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100k School Debt to Financial Freedom – Merch by Amazon Update 1

This post is also available in: German

From talking to people all over the world about Merch by Amazon, there seems to be a fewcommon themes. There are those that are just looking to make a little side money, andthere are others who are looking to replace their full time job. Almost everyone I havetalked to are trying to dig themselves out of debt or pay their mortgage each month withtheir Merch money!

If you have read any of the interview series we have started doing, you will see that some ofthese people who have dedicated their time to their merch craft have been successful atgetting rid of their debt. Not having all that pressure looming over you really helps to get ridof the stress you might be feeling. The best part? ANYONE can do this and be successful atit.

As I have told people over and over again, there are 2 billion people on Amazon.com eachand every month purchasing goods. All you need to do is appeal to a very small percentage

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https://merchinformer.com/100k-school-debt-financial-freedom-merch-amazon-update-1/

https://merchinformer.com/de/100k-schuldverschuldung-zur-finanziellen-freiheit-merch-by-amazon-update-1/

https://1.envato.market/c/2104946/629767/10168?subId1=discount-link&subId2=banner_header_txt&subId3=https%3A%2F%2Fplaceit.net%2Fc%2Fmockups%3Fpl_coupon%3Dmerchinformer&u=https%3A%2F%2Fplaceit.net%2Fc%2Fmockups%3Fpl_coupon%3Dmerchinformer

of them to be financially free!

What I have not seen many mentions of is another kind of debt. School debt. College orUniversity as all my overseas buddies call it, has gotten a lot more expensive in the past fewyears. Almost everyone I know who went to school has some sort of debt still hangingaround that has not been paid off yet. What we all have the opportunity to do, especiallywith Merch by Amazon, is get rid of all of this debt within a year or two.

This will be a monthly installment where I tell the story of my girlfriend who went back to geta second bachelors degree at college and the attempt to pay off $100,000 worth of collegedebt within 1 year through MBA.

The Story SetupAbout a year ago now, we decided to pack up our bags and leave the mid-west. I needed achange in scenery and the mountains were the perfect place to hang out and continueworking on my projects and building my Merch account. While I was building my account,my girlfriend decided she was going to go back to school to get another degree and switchcareers. This was a big switch because after the first bachelors degree, there was not muchtime to work to save up some money to pay for school.

Loans were taken out, and class started. Loans to the tune of around $100,000 which is abig gamble to take out on yourself.

Months went by where school was the main focus. It took up a good 12-16 hours a day withtraveling, studying, and clinicals. So much time spent on school that in order to be in thisspecific program, realistically there was no way you could hold down a job at the same time.

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Now, she had a Merch account at this time, but justwould not upload any more designs. The account had25 designs put up on it as soon as it was accepted butthe 60 day rule took around 18 of those down. Theaccount was left with around 7 designs that weremaking only making pocket change each month aspriorities laid elsewhere.

Fast forward to the end of April and we had a MASSIVEhail storm where she was going to school. Golf ball sizedhail causing whiteout conditions can be a little bit scarybut watching your new car get utterly destroyed whenyou can do nothing is on another level. All in all, therewas thousands and thousands of dollars in damage tothe vehicle that had just been purchased 9 monthsearlier.

Imagine taking out 100k worth of loans for school and now the vehicle that gets you too andfrom school has just been nearly totaled and is not drive-able. On top of that, you now needto pay for a rental car to get to class which is only going to cost more money.

It was at this point I think my nagging of “just do Merch, you can pay for everything!” startedto sink in!

Up to that point, these were the earnings of the account. As you can see, very unimpressive.

I think this is where most people get stuck. They have a few designs up, realize they are notmaking good money, and just get discouraged and stop trying.

The same thing happened in this situation. Not many people can make the leap frommaking $20 last month, to thinking this income stream was about to pay for a new car andpay off school loans. It might have helped a bit that we live in the same house and she knewthe concept worked because she has seen my account grow over the years but she needed

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to take the leap of faith herself.

At this point, with nothing left to lose, she agreed to upload her 10 slots a day if I helpedwith outsourcing (the account is at the 500 tier). I agreed to help and the research processstarted.

Research ProcessThis is where a lot of people just get really hung up on what is a REALLY simple process.With a login for Merch Informer and a quick 5 minute conversation of how BSR works, wewere off to the races.

The research process went in two steps. First, we would look at the product search moduleand find products that were ranked between 100k-300k BSR. When we found designs in thisarea, we looked at the price. If the price was $15.99 or higher, we would add it to thefavorites in our organizational tree.

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https://merchinformer.com/amazon-best-sellers-rank/

https://merchinformer.com/product-search-overview/

Then about 3-4 days later, we could go back into this list in the favorites tree and REMOVEeverything that was no longer in the 100k-300k BSR range. This means we got rid ofeverything that had sold but was not selling consistently and was left with only designs thatwere constantly moving and making money. These are the niches and ideas we know willsell if we come to market with something better so we downloaded these ideas tooutsource.

Now you might be wondering, how did you come up with niche ideas to put into the productsearch module in the first place? Did you watch a video, did you do something to check thecompetition? Nope! All she did was sit down, look around the room, and start typing inkeywords to search. As we sat on the deck, looked down at the ground and saw grass. Putthat in and hit search. See some herbs on the windowsill? Type in Herbs and differentnames such as basil, parsley. Start building your list based on what is around you.

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From there, look at the bullet points of what is actually ranking and looking at the brands.What else are they selling, what other keywords are they using? Turn around and put theseback in and hit search.

All we are worried about is finding sellers in the 100k-300k BSR range and that is exactlywhat she did, nothing else.

Once we had the list of ideas, I had to have her check them over to make sure they were nottrademarked.

Trademark?Making sure the phrases on these shirts were not trademarked before we sent them off to adesigner is not hard at all. It barely takes any time at all if you know what you are doing. Iquickly explained to her how to check the USPTO website. If you are not familiar with howto do that, please watch this video:

Watch Video At: https://youtu.be/N3dnS3sfFaI

Now, we have a list of shirts that we know the phrases are not trademarked.

The final step before we outsource them is to put them into the Merch Informer TrademarkAlerts. This ensures that even though the phrases are not trademarked now, that if they dobecome trademarked months later, we can take action without Amazon taking action on us.That interface looks pretty awesome and looks like this:

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https://youtu.be/N3dnS3sfFaI

https://merchinformer.com/trademark-alerts-overview/

Once we had all the terms in the trademark alerts, it was time to actually outsource these!

Outsourcing DesignsI am not a graphic artist, and neither is my girlfriend. What I do have is a few graphicdesigners on my team that we can outsource to. This costs $4 per design.

There is no secret tip or trick to getting a graphic designer to do designs that are high qualityon the cheap. We used Upwork.com and did EXACTLY what I lay out in this outsourcingguide here: https://merchinformer.com/use-upwork-outsource-scale-merch-business/.

Putting The Designs OnlineOnce she gets the designs back from the designer, she had to put them up. I was insistentthat she fill her slots EVERY DAY. With 10 slots available, this usually took about 30 minutesto an hour. As the days went on, she got much faster at this.

