Post: #1

I've noticed the print on demand or POD business has had a lot of interest from people on here so I thought I would make a datasheet sharing my experiences.

Years ago before POD was a big thing, I dabbled with trying to sell on sites like CafePress and Zazzle. It's kind of funny that POD has been around for ages, but hadn't really gotten popular until platforms like Teespring, Amazon Merch, RedBubble and others came into the space.

Amazon Merch was initially designed to be a platform for game creators and app developers to sell swag via their games, however it wasn't locked down to only developers so it quickly became popular among online marketers, graphic designers, and people looking to start tee shirt and/or clothing brands.

While there are a number of platforms out there, Amazon Merch is by far the leader in the space for one reason and one reason alone, organic traffic. 2/3 of households have Prime accounts, most people shop on Amazon fairly regularly and this is why Merch is so powerful. Let's think about it, have you ever gone on tee spring to search for a beer pong shirt? I'm guessing no. However have you ever gone on Amazon and searched for a beer pong set, a yoga mat, a camping item or really anything else? The answer to that question is probably yes.

Now when you search for something like a Yoga Mat on Amazon, there is a chance that an Amazon Merch tee shirt will pop up in your search and that is the power of Amazon Merch, your items are on the Amazon platform.

Why Most People Go About POD The Wrong Way?

I see a lot of people on here as well as on the internet wanting to create a brand or a clothing line. Nothing wrong with that, but realize it's an uphill challenge. Everyone and their mom is trying to start a POD brand. Unless you have a large social media following it's going to be an uphill battle. Someone like Jake Paul has millions of people who want to be part of his brand so he makes a fortune selling swag despite being a huge dooshbag. If you are internet famous, or even manage a large Instagram following about weed or surfing or anything else this can be a viable option for you, however if you don't have that, this will be a huge challenge.

It's not cheap to drive traffic, especially paid traffic, and POD is notoriously a low margin business. While some people sell IMHO crappy shirts with CustomCat, almost every other platform is $12 to $15 base price of a shirt plus say $4 for shipping so your looking at $16 to $19 as a base price. Personally I think any shirt over $20 is overpriced unless you have a REALLY strong brand so assuming you are using $20 as a price your making anywhere from $1 to $4, not nearly enough to run FB ads or Adwords.

Lastly, for someone wanting to start a brand, the quality of POD can be mixed. Sometimes the wrong shirts get sent out, sometimes shirts come apart after a wash, sometimes the ink doesn't go on well. Do you really want to try to build a brand with some perceived luxury and be sending out poor quality items? Do you really want to associate your brand with POD quality merchandise?

I think POD can be used as a testing ground to try out concepts, brands and designs before ordering blanks in bulk and screenprinting, but your not going to create a longlasting and sustainable brand with POD.

I know everyone has some friend making huge money selling $30 shirts, if that's true it's not the norm.

So How Do I Join?

Amazon Merch has kind of an odd way of joining. You have to be invited. Here's the funny part though, you request an invite by visiting Merch.Amazon.Com. Your asked for your name, e-mail, and if you have a website or blog. I would recommend putting something in, even if it's a social media profile, it shows you have some platform for driving traffic and will probably get you on quicker than putting nothing at all.

Basically while they call it an invitation your really just signing up and being put on a waiting list. Due to the popularity of the platform some people are waiting over a year to get on, while other people get on in 1 day or 30 days, there seems to be no rhyme or reason.

I'm In What Now?

So your in, your going to start out at tier 10. This means you can only list 10 shirts. Once you sell 10 shirts you're "tiered up" to 25 and can list 25 shirts. Once you sell 25 shirts your tiered up to 50 and can sell 50, next 100, then 500, then 1000 and so forth and so on.

Early on price your shirts near the base price, fuck making money, just tier up to 100 or 500, that should be your focus. Once you get 500 shirts up you can now start raising your prices to full price and making $5.68 per shirt.

Amazon is very very strict in terms of trademarks and protecting brands. For example the word hot sauce is pretty innocent right? Not a brand name or anything. Wrong it's trademarked so having hot sauce on a shirt or even in your item tags, title or description can get you a strike or possibly banned. Stay away from any brand names, sports teams, etc. This is one area Amazon is worse than other platforms, it's incredibly restrictive in the types of shirts you can make. No drug use, no swearing, nothing overtly sexual, nothing controversial, that is one shortfall of the platform. Moral of the story put your Game of Thrones shirts on Redbubble not Merch.

