trends, designs, data, item pool and analysis exclusively for Merch by Amazon!