Hey guys, just wanted to touch on some odd Amazon Merch sales numbers I've been experiencing and wish you guys a Happy National Donut Day.
So lately on the r/AmazonMerch subreddit people have been up and arms talking about Amazon Merch throttling. For anyone who doesn't know what throttling is basically when AmazonMerch doesn't have enough tee shirt stock, and/or when they can't keep up with demand they'll make some of our Amazon Merch shirts not show up high in search.
Throttling is a real thing, Amazon Merch TOS addresses the topic of throttling. During Q4 throttling was a big issues and Amazon openly tells us it's happening so it's no surprise throttling exists. That said at the end of the day we don't know how Amazon's algorithm works and Amazon doesn't share that info with us.
I think sometimes when someone is having a bad day or a bad week or a bad month of sales they automatically want to blame throttling when in reality it can just be natural sales patterns and just the normal ebb and flow of business, it's not always some big Amazon conspiracy.
Another thing I wanted to mention is I see a lot of people getting very negative over the whole potential throttling. They get upset and say they are going to quit merch or they're going to stop designing. Ultimately at the end of the day it's completely up to you whether Amazon Merch is worth your time or if your time would be better spent on other platforms like Redbubble or TeeSpring or even if you want to participate in the Print on Demand or POD business period.
That said I think this negativity affects peoples attitudes and affects people's work ethic and design. We can't control what Amazon does, all we can control is what we do and how we react to it. Put out more designs, make sure your maxing out your uploads per day, work on becomming a better designer, work on comming up with better titles, bulletpoints and descriptions, work on promoting your shirts. Those are the things you can control, you can't control what AMazon does so don't focus on that.
Lately my shirt sales stats have been very wierd. So December and January were awesome months for me. March was horrible, April things picked back up and may as a whole was pretty decent up until the last week when my daily sales were typically 1 shirt or sometimes even 0 shirts. It was really odd to as I have a niche that sells consistantly well as well as a shirt or two ranked either number one or within the top 5 so I'm used to some consistant sales so it was a bit odd to see things dry up so quickly. I think I had a day with one sale, the next two days with 0 sales, then had a 10 shirt sale day and then back to one. Things seem to be picking up but again all I can do is continue to crank out shirts so that's what I'm gonna do.