Advice & Strategy

Kind of touched on this but early on focus on tiering up. Once you have a good amount of shirts go hard. Don't put too much time or effort into creating designs. You can make the best fucking unicorn shirt in the world but if people aren't buying unicorn shirts you wasted your fucking time. Throw up half ass shirts, if something sells well then hit that topic hard ie if a bowling shirt sells well crank out 100 more bowling shirts and put a bit more effort in but early on stick to simple text or graphic designs that can be done in under 5 minutes.

Same overall strategy for web SEO, Amazon and eBay ranking applies, put in keywords that people who might buy that shirt will be searching for. Make it readable don't just keyword stuff.

Buying your own shirts works. Most times until you get a sale you won't have a BSR score or best seller ranking, once a shirt sells you will have one. Buy some of your own shirts, you'll get a bump in BSR and search and will likely have an organic sale follow that.

Going along with that, while technically this violates Amazon policy, on a small scale you won't get caught. List your shirts on Etsy, eBay, etc and use Amazon to dropship your shirts to those customers. Hopefully you can squeeze out a couple extra bucks and even if it's a break even your helping those shirts rank better and will organically sell more through Amazon.

Word of Caution

Amazon does what's best for Amazon. Don't rely on this for a full time income. At times Amazon will block people from uploading for a month at a time.At times Amazon will hide all your shirts so buyers can't buy them because they can't keep up with the printing. Amazon could suspend you at any time for any reason, they could close the program. This is a great little gig for a couple hundred bucks per month, some people even make thousands and tens of thousands but realize its not stable and could come to an end at any time.

In terms of a reasonable expectation, if your decent with design, SEO, marketing, online selling any of those things and build this for a few months you can very easily and very passively make a couple hundred dollars per month even if your not that creative and not that great at designing.

Post: #2

Thanks for that post. I am about to start with the whole t-shirt thing. I run a page with about 60k Instagram followers and have connections to other influencers in that niche, but I have a feeling that just by providing other instagram pages with affiliate links to my shirts (run on shopify), I won't make many sales. Can I just submit the same t-shirt designs to Amazon merch or does Amazon not allow that? And do I understand that correctly, that you just have to upload the t-shirt design (similar to POD companies) to Amazon merch and not send the physical t-shirts to their warehouses (like you do with FBA)?

Post: #3

(04-17-2018 11:09 PM)RagnarLothbrok Wrote:  Thanks for that post. I am about to start with the whole t-shirt thing. I run a page with about 60k Instagram followers and have connections to other influencers in that niche, but I have a feeling that just by providing other instagram pages with affiliate links to my shirts (run on shopify), I won't make many sales. Can I just submit the same t-shirt designs to Amazon merch or does Amazon not allow that? And do I understand that correctly, that you just have to upload the t-shirt design (similar to POD companies) to Amazon merch and not send the physical t-shirts to their warehouses (like you do with FBA)?

Yes Amazon Merch, while it does have a couple downsides ie strict content policies, it's IMHO the best platform out there for POD.

You upload a 4500x5400 design to Amazon, you make the titles, tags and descriptions and select the type of shirt ie regular, premium, long sleeve, hoodie or noodie, and then you select the colors. Your done.

Any order that comes through, Amazon will take payment, print the shirt, ship the shirt and handle returns and/or customer service. You do nothing. Other POD sites or Shopify stores your typically either needing to setup an automated system to forward orders to Printful, your taking returns, etc, Amazon is much more passive. YOu also have your items on Amazon.Com where people are shopping which is incredibly powerful so while you can do some of your own promotion it's not at all necessary.

You are allowed to upload designs that your also selling on other platforms or on your own Shopify store.

The margins are better than most POD stores as well. Your base price per shirt for a basic is something like $14, I forget the exact amount but if your charging $19.99 you make a $5.68 commisssion. Most other POD sites I see charge a $14 fee plus like a $4 shipping so your cost is like $18. Merch is great because almost everyone has prime so they get free shipping and your making a not great but decent margin selling at $19.99 per shirt. Your not having to sell shirts for $30 to make a decent margin.

Post: #4

(04-18-2018 09:10 AM)jamaicabound Wrote:  

(04-17-2018 11:09 PM)RagnarLothbrok Wrote:  Thanks for that post. I am about to start with the whole t-shirt thing. I run a page with about 60k Instagram followers and have connections to other influencers in that niche, but I have a feeling that just by providing other instagram pages with affiliate links to my shirts (run on shopify), I won't make many sales. Can I just submit the same t-shirt designs to Amazon merch or does Amazon not allow that? And do I understand that correctly, that you just have to upload the t-shirt design (similar to POD companies) to Amazon merch and not send the physical t-shirts to their warehouses (like you do with FBA)?