When she first started uploading though, she had not uploaded any designs in manymonths so we had to have a talk about how it all works. If you have not already read thearticle on Merch SEO that I wrote a long while back, give that a read. That should give you agood idea of how the optimization works.

The title for each of the shirts contained at least 1-2 keywords relating to the designs.

The brand contained a keyword as we have proven that keywords in the brands do in facthelp the listing gain some initial rank.

The bullet points were hard at first as she was having a hard time describing these shirts ina marketing sense and getting all the keywords in that she should. I had her take a look atthe competition and what was ALREADY selling. Since they are ranked and selling, we knowthat their keywords should be used in our listings as well. Once she put those keywords in

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https://merchinformer.com/use-upwork-outsource-scale-merch-business/

https://merchinformer.com/merch-amazon-seo-ultimate-guide/

https://merchinformer.com/keyword-optimization-merch-by-amazon-case-study/

sentence form, she added her own off the top of her head that were synonyms and betterexplained the niche that the tees were in. Putting this all together, you come up with a gooddescriptive set of bullet points that are keyword rich but also sound properly put togetherwhen you speak them out loud.

I also had her include in the second bullet point that the shirts were printed to be fitted andthat if they wanted a more baggy fit, that they should order a size up. I have tested this andit seems to cut down on negative reviews as the anvil shirts never seen to fit right if you donot order a size up.

That was literally all that was done in the month of May. Research, outsourcing, and puttingall that work together to upload the designs to Merch by Amazon.

The ResultsLet’s do a quick recap of April Numbers:

A whole $20.78 in April. You might say not as good as expected. Let’s break those numbersdown per shirt…

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Low prices were used to get out of the lower tiers. At the time that she started puttingactual effort into the account, the low price strat had gotten the account tiered up to the500 tier.

30 days of effort later…?

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20 shirts a day!! On the very last day of the month, she hit 20 shirts a day for the first time.Not only that, hit 100 shirts sold for the week as well.

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Summary of totals for May 2017 from downloading the excel spreadsheet:

186 shirts sold and $756.94 from royalties! This is all from a single months effort. The bestpart is that this all happened with around 30 minutes a day.

I can tell you right now (this is being published about a week after May), that the account isnow doing last months total royalties a week.

The MathSince designs can easily be created yourself (and what most people are doing when theystart), we are only going to be including the royalties in the math.

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About Author: Neil

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https://merchinformer.com/100k-school-debt-financial-freedom-merch-amazon-update-1/#




Another month has come and gone and it is time to put out the next update to digging outof school debt. If you missed the first update in this series, you may want to check that outbelow. Otherwise, prepare to learn how to 5X the earnings of an account in 30 days.


If you do not want to read that article (you really should), the gist of the story is that mygirlfriend went back to school to get a second bachelors degree and needs to pay off about$100,000 worth of school debt. The goal is to do that within 1 year with Merch by Amazon.Since this is the second update, there will be 10 months left after all is said in done to hit thisgoal. I think this is very possible with all the great things coming up such as Q4 andChristmas shopping season which is absolutely massive. Most people can expect 4-5Xnormal monthly earnings in December alone.

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The growth this month was MASSIVE so make sure you read till the end to see the progresson the account.

The ProcessIf you were paying attention to the article last month, the account ended at just over 250shirts live (267 to be exact) and hit the first 100 products sold in a rolling 7 day period. Thiswas exciting with only a months worth of work, but there was a still a lot to do. Hitting 6figures in a year does require a process and thankfully the process is pretty easy!

Step 1: Use Merch Informer to find niches within 100k-300k BSR.

Step 2: Add shirts from those niches into the favorites module.

Step 3: Check trademark on those terms/phrases and put them into the trademark alertsmodule.

Step 4: Wait 3-5 days

Step 5: Remove shirts that have trademarked phrases/fell out of the 100k-300k BSR range.

Step 6: Get new designs in those niches created

Step 7: Upload

When you put it down in a list like that, it really does not look that hard. A lot of people gethung up on competition. Do not get me wrong, when you have 10/25/100 slots, competitionis important! But when you get into the 500 tier and above, you have slots to play with, and Iwould recommend going with the method laid out above. It is SO EASY and I can tell you itworks time and time again!

There is literally no reason to get hung up on anything else. I might sound like a brokenrecord when it comes to this. Find where customers are spending their money, make surethe things they are buying are not trademarked, and then provide them with better

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products. Rinse and repeat that until you hit your goal.

Finding Great NichesOne of the things that we added to Merch Informer this month is the Merch Hunter. This is arecreation of the database of Merch by Amazon shirts and can be used to display the verybest top sellers on Merch at any given time in order of BSR. This is great for two reasons.The first is that you can see exactly WHAT is working and how (via the historical price/BSRgraphs that look like this:)

The second is that it is incredibly quick and does not require you to wait for 20 or soseconds in between searches. Being fast and having historical data makes it really easy todecide what you should be going for and what you might want to avoid.

When we pushed out this new feature, I showed the girlfriend how to use it and how totarget niches above the 100k mark in order to find the sweet spot of where people arebuying but there is no too much competition.

If you would like to do this yourself, first step it to head to the Merch Hunter. Pick how manytop best sellers you want to display, and then check the 100k+ button to the right. Finally,add a keyword to the keyword field and hit search. What this is going to do is show you thetop sellers above that specific BSR for that keyword in order of how well they are selling.

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Instead of the product search, this is what she mainly used to find hot selling niches thismonth. Before that (since we pushed it mid month), she was using this method:

Watch Video At: https://youtu.be/kJJDms_rhOA

Checking Trademarks/Removing Shirts

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https://youtu.be/kJJDms_rhOA

Once she went through and added the shirts in the correct BSR range from the researchmethods above to the favorites module, the next thing that was done was a USPTO searchand then adding those phrases to the trademark modules.

Checking USPTO is something you simply MUST get used to in order to succeed on Merchby Amazon. Without it, you will be flying blind, and get shirts taken down and have no ideawhy they are being removed.

You cannot infringe on someones trademark. To do this, you want to search TESS. I made aquick video that I linked before, but if you have not seen it, please make yourself familiaragain.

Watch Video At: https://youtu.be/N3dnS3sfFaI

After you check TESS on the USPTO website, remove the shirts you cannot obviously make adifferent version of. Merch by Amazon is still in the beginning stages and shirts slip throughthe cracks all the time.

Just because you see something on Amazon does NOT mean you can do it too!

Keep that in mind when you are doing your research. Just because someone else is gettingaway with it currently, does not mean you will. In fact, this is the quickest way to get a strikeagainst your account and eventually get your account banned. It is just not worth it.

Next, add them to the trademark module within Merch Informer. What this is going to do ischeck the USPTO database every single day for you to ensure that your phrases you areusing are still safe to use on a shirt.

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https://youtu.be/N3dnS3sfFaI

Previously we only had 100 slots available but with the change in structure to MerchInformer this month, higher plans have been introduced to allow you to track more than100 trademarks at a time.

Once you have the new phrases you might consider using have been added to thetrademark alerts, your job is to simply wait a few days!

Why wait?

Well, consider this. You are looking at frog shirts like the example above and see a design inthe BSR range you are looking at. You decide that is a great niche and outsource somedesigns right away. By the time the designs get back to you, you check the niche again andthe BSR on the top sellers in that niche is now in the millions! This means they are notgetting sales. You are stumped asking yourself “what happened?”.

Well, the design might have gotten lucky and someone ordered a good amount of them atonce. It could have been a one off design that they marketed for a specific event. These arenot good shirts or niches to go after.

The entire plan with this account is to get it earning day in and day out. To do this, we needto focus on evergreen shirts that will sell consistently.

After 3-5 days, go through all your favorites that you have saved. Remove everything outsideof the BSR range you are comfortable with. In this case, we picked 100k-300k. Anythingoutside that range gets removed. My girlfriend also keeps an eye on the trademark alertsand removes any niche that has that certain phrase get trademarked in the time we arewaiting. Remember, the name of the game is to keep your account safe while makingmoney!

Outsourcing!Once everything has been removed and you are left with your list after a few days in theBSR range you are looking for, you are ready to outsource. This list you have is now a list ofdesigns that sell consistently, and that you think your designer (or yourself) can improve onby coming up with a new design. If you going to do it yourself, nice! If you are like themajority of us, you will need to outsource. In order to do that, we have written an easy tofollow guide here:

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How To Use Upwork To Outsource And Scale Your Merch Business

After you get your shirts back, upload them! We have written a ton about uploading, so feelfree to follow any of that advice (it seems to work for us!), or do whatever feels most naturalfor your account.

The Results For JuneBefore we hop into it, let’s do a quick recap of May Numbers:

Now, I know that the last update had a bit higher royalties than it is showing in thescreenshot above. This is because Amazon pays based on when the products shipped out,so no worries there!

This month, all shirts were priced around $16.99 per shirt. She has found this to be a goodsweet spot for doing volume in sales, but also making decent money.

The other big news is that in the last 2 weeks, the account got upgraded!

This brings the account to 20 uploads a day at the limit. With a lot of tests and sometraveling this month she was not able to hit the max uploads a day (tisk tisk). That beingsaid, this month was great. Here is a screenshot of the peak:

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Here is a summary of the totals for June 2017 from downloading the excel spreadsheet:

933 shirts sold and $4,098.54 in royalties!

The most insane thing about this increase is that last month the total was $756.94 and thismonth no extra time was spent on the account. The time expenditure is still around 30minutes a day.

Just like everyone else, the account is experiencing a bit of a slow down in sales with slowershipping times, but this is to be expected until MBA can figure out their own program. Untilthen, uploading continues for Q4!


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About Author: Neil

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I am a little late to the table to write this edition of the debt to financial freedom post since Iwas away at a conference, and this one is going to be a little hard to post. If you missed thesecond update in the series, you may want to check that otherwise. Otherwise, prepareyourself to get a real dose of what everyone was feeling for the month of July.


You should read that article, but if you are really lazy and do not want to take your time,what happened was that my girlfriend was about to 5X the earnings of the account with 30days of actual effort. Why is she working so hard on this account you may ask? Well, she isgoing back to get a second bachelors degree and needs to pay off around $100,000 worth ofschool debt. The goal is to do this within a single year with Merch by Amazon.

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We have about 9 months left to hit the goal. I think this is extremely possible even with thisupdate. Keep in mind that Q4 is just around the corner and the Halloween/Christmasseason usually sees a very healthy increase in income. I am talking at least 5X normalmonthly income in December as everyone is buying shirts as gifts. This is where you canexpect to make a LARGE chunk of money, and where we are trying to focus on time andeffort.

Last month, this account did $4,098.54 which was a crazy big improvement over the monthprevious. This month however, not so much.

What Happened In July?Life.

Life happened. I know I often sit here and preach that you should be hitting your dailyuploads, and you need to be spending your time on Merch by Amazon. I only do thisbecause I know the entire process works!

That being said, in early July, we actually ended up traveling 1,000 miles to purchase a newvehicle since the last one was destroyed by hail. If you do not remember what the destroyedvehicle looked like, maybe this will refresh your memory:

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So with all the traveling, this ate up some time wherenot a single shirt was uploaded.

Couple that with the fact that we spent some time withfamily and July is one of the “down” months for mostpeople on Merch, not much got done within the fewdays of the month.

Since she is in an accelerated program for her degree,this took up a LOT more time this month than it didbefore so if any designs got uploaded (some did), it wasnot many per day.

With the amount of royalties dropping with the seasonand not having many fresh new designs going live, wefinally got hit with something that needed addressed.What might this be? Well, it was something that I never really decided to respond to in thefew times that this happened to me before.

False DMCA NoticesDuring the entire month of July, we had not one, not two, but THREE false DMCA takedownsfiled for shirts. Copy and pasting from Google:

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a United States copyright law thatimplements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

Essentially what happened was that a not so honest competitor got mad that the girlfriendsshirts were selling better and outranking them in the results that they decided to file a takedown with Amazon in order to get rid of the competition. Even though the designs are 100%different with different sentence structure and different amount of reviews, the shirts werepulled down and it almost seems like there is nothing you can do.

The reason Amazon does this, is because the DMCA is a legal process, and they have to takedown the work or else they would risk being sued (is my understanding, I am not a lawyer).

This is what the notice looked like. I have blocked out some of the information.

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The most frustrating part of this entire process is even if you contact the Merch by Amazonteam at the email they suggest, they will demand that you show them proof that you haverights to the design or trademark that is 100% different than the one you had on Merch byAmazon.

The ONLY solution is to get the person that filed the take down to contact Amazon and askthem to remove the strike. To this date, I have never actually heard of this happening.

There is one thing that you can do, but we will have to go over that in another article.

OutsourcingWith the take downs (strikes on the account) and the amount of work outside of Merch byAmazon that had to get done, there really were not that many uploads at ALL in July.

In fact, she was almost afraid to upload since Amazon is not clear on how manyinfringements you can get before they disable the account. It is hard when she does all shecan to do everything right, and then have to deal with people with low morals.

With a little nudge in the right direction and talk of Q4, I finally got her to do someoutsourcing, which just came back to us a few days ago. This outsourcing took about 1.5hours and should be enough for most of this month.

If you are interested in the exact process of how she does the research so fast, I wroteabout that here:


The Results For July4/6


Before we get to it, here is a quick recap of June numbers:

I always feel like I need to mention that if you take a look at last months royalties, you willnotice that they are higher when mentioned in the previous posts. This is because Amazonpays based on when the products ship out. This almost makes this month a little moredepressing but I always have to keep in mind that this is the same trend that MOST peoplein the community saw as well.

It should also be noted that all the shirts were priced around $16.99 a shirt. This has beenthe sweet spot but of course, there is always that thought that maybe more money could bemade from upping the price slightly. Currently, she is not willing to risk it to find out.

Here is where the current uploads are:

Here is a summary of the totals for July 2017 from downloading the excel spreadsheet:

562 shirts sold and $2,515.57 in royalties.

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Some people would be absolutely stoked to see these numbers, but this represents a 40%decrease in the amount of shirts sold and about a 39% decrease in royalties from theprevious month.

The longer we keep looking back in the rear view mirror, it takes away from everythingthat’s moving forward. ~ Dan Quinn

That quote above basically sums up this month perfectly. After I finish this article, I will trynot to think about July at all since the only thing that matters is moving forward. I wouldhope the rest of the Merch community that is down on their numbers from the previousmonth can take that to heart and move forward.


About Author: Neil

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Once again I am a bit late on writing this case study so I would like to appologize. I justspend the weekend in Seattle attending the Merch by Amazon conference and eating a LOTof fresh seafood!

I guess that marks 2 months in a row that I was away at a conference but this was oneparticularly great. It was the first Merch by Amazon conference ever and I got to meet a tonof really great people in the community. Special shout outs to Lanelle Barber, Ken Reil,Michael Essek, Stephanie Witham, Chris Green, Joel Barnett, Carrie Hitchens, BrandonOrtega, Thomas Smale, and Josh Brown who I met all in person and had some reallyinteresting conversations with! I should have a post about the conference coming out soon!

Many people came up and asked about this particular case study on my girlfriend’s account.It was amazing to hear over drinks that a guy implemented the exact strategy she is using togrow his account from less than 20 dollars to 800 dollars in royalties from his account the

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very next month! Since I know these posts are helping people, I will continue writing themso make sure you drop any questions in the comments below.

In case you missed it, here is last months case study:


If you read that case study, you may have noticed a big trend. Sales dying off and everythingbeing slow.

I hear this constantly from the community so it is NOT just you! Sales (outside of the eclipseniche), have been pretty slow. We are seeing slower sales across the board and this monthis no different.

That being said, the goal is still the same. She is working towards paying off around$100,000 worth of school debt and that is still the main purpose of this case study.

We have around 8 months left to hit this goal and I think it will for sure happen. I know Ikeep saying that I think it is very possible that we will hit the 100k goal within a year, but Iknow something that many other people do not know that have not been in program verylong. I know that these stagnant sales are for the most part NORMAL. I know that printcapacity goes to the big players and big trends and the main trend that was taking up allthat capacity (eclipse), is now over!

Q4 has pretty much just started and I am super excited for what the future is going to bring.If you thought last years numbers were big (if you were around then), this year I actuallyexpect them to be bigger because Merch has had an entire year to build out the facitilitiesand print capacity to handle it. You may remember that they completely shut off uploads fora few months last year. I expect that that will NOT be the case this time, but who knows. Wehave to optimize the uploads while we have them!

Last month, this account did $2,515.57 in royalties which was way down from the previousmonth. This month is not painting a better picture, but there a few key points I want todiscuss.

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What Happened In August?In July, life pretty much happened with the amount of school and work that was happeningoutside of the online world. I always harp on hitting your daily uploads, but when you haveother things going on and MBA is not your full time job, this can often get side tracked forother activities.

I was actually gone at another conference in California and school tests and work relatedthings kept coming up.

After July, you can pretty much just say she was burnt out.

This happens to all of us though! I know, because it has happened to me plenty of times. Allyou can really do is focus on what you need to get done, and then just get back on the trainand keep going.

August was the month of reboot.

A lot of you may not live with someone else that is constantly harassing you about hittingyour uploads, or doing research, or really just talking about Q4 constantly. Well, we talkabout merch a LOT (or at least I do), and that finally seemed to kick start the engine again.

Trending ResearchTrends are a tricky one, and something I talk a lot about. Since the account in question is atthe 1000 tier, this is something we wanted to make sure to hit because there are plenty ofslots to capitalize on. Halloween is coming up, and we wanted to make sure that we got tomarket early.

The first thing that she did was hit up the Merch Hunter and look at all the Halloweendesigns that were already live. As you can see they are doing pretty well!

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As you can see from the above screenshot, there are already a TON of designs selling andselling like hot cakes!

When you are really early on a trend, especially when it comes to a holiday, there is a greatapproach after using the Merch Hunter!

First, start by checking the Merch Hunter and seeing what is selling on Amazon right now. Ifyou are early enough like we were, you should notice that some designs are selling, but themassive wave of sales has not started yet.

Second, head over to Pinterest, and do a search for “Halloween Shirts”. It should looksomething like this:

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Right away, you are going to say to yourself “you can’t use half of those!” and that isabsolutely correct.

But some of them you can!

The trick here is to go through and write down all the phrases into a sheet and then bringthem back into Merch Informer. You can either put them into the Merch Hunter, or theproduct search. Since we are not looking at BSR ranges, I would suggest the product search.

I grabbed this screenshot a little too late but this really demonstrates this technique.

Usually we are looking for a niche that has a lot of other sellers that are selling so we knowthe niche has demand. With holiday niches though, if you are getting in early, you want tosee little to no shirts up! The reason for this is because they are holiday niches, the goal is toget things up before they are even selling.

If you can get a shirt up with a nice phrase for that holiday before anyone else is eventhinking about uploading shirts, you have a very good chance of getting a ton of sales onthat shirt.

As you can see from the above screenshot, there are a few that have started to sell, but thisis even more telling:

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There are only TWELVE designs for that phrase that are currently selling on Merch! That rightthere is a massive opportunity that took about 30 seconds to dig up. Easy money for peoplethat want to take action!

90 Day RuleThe 90 day rule is something about Merch by Amazon that I really wish was not an actualthing. I understand why they did it. It costs money to have ASINs on Amazon, and if they arenot selling there is really no point in having them.

Some people think that if a design has not sold within 90 days, there is no point in putting itup again and usually just leave it.

From my experience though, I KNOW that good research went into those designs and Iknow there is demand for them. Usually looking at the niches with a fresh set of eyes isexactly what is needed to get that initial sale.

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My girlfriend has 10 pages of this or around 150 designs that have been removed for nosales. This is a big opportunity here and something that has been happening over the pastmonth.

The plan is to reupload them after taking another look at the niches and finding out whatkeywords the competition is using that IS selling shirts in those niches. Getting those 150designs back up is going to be huge for Q4 and if she can keep up, should be ready for a tierup soon!

The Results For AugustBefore we get to it, here is a quick recap of the July numbers:

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Last month you will see that July looks a little bit higher than was reported in the last article.This is because Amazon will pay based on when the products ship out. The extra moneyshould be attached to the payment the month following. This month was still a down monthjust like the majority of people in the community are reporting, and in fact, we are downmore than last month here. Keep your head up though!

I should also note that all the shirts are priced right around $16.99 except for those thathave reviews and are proven sellers which have seen the price bumped up. This is the sweetspot that we have found, but I know a few others are following the same outline but havejacked all their shirts up to $19.99. This is something we are considering doing for Q4.

Here are what the current uploads are looking like. Keep in mind that we are dealing with alot of removals for not getting a sale in 90 days.

Here is a summary of the totals for August 2017 from downloading the excel spreadsheet:

470 shirts sold with $2068.95 in royalties.

This is an absolute disappointment if we are being honest. I think it is important to remaintransparent and it probably helps a lot of people that are facing the same exact thing. Q4 is

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just starting here, and I am happy to report that numbers are finally trending upwards fromhere!


About Author: Neil

9/9





I seem to be getting into a bad habit of writing these case studies a bit late. Last time myexcuse was that I had spent the weekend in Seattle attending a Merch by Amazonconference and this month my excuse is similar by attending a meetup in Denver talkingMerch with the Merch Minds group. Following the eating a bunch of seafood theme, thegirlfriend and I ended up grabbing sushi at Blue Sushi and it was top notch if you are ever inthe Denver area!

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This now marks 3 months in a row that I was away at aconference. Seeing that we have now moved into Q4,things have been a bit more quiet as everyone is gearingdown and working on their businesses and that isexactly what we have been doing; pushing forward! Thepast month has marked a lot of progress with uploads,research, and fighting the 90 day rule almost everysingle day. It seems that we are almost caught up andhoping for an excellent Q4!

At the meetup in Denver, more people asked about thiscase study and the same guy that went from 20 dollars amonth to 800 dollars a month by reading this advicewas actually there and is absolutely crushing it now(with more shirts than my girlfriends account has live).His biggest secret? Making sure he maxes uploads eachand every day! He also had some other tricks that we might implement into this account tosee what happens, but that will have to wait until the next case study article.



Sales the past month were not much better but they have picked up a small bit.

The community has been complaining about sales lately and I feel your pain, because weare feeling the same thing. It can be incredibly frustrating that some people are seeingsome of their best sales in months while your own account is not performing as well as youwould like. This month is the exact same for us!

Before we get into what happened the past month, I need to get a few things off my chest.The first is that a lot of people I meet in person, as well as people on Facebook/Reddit keepmentioning on how my girlfriends account is crushing it. They are often surprised that I am

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really not happy where the account is at and think it should be doing more compared to thedata from my own account and from other people I know. I still think we will do a 5-10kDecember pretty easily, but there are a few points we need to discuss.

The first is that competition is higher than it was before. The second is that all the newshirts we are putting up do NOT have reviews like many of mine, and many friends thatstarted earlier in the game have. Since we are coming to the table with a medium price(instead of rock bottom prices that I generally start with to try and get reviews) this may beone of the causes for slower sales. The reason we did not take the same path for thisaccount is that we are trying to make money as quickly as possible to pay off the 100k worthof debt she has accrued, and pricing low to get reviews takes a lot more time than we arewilling to wait for.

Now, while competition is higher than it was before, this just means we are going to tweakour strategy. It does NOT mean that it is impossible to reach $10k+ a month which shouldcertainly be achievable, just that we need to take a different approach. Since we are stillpricing middle of the road (right around $16.99), instead of focusing on the 100k-300k BSRshirts that has proven to be a winner from the beginning (and still works), we are going tostart looking at higher BSR ranges that absolutely no one is targeting. With a tier up rightaround the corner, we will have plenty of slots available and because absolutely no one istargeting niches with BSRs from 300k-600k, this should be a good strategy moving forward.Imagine 1-2k slots filled and only selling 1 shirt a month per slot. That is still a LOT of moneywithout any increased competition!

Now that we have that little part out of the way, the goal is still the same to pay off the$100,000 worth of school debt and this case study is following that journey.

We now have around 7 months to hit this goal and it will be happening. Like I said, we stillhave some tricks up our sleeves that we will be sharing with you once the data is in. Q4 hasofficially started and sales have picked up slightly. I would expect sales to pick up even moreover the next month and hopefully by next month they are really rolling in like last year.

If anyone was around last year doing Merch, they will remember the great freeze where wewere not able to upload, change prices, or really do much of anything. Because of this, andeven knowing that Amazon has greatly increased their print capacity, we are still attemptingto get as many shirts up as possible in case something does happen this year. Make sureyou are getting as many shirts uploaded and at the price you want them to sell at during Q4because if a freeze does happen and you are unable to update your prices, you may bestuck with a hot selling shirt making pennies. Just keep that in mind!

Last month, this account did $2,068.95 in royalties which was down from the previousmonth again. This month is actually a bit better as we have hustled to prepare for Q4.

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What Happened In September?September has been the month of getting it done! Time and time again, I mention thatmaxing your daily uploads is the best thing you can do to see success on the Merch byAmazon (as long as you are doing excellent research and understand how to properly usekeywords) and this month this has been made a priority.

With school slowing down a bit and some time freeing up, she has been able to make a lotof progress.

It has almost become a little comical to see the dedication to this account. Since school isalmost done for her, paying off that giant debt that is hanging over her head seems to reallya lingering thought. I have always been someone who gets things done no matter what andblow off all other things in order to do so and that is exactly what has been happening here.“Want to watch XX show tonight?” “Nope, I have to get my 20 shirts uploaded for today!”.

Making things happen!

Fighting The 90 Day RuleThe 90 day rule is becoming one of the most frustrating aspects of the Merch by Amazonprogram. If you are not familiar with it (finding it hard to believe anyone in the programwould not know what this is), it is when your shirts get removed from Merch after 90 days ifthey do not make a sale.

We have been told that if a shirt does not sell within the first 90 days, more than likely it willnever sell. It costs a lot of money to host the amount of ASINs on servers that Amazon has,so I can see why they do this, but it is still frustrating.

We know that we did good research in the first place and that there is customer demandthere. That is why I recommend that anyone that has done the same puts their shirts rightback up when they come down!

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Hopefully you can see that image, but there are now 20 pages of removed shirts for the 90day rule.

Fighting this 90 rule was the very first priority this month. The first issue was actuallyFINDING all of these designs on the computer. I am not the most organized person, andneither is she when it comes to computer folders so it took a good many hours to find allthese designs and get them ready to upload them all.

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The entire strategy here was 1: find the designs, and 2: do the research over again.

So once the designs have been found, she would open Merch Informer and do a search forthat phrase/niche to see what was selling at that moment. As an example, if she had a chefshirt taken down, she would find that chef shirt, then do a search in the product search for“chef” and see what was ranking:

From here, she would pull the keywords they were using to rank in their title, bullet pointsand description and then use those same keywords in her own sentences. We know thatthese are ranking because of those keywords, so using the same keywords on her ownunique shirt designs seems to have worked very well. We often saw sales come in the sameweek on the designs reuploaded after they were removed after the 90 day rule. This justgoes to show that the research we did the first time was solid, and that all it takes is asecond look at the keywords we should have added previously.

Research/OutsourcingWe have continued to do research just like we laid out in the previous article. In case youmissed it, here is the TLDR version:

Go to Pinterest and search for shirtsWrite down all phrases seen on shirtsBring phrases back into Merch Informer to see what is sellingTarget any phrase that has low competition with a few shirts ranking and sellingOutsource to designer

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This was the example we used last month, and the technique seems to be working well witha lot of these designs that show only 10-20 results on Merch making sales within the firstweek.

The biggest hurdle though has been outsourcing!

I have a solid team of designers working for me at this point, but it never seems to beenough since I want the work done RIGHT the first time. Many readers do not know this, butmy sister is also doing Merch by Amazon (and crushing it!), but currently the designer that isdoing all of the designs for her is also doing all the designs for my girlfriends account. Sinceboth of them are in the higher tiers now and we are trying to really ramp up production forQ4 since it is now here, I find myself a bit short.

Thankfully my girlfriend has had shirts to reupload because of the 90 day rule, but now thatthose are already uploaded and we seem to be caught up, I am going to need to hire yetanother designer (which is a pain but worth it in the end). If you find yourself in the samesituation, you may want to read about how to outsource your t-shirt designs here:


If you just scan the article above, I want to again mention 2 quick tips.

The first, is that you should be asking 2 screening questions when hiring. I generally ask“who is the 23rd president of the United States” and “What is your favorite hobby and why”.

The first question allows you to see if the freelancer can actually use Google and look thingsup. This is important so you can have them link you to design eliments they use in theirdesigns so you can check to make sure they are free for commercial use.

The second question allows you to see a longer written out response from the freelancer.This lets you know if they can communicate well in your language. If you cannotcommunicate with your designer, you are going to have a bad time.

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The other tip I have is to hire quickly and fire even quicker. You do not want to waste yourtime with a designer who can’t listen or is putting out bad work. There are plenty out there,so make sure you do not get stuck in the spiral of trying to train someone who does notwant to be trained.

The Results For SeptemberBefore we get to it, here is a quick recap of the August numbers:

Last month you will see that August looks a little bit higher than was reported in the lastarticle. This is because Amazon will pay based on when the product ships out. The extramoney should be attached to the payment the month following. This month was still a slowmonth, but it was a little bit higher.

Almost all of the shirts are priced around $16.99 except for those that have a review or twoand have proven to be great sellers. In fact, one of the shirts that has 3 good reviewscrushed it last month:

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Here is what the current uploads look like (keep in mind some of these are from Octobersince I forgot to take a screenshot. Sorry!) :

Here is a summary of the totals for September 2017 from downloading the excelspreadsheet:

519 shirts sold with $2230 in royalties!

We expected more than this, but a few really slow days mixed in, we still ended up betterthan last month by 49 more shirts sold!

Something we did not go over in this article that we will next month is that she started theEtsy integration as well.


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https://merchinformer.com/printful-etsy-integration-ultimate-guide/

About Author: Neil

10/10





It looks like I might finally get this article out before a week has passed into the next month!There has been some consistent work being done this month, but first I need to address theimage that I use for this case study series.

I have had numerous people ask me about the image used, if it was my girlfriend, if it wassupposed to “motivate” them, or if it was family friendly. It is NOT my girlfriend, and I haveno idea if it will motivate you or not. Family friendly is up to you to decide, but I can tell youone thing. It gets a very high CTR (click through rate) and that is exactly why it is used. Justlike marketing your t-shirts (which you should all be doing), you want to use big bold textand images to get the highest click through rate you can, and this is why we use this image.Take it for what you will, but it works!

This month has actually been one where the account could be focused on, new designsoutsourced, and best of all, we were NOT fighting the 90 day rule as it was finally caught up

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on.



The best news I have to report is sales are FINALLY on the up!

They are not up by a massive percent as I would imagine that would happen at the end ofNovember into December as people are starting to buy shirts as gifts for loved ones. What isnice that even though the account had some rough individual days the past month, overall,the account is up and should keep climbing.

As of writing this, this officially marks the middle point in our journey to pay off the $100,000worth of school debt. There are 6 months left to pay this off if we are going to reach the goalof doing it in a year. Last month I wrote that this WILL be happening and this month is nodifferent. You may be looking at the numbers we are about to talk about below and think toyourself that it is not possible, but we have some tricks left to play to make it happen.

In the previous month’s case study, it was mentioned that the niches being targeted weregoing to move from BSR 100k-300k up to 300k-600k. This strategy has been working for mepersonally, but for my girlfriend’s account, we decided to do something a little bit differentthan the original plan. Instead of outsourcing as much as possible to get new designs up, wedecided we would finally get going with premium shirts for the known winners on theaccount.

Last month, this account did $2,230.00 which was up from the previous month by a smallmargin but this month is even better and we will get into what exactly happened as we arenow in the full swing of things during Q4.

What Happened In October?

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October has been a month of consistency. Daily uploads as often as possible were donebecause this is the easiest way to make money with Merch by Amazon. Now, when Imention daily uploads and how important they are, people tend to forget the underlying“but…”. You need to hit your daily uploads BUT the designs need to be good! You can put up100 text based designs a day but if they are 100 text based designs in comic sands point 12font, I can guarantee you will not be selling any. The designs you spend your time putting upneed to be good and they need to be something both you believe in, but has been properlyresearched so you know there is an audience of hungry buyers willing to open up theirwallet and pay for it.

Filling 20 a day for her was pretty difficult with all the school going on as well as tests as weare nearing the end of the year. What is REALLY difficult though, is filling 40 slots a day!

Yep, she got tiered up from 1,000 slots to 2,000 slots!

Getting 40 a day uploaded is not always going to happen. Some days she might come homefrom school and get only 6 live before bed but that is 6 more than 0 so that is progress andsomething she has shot for every single day.

Crushing Premium UploadsNow that the 90 day rule was finally caught up on (which was hundreds of shirts, thanksAmazon!), she could actually focus on getting designs uploaded that had not been takendown. Since I have been swamping my main designer (who is also the one who designs forthis account), we were only able to get a little over 100 new designs in October. Since withlittle designs and another 1,000 slots to play with, we decided to start with the winningdesigns and start uploading them to premium shirts.

Our strategy has been as follows:

1: Take the best sellers, upload them to premium shirts.

2: Brand new designs take priority, which go on Anvil shirts first.

3: When no new shirts are available, premium designs are uploaded with the goal of gettingall designs on premium in the future.

4: All premium designs are priced at $19.99.

5: ALL premium designs have new brands, new bullet points, and new description.

Now, you might be asking yourself, why on earth would you put new brands, bullet pointsand descriptions for the premium t-shirts when you could just copy and paste the successfulkeywords you were using before?

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Let me explain. My background is in affiliate marketing and building large websites to rankin Google for specific keywords. This is very similar to ranking in Amazon for specifickeywords. What I learned building these websites is that in order to rank, you first neededgreat content (for merch you need great designs), and then you needed good uniquecontent. For Merch by Amazon, the equivalent to unique content would be the title, bulletpoints and brand.

Okay so what?

Well, let’s use the keyword “panda shirt” as a keyword. If I have a hot seller in this niche, itmight be ranked on the first page. If I were to upload my hot seller on a premium shirt andjust copy all the information, the Amazon algorithm is not going to want to rank the exactsame design with the exact same text in the bullets on the same page even though this isthe premium version. They want to give the customer as many choices as possible so it willprobably only be 1 of your products. The goal is to get ALL your products ranking for thoseterms, and for this you need unique content.

With the release of Long Sleeves (we will talk about that later, this account has not beenactivated for those yet), if a customer puts in a search term, wouldn’t it be nice to have Anvil,premium, AND your long sleeve design show up on the front page? 3 of your products infront of your customer gives you a lot higher chance to make the sale than just a single withcompetitors taking the other slots available. This is why you use unique content, and so farit has been working!

Not only have we gotten some results ranked on the same page as the Anvil shirts thatalready existed, but they have started selling pretty well too! They are not selling as much asthe majority of the $16.99 priced Anvil shirts, but every day at least a few premium sell andthis equates to a royalty of $5.69 at a $19.99 price point.

Throttling?It is time to finally address the issue that many people are upset about but no one reallyseems to be discussing with a cool head.

Throttling, is it a real thing?

