So I’m sure you read my intro on the Merch By Amazon program, but if not here it is: https://steemit.com/amazon/@bodyinbeta/merch-by-amazon-a-beginners-intro
On April 17th, I received my acceptance email into the Merch By Amazon program. I had forgotten about even applying for the program.
It took me almost 3 months before I was accepted into the program. Unfortunately, I didn’t make good use of this time and when I was finally accepted in I had no designs ready and I had no design skills.
At that time I was allowed to upload 2 designs a day and 10 designs total. I bought a few courses on Udemy and Jacob Toppings’ book on Gumroad to learn more about Merch.
After reading Jacob’s book, I decided I would just outsource the first 10 designs. Using someone he recommended in the book I paid $140 for 10 designs. This was to include the designs and keywords to use.
I received the designs within 2 days and they were horrible. Just plain text designs with crappy fonts and no original Photoshop or Illustrator files so I could change colors, etc. It was also going to be another 4 days before they got me the keywords.
I knew that I could do this good of designs on my own so I ended up purchasing Adobe Illustrator CC and started watching some YouTube videos on how to use it. I had my first design done and ready to upload in a few hours.
The design was just simple text but it was done and uploaded. It took 3 days for Amazon to approve my first design. This was April 24th.
I continued to upload designs that I had made and a few that a friend helped me with. On April 30th, I got my first sale. It was the first design that I had uploaded. From there I made a few more sales but I was maxed out at 10 designs.
I was impatient and wanted to move up through the tiers. I knew that the real money was going to come from being in the 500+ design tier so I decided to buy my way out of the 10 tier and I bought 6 shirts.
Amazon tiered me up to 25 total designs a few days later with 2 max uploads a day. I had some designs ready to go and continued to max out my uploads each day until I had 25 designs up.
I was still short on having my 25 total sales to move up to 100 designs so again, I bought my way out of this tier. All told I only sold 7 shirts organically in those first 25 shirts sold. The rest either I bought or friends and family.
I will probably do a post on tiering up in the future but I don’t regret buying my way out of the first 2 tiers. Some people will tell you if you can’t sell 10 shirts then you don’t have any business having 25 design slots. I disagree and I feel Merch is still a numbers game.
Again, I got lucky on tiering up and I got tiered up to 100 total designs within a day or 2 of selling my 25th shirt. Around this time, Amazon upped their daily limits and I could now upload 5 a day.
I managed to keep up with my daily uploads and I started making more sales. I was determined that I was done buying my way out of the tiers. I improved my design skills, bought some images, and fonts.
Once I maxed out at 100 designs, it was a waiting game to get enough sales for Amazon to tier me up to 500 designs. It took me another 2 weeks after that to get my 100th sale. 2 days after that Amazon tiered me up to 500 designs and that’s the level I’m on today.
I feel like I’ve been pretty lucky to have gotten tiered up quickly whenever I’ve gotten the required sales to move up. Several people wait weeks or months to get leveled up. I’ve also moved faster through the tiers than some because I did buy my way out of those first 2 tiers.
So have I made any money? Not much and part of that is due to my pricing strategies. I’ve tried several different strategies to try to get more sales and I’ve even went as low as only making a penny on each shirt just to get more sales and tier up.
As of today I’ve sold 144 shirts and have made $420.55 in profit. I have 250 designs live at this moment and so far I’ve been keeping up with my 10 uploads a day. I’m not sure I can keep up with that but if I do I should be maxed out again at 500 designs sometime in the first week of August.
Sales since Father’s day have really slowed down but I’m told that’s normal for internet sales in general. July and August tend to be real slow months and then it starts picking up again in September.
My goal is just to have 1000 designs live by mid November so I can take advantage of the Christmas rush. My next Merch by Amazon article will be tips & tricks on how to tier up quickly.
Timeline so far:
- January 25th, 2017 - Applied for Merch account
- April 17th, 2017 - Got accepted into Merch
- April 24th, 2017 - First design was live
- April 30th, 2017 - First sale
- May 15th, 2017 - Tiered up to 25 designs
- May 26th, 2017 - Tiered up to 100 designs
- June 27th, 2017 - Tiered up to 500 designs