Yes Amazon Merch, while it does have a couple downsides ie strict content policies, it's IMHO the best platform out there for POD.

You upload a 4500x5400 design to Amazon, you make the titles, tags and descriptions and select the type of shirt ie regular, premium, long sleeve, hoodie or noodie, and then you select the colors. Your done.

Any order that comes through, Amazon will take payment, print the shirt, ship the shirt and handle returns and/or customer service. You do nothing. Other POD sites or Shopify stores your typically either needing to setup an automated system to forward orders to Printful, your taking returns, etc, Amazon is much more passive. YOu also have your items on Amazon.Com where people are shopping which is incredibly powerful so while you can do some of your own promotion it's not at all necessary.

You are allowed to upload designs that your also selling on other platforms or on your own Shopify store.

The margins are better than most POD stores as well. Your base price per shirt for a basic is something like $14, I forget the exact amount but if your charging $19.99 you make a $5.68 commisssion. Most other POD sites I see charge a $14 fee plus like a $4 shipping so your cost is like $18. Merch is great because almost everyone has prime so they get free shipping and your making a not great but decent margin selling at $19.99 per shirt. Your not having to sell shirts for $30 to make a decent margin.

Thanks. That sounds really interesting. I will give it a try and report back.

Post: #5

Amazon is really a powerhouse, if any company was going to take over the world. Amazon is in the top five. Overall, this sounds like a good opportunity. Aside from design fees, are there any startup fees or charges for listing your t-shirts? Like FBA charge you a small amount for storage in the warehouses.
i wonder what niches could be exploited(if theres any left)

Post: #6

Would not be surprised if they follow the FBA model and charge a monthly subscription soon.

They are a money making behemoth. This would deter more newcomers but the hardcore and early adopters would still be making $$$

Post: #7

(04-18-2018 05:01 PM)Dafffy Wrote:  Amazon is really a powerhouse, if any company was going to take over the world. Amazon is in the top five. Overall, this sounds like a good opportunity. Aside from design fees, are there any startup fees or charges for listing your t-shirts? Like FBA charge you a small amount for storage in the warehouses.
i wonder what niches could be exploited(if theres any left)

Absolutely no fees for selling on FBA. There are some hacks where you can turn your merch shirts into sponsored ads, there's also some analytic programs you can signup for that can be helpful but no there are 0 fees regarding the actual selling on Merch, no monthly fees, no fee per order. Basically each shirt has a base price so we'll say standard $14. You choose to sell at whatever price above that you want so if you pick $16 you make a $2 commission if you pick $20 you get a $6 commission, etc, etc, etc.

Post: #8

(04-19-2018 12:27 AM)tobehero Wrote:  Would not be surprised if they follow the FBA model and charge a monthly subscription soon.

They are a money making behemoth. This would deter more newcomers but the hardcore and early adopters would still be making $$$

Funny you say that, I've actually been thinking the same thing and have heard other merch sellers echo the same sentiment.

Alot of big companies use merch like Marvel Comics and others. Some peoplle suspect it will go away and they'll only deal with big brands, others like you and I, think it will go to a pay per month type deal where you have to pay say $39.95 per month.

Honestly a lot of people would be happy for this. It would definitely get rid of all the halfass sellers and get rid of a lot of the casual sellers which is a large percentage of people. This would hopefully mean they don't have to throttle, they dont have to stop allowing uploads for a month like they did in December, they wont be out of certain sizes and colors at times, etc.

Post: #9

Thanks Jamaicabound, applied when I saw this thread and just submitted my first design.

Question: what are some of the free/cheap ways to promote your tees?

Post: #10

(04-19-2018 11:57 PM)d_hzy Wrote:  Thanks Jamaicabound, applied when I saw this thread and just submitted my first design.

Question: what are some of the free/cheap ways to promote your tees?

How did you get approved so fast?

Post: #11

(04-20-2018 10:32 AM)tobehero Wrote:  

(04-19-2018 11:57 PM)d_hzy Wrote:  Thanks Jamaicabound, applied when I saw this thread and just submitted my first design.

Question: what are some of the free/cheap ways to promote your tees?

How did you get approved so fast?

I don't know, i just put my ideas behind the designs and my IG in the description.

Post: #12

Updates from any guys doing this?