Putting it simply, YES, Merch by Amazon is throttling designs.

So what is it, and why does it matter?

Well, throttling when it comes to Merch by Amazon means that even though you may have alink to your design from your dashboard, Amazon may selectively remove your designsfrom search. For the first time ever, they have actually acknowledged this.

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What we have noticed is that when Merchthrottles a design, it is both removed fromsearch AND removed from your brand sothat a customer really cannot find it.Another version of of the throttle is whenonly certain sizes or colors show asavailable. This has meant a lot less sales fora lot of us.

So why throttle?

Amazon is a business and because of this,they have brought some other big brands onboard to sell on the platform. You haveprobably noticed some of the big players such as Marvel, Disney, and Coke. As a businessthat is publicly traded on the stock market, they have a financial responsibility to make asmuch money for their investors. To do this, big brands are going to take up the printcapacity first. Why would Amazon throttle your designs instead of throttling Coke? Simple!Coke makes Amazon a lot more money than any one of us could, and thus increases theirstock price.

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That being said, there is still room for us. Think about it! Individual content creators like uscan react much faster to the market to trending topics and hot seasons a lot better thansome giant company on the platform could. Will the big companies and brand accounts getaccess to more products long before we do? Of course, but there is always going to be roomfor us. We just get to fill up the print capacity that is not being occupied.

Now, the one thing that I have a growing hunch over is that there is no way Amazon is goingto throttle a design where you are driving your own traffic.

We all love to rely on organic traffic because it is essentially free money. That being said, thecustomer is ALREADY on Amazon and since they are the masters at conversion, they knowthey are getting a sale no matter if it is your product, or someone else. Since they know theyare going to get that sale on traffic that they have already required, they really do not “owe”us anything. When we are driving traffic on the other hand though, we are providing them apotential customer that was NOT ALREADY on their platform. There is zero reason for themto throttle designs when outside traffic is driven. In fact, it works in their favor to make thoseproducts available to capture the sale because they ended up visiting Amazon because ofyou.

It is what it is, and all we can do is roll with it and hope that they expand capacity much6/9

faster.

The Results for OctoberBefore we get to it, here is a quick recap of the September numbers:

You will notice that September looks a little bit lower than was reported in the last casestudy. This is because Amazon pays based on when the shirts actually ship. The extra isalways brought over to the month following. This month was actually better by a goodmargin.

Most of the shirts that have been put up are at the $16.99 price point but there are a fewthat are higher than that based on the reviews that the shirt has.

Since a lot of the 90 day rule shirts got put back up, many of these were put back up on Anvilshirts at a cheaper price. Generally, $12.99 or $13.99 was used based on the niche to tryand get that sale on them so the effort to put them back up would not need to happenagain.

For the month of October, there was a really good spread of t-shirts sold. The best selleronly equates to around $107 dollars of the total for the month:

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Here is what the current uploads look like (keep in mind that this might be a tad bit morethan at the end of the month since I am writing this a few days later):

Here is a summary of the totals for October 2017 from download the excel spreadsheet:

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600 ASINS on the dot sold with $2,581.07 in royalties.

If the month of November is anything to go by, it should be higher than this for next monthsince we are off to a good start.

No more work has been made on the Etsy integration that was started, but a single sale wasmade that has not been reported here.


About Author: Neil

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It looks like we all have a bunch of free time on our hands now that the great freeze of 2017is in full swing (just kidding, upload to more platforms!). I finally have some time to sit downand write this update which I am pretty excited about. We more than DOUBLED theprevious months earnings in November, and we are well on our way to double Decemberearnings for next month.

To be honest, I was getting a tad bit worried as Q4 that everyone had hyped up (myselfincluded), just did not seem to be happening for many people. Yes, sales were up lastmonth, but they were not as high as I would have expcted.

However, all of our fears were to put to rest when the account crushed November! Thismonth was focused on uploading, uploading, and uploading some more. Even thoughsubmissions were cut, this was still the main focus with no outsourcing done this month. Iwill explain why below.

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In case you missed it, here is last month’s case study:


While last months earnings were up just a bit from the previous month, November saw amassive jump. This was partially due to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but the averagesales per day seemed to have increased a healthy amount as well.

This article marks 7 months since we started writing this case study. If you go back and readall the journey posts up until this point, you will notice that it has been a bit of a bumpyroad. The goal is still the same to pay off the $100,000 worth of school debt, and after thispost, there is officially 5 more months in order to pay it off. Looking at the numbers, youmay be wondering how we will do that. After all, Merch by Amazon just came out and toldus all that royalties are about to take a hit.

To that, I have two things to say. One is that the royalty changes sting, but in the long run, Ithink they will probably help us all as sellers. Before you grab your pitch forks, let meexplain. I know that it hurts that we are about to take 30% pay cut from Amazon on what wewere already selling. I know it hurts that this will force people to RAISE prices on t-shirts thatare already just being bought as funny gifts and impulse buys that they are more than likelygetting for under $1 per blank. It may feel all doom and gloom as a seller, but think about itfrom Amazon’s point of view. They have this Amazon platform that lets content creators likeus join it, and they are very clearly having massive issues keeping their promises, both to US(the content creators), but more importantly to their customers. Have you noticed that whenyou purchase a Merch shirt with prime shipping, it takes a week to get to you? Ya, that is notgoing to fly with customers expectations around the holidays.

The royalty change is going to actually solve both of these issues. First, even though they arechanging the royalty structure and we will be receiving 30% less than we were before, we ascontent creators should be selling MORE shirts. A lot more!

Why?

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Well, with more money, Amazon can actually build more printing facilities which meanstheir capacity goes up. When their capacity goes up, that means…

The throttle will FINALLY be over!

If you have not checked lately, Amazon has been throttling results. This means that yourshirt is not going to be searchable for your keywords you may have been ranking forpreviously. Your shirts could be completely removed from your brand name so eve if youwere to link a brand name to a family member or friend, they would still not see your shirts.Sometimes, the only way to see a shirt was if you had the direct link. Other times, shirtswere still searchable but missing different colors and or sizes. This all causes less sales forus, and can be extremely frustrating.

I actually went through and audited the account to see how many of the shirts were beingthrottled the other day. Keep in mind that the throttle seems to come on and off shirts atdifferent parts of the day, but from what I saw, slightly over 65% of the shirts live wereeither missing colors/sizes or were not even displaying under the brand name. Even thoughthe throttle is so large right now, the account is still making excellent money. Because ofthis, even when royalties drop, if the throttle disappears and all shirts are searchable withthe correct colors and sizes, we should be selling at least double what we are. I will takedouble sales over slightly lower royalties any day of the week.

Do you guys think Amazon WANTS to be doing all of this? Of course not! The more throttlingand issues they have, the less money they make. All we can do is hope for the best andhang on for the ride!

Now that we have that out of the way, this account did $2,581.07 last month. This was upjust a bit from the monthly previous total, but November was all sorts of fun. Increasedsales, special “holidays”, and Q4 finally kicking into gear.

What Happened In November?November has been the monthly of daily uploads and no outsourcing. You may rememberthat last month the account finally went from 1,000 slots to 2,000 slots! Finally, a bit of roomto work with. What followed was going from 20 uploads a day to 40 a day, which was nowgoing from hard to fill, to almost impossible with her busy work/school schedule.

Well, Merch much have listened in to some nightly complaints about how hard these slotswere to fill and cut everyone’s upload limit pretty much in half! This account went from 40uploads a day right back to 20 a day. This is clearly because they were getting swamped withdesigns during Q4, but this was still a bit disappointing.

Here is a quote from last months post:

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You need to hit your daily uploads BUT the designs need to be good! You can put up 100text based designs a day but if they are 100 text based designs in comic sands point 12 font, Ican guarantee you will not be selling any.

Keeping this in mind, with lower upload limits and the Q4 swing continuing upward, werevised the plan for the account. Instead of outsourcing more new designs that wereunproven, we would go through, and start to upload all the designs that were proven sellerson premium (which we started the previous month), but also on Long Sleeves since thisaccount was finally approved for them.

Long Sleeve UploadsWith the newly available slots and the decision to not outsource any more designs thismonth, we had to figure out what designs were the best selling, and then go and find themall throughout the numerous amount of folders split between 3-4 computers and multipledropbox accounts. Let me tell you, this is a huge pain! Once we found them all and got themslightly organized, it was time to upload them all with premium shirts taking priority FIRST,then long sleeves. From research, t-shirts are still going to sell more than long sleeves, orhoodies (when they become widely available).

The results have been super promising. We only have a few hundred of them up now, butthey are selling daily.

At first, we put them up with a price of $27.99, but after some testing, they seem to sell thebest for the account at $25.99 giving a $4.59 royalty which is pretty nice (even though somemay complain about the low price).

The strategy for long sleeves has been the following:

1. Take the best sellers, upload them to premium shirts first, then long sleeves.2. All designs must be up on Anvil first. Until an Anvil shirt has sold, it does not go on a

long sleeve.3. All Long Sleeves are priced at $25.99 and stay there even after they sell.4. All Long Sleeves have new brands, bullet points, and descriptions (this helps the algo).

This has been working really well for the account and they are selling quiet a lot for theamount of Long Sleeves up.

Now, the research for these long sleeves was done on normal anvil MBA shirts throughMerch Informer. As of writing this, Long Sleeves are now searchable in the product search!

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Did I mention we added hoodies, and sweatshirts too as well as just plain old FBA t-shirts tothe product search? Oh yes! If you have never tried out Merch Informer, please usecoupon code: girlfriend30 for 30% off your first THREE months of Merch Informer. Thisis her idea, so this will be removed in the near future.

Black Friday / Cyber Monday – New Records!It just so happened that both Black Friday and Cyber Monday both landed in November.Now, I am not the biggest shopper, but other people sure are. Cyber Monday ended upbeing the biggest day of the year for Amazon surpassing prime day! Pretty crazy to thinkabout and the numbers showed it!

Here are the Black Friday numbers:

This was a new record for this account and the girlfriends first $300 dollar day on Merch!This is actually a lot more than most people make in a day at a day job. Seeing that first $300dollar day sure was special. We expected Cyber Monday to be a bit less in volume. We werevery very wrong!

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https://merchinformer.com/pricing/

Here are the Cyber Monday numbers:

Not only was this the first 100 shirt DAY, but the account almost doubled Black Friday saleswith $611 dollars in royalties for the day.

November was really only the start though. The account is doing Black Friday numbers daily,so December should be a good one.

It took 7 months to go from nothing, to selling 100 shirts in a single day, over $600 for asingle day, and over 600 shirts for the trailing 7 day total. That is GREAT progress! In fact,she is outselling many of the people I talk to on a daily basis all while working and going toschool full time.

Now yes, she has access to my VA’s but all the research for this entire account was done byher and it is just so easy. Anyone can replicate the exact same thing this account has done ifthey follow the same strategy laid out time and time again here on the blog.

Research Strategy

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Step 1: Use Merch Informer to quickly find niches in the 100k-300k BSR ranges with theMerch Hunter Module

Step 2: Niche down in the niches you find where the shirts are still in the same BSR rangebut have smaller amounts of competition. (Make use of the BSR history to make sure it is aconsistent seller)

Step 3: Get better products created in those niches (no copying!), upload them with similarkeywords in your own sentence form.

Step 4: Price competitively

Step 5: Rinse and repeat over and over again.

So many people get caught up in heading over to Amazon and going through thousands ofpages and spreadsheets and using BSR plugins (been there done that). This can work sure,but wastes an incredible amount of time. For someone like my girlfriend who is rarely homewith a busy schedule, getting things done and saving time is a priority. I basically taught herexactly what I have done to build up my own account as you can see, 7 months later, theexact same strategy is very easy to replicate. In fact, I do not think she has ever doneresearch directly on Amazon.com as nothing is actually ranked in order. I tell people overand over again. You could be doing research and something on the 12th page could beselling BETTER than something on the first page because it is optimized for a betterkeyword. You would probably never have discovered that though because of the time itwould take you to get through 12 pages of content. Merch Informer does it in 1 click. If youwant to replicate the process, you can use the coupon code above.

The Results For NovemberBefore we get to it, here is a quick recap of the October numbers:

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You will notice that October earnings are actually a little bit higher than was reported in thecase study. This is because Amazon pays based on when the shirt ships out to the customerand not when it is sold. The extra is brought over from the month previous. This month wasactually MUCH better than October numbers!

Almost all of the anvil shirts are priced at $16.99 while the premium versions are priced at$19.99. The long sleeves on the account are priced higher at $25.99 but give about thesame royalty as the other shirts on the account.

For the month of November, there was a massive spread of t-shirts sold. Lots of things thathave never sold before and were re-uploaded sold through as well. Here is what the currentuploads look like (keep in mind that this might be a tad bit more than at the end of themonth since I am writing this a few days later, and the freeze just hit!):

Here is a summary of the totals for November 2017 from downloading the excelspreadsheet:

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1186 Asins with $5399.15 in royalties!

If this month is anything to go by, with the current numbers and if the throttle does not hurttoo bad, this account should do around $10k next month.

A few sales were made using the Etsy integration but have not been included here as workhas not been focused here.


About Author: Neil

9/9






Now that everyone should be back at home and ready to get back to work on Merch, Ithought I would finally release this update. Q4 is finally done and December was an excitingbut bumpy ride. My girlfriend’s account crushed some goals, did well from some advice wereceived, and is in a position to have an incredible 2018!

Q4 is finally over when you are all going to be reading this. For some it lived up to the hype,and others it did not. This is something I will dive into in another article, but for us, Q4 was amix of both which I will explain below.



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Quick Note: Merch Informer released the newbie plan a few weeks ago. If you are lookingto duplicate the success of this case study, make sure to go over and make sure you lock inyour rate. Read until the end to grab a limited time discount.

December saw a very healthy jump in royalties day after day just like was expected. Withnearly 2,000 shirts live (current tier is 2000), even with decreased upload limits, the goal wasto max those out each day as each slot is incredibly valuable in December.

Then we all got hit with this:

Most people were expecting this to hit butjust did not know when. I will fully admitthat I did NOT think this would happen, asthe throttle on shirt designs was gettingworse and worse. I figured it was easier tothrottle designs (less anger from thecommunity