Post: #13

I've been doing merch for a bit. The best advice I can give to promote your shirts is to have as many friends and family by them, and pay them back if you have to.

You can have the coolest design, but it won't see the light of day in searches if it hasn't had any sales yet.

Post: #14

Good thread. I will most likely try to start this up soon.

What's a good amount of money to throw at this to start out?

Post: #15

Curious, is anyone making money off this? Like 1k+ a month?

Post: #16

By reading the above I believe that they are not any start up costs involved, just getting your application accepted. Amazon takes a large cut because they essentially do everything. I'd be interested in knowing how much would be spent on marketing, design costs and so forth. At the moment I'm struggling with the designs, I used to pay freelancers through fiver but they don't seem to know exactly what I wanted (now I'm. Learning how to use gimp). Where did you guys get your designs done btw

Post: #17

By reading the above I believe that they are not any start up costs involved, just getting your application accepted. Amazon takes a large cut because they essentially do everything. I'd be interested in knowing how much would be spent on marketing, design costs and so forth. At the moment I'm struggling with the designs, I used to pay freelancers through fiver but they don't seem to know exactly what I wanted (now I'm. Learning how to use gimp). Where did you guys get your designs done btw

Post: #18

(05-18-2018 10:41 PM)Dafffy Wrote:  By reading the above I believe that they are not any start up costs involved, just getting your application accepted. Amazon takes a large cut because they essentially do everything. I'd be interested in knowing how much would be spent on marketing, design costs and so forth. At the moment I'm struggling with the designs, I used to pay freelancers through fiver but they don't seem to know exactly what I wanted (now I'm. Learning how to use gimp). Where did you guys get your designs done btw

How long did it take for you to get approved Dafffy?

Post: #19

I haven't, I've just been doing research on it so far. Should have my application submitted by the end of the week. Apparently, your application will be accepted much quicker if you have a website and some Internet presence.

Post: #20

(05-18-2018 09:01 PM)fiasco360 Wrote:  Good thread. I will most likely try to start this up soon.

What's a good amount of money to throw at this to start out?

You really don't need to throw any money at it, you have Amazon traffic, nothing you can do can even come close to that. Like the poster above said, probably the best money spent, if you choose to spend some money, is buying your own shirts. It gives them a bump in BSR and search ranking. You can either wear them yourself, give them away as gifts or even resell them on eBay or Etsy to recoup the money

Post: #21

(05-18-2018 10:40 PM)tobehero Wrote:  Curious, is anyone making money off this? Like 1k+ a month?

I havn't broken 1K yet, however since initiallly making this post my earnings are regularly just under $1,000. I should add I will at times go weeks without even logging in to merch, this is very much so a passive side hustle for me. If someone were to put in effort on a daily basis you could do even better. I personally know people consistantly making 3k to 6k, the biggest earner I've met was doing 20k per month during the holidays but had an entire team of people working for him and was also listing shirts on nearly every other POD platform out there.

Post: #22

(05-21-2018 04:53 PM)Dafffy Wrote:  I haven't, I've just been doing research on it so far. Should have my application submitted by the end of the week. Apparently, your application will be accepted much quicker if you have a websit and some Internet presence.

There's not really anything to think about in terms of the application, its like name, email and an optional spot to put in a website or blog if you have one. They really don't have much to go off of and judge you on in terms of we'll take this guy but not that guy. I do think it helps to have an online presence even if its a social media profile, just something to show them you have a means to drive traffic and promote stuff.

Post: #23

How many t-shirts do you have on sale? Do you have a specific brand or style?

Post: #24

I applied for Amazon merch account on 20th June and got accepted on 26th June. Which is fuckin awesome, just 6 days!!!

Jamaicabound, would recommend using standard tshirt or premium tshirt? I can’t find the cost of each one

Post: #25

(06-27-2018 10:14 AM)Aviel Wrote:  I applied for Amazon merch account on 20th June and got accepted on 26th June. Which is fuckin awesome, just 6 days!!!

Jamaicabound, would recommend using standard tshirt or premium tshirt? I can’t find the cost of each one

Standard is gonna be Port and Company, Premium is gonna be Bella Canva. Your commission on a standard is gonna be like $2 and some change more than a premium unless you wanna start pricing premium shirts at like $23 as opposed to $19.95.

I used to do more premium but have since moved over to doing nothing but standard. The commissions just don't add up to as much using premium shirts.

Read over the linke below before you really dive into selling, it will cover everything in terms of the TOS, what type of content is allowed, how commissions work, etc.

https://merch.amazon.com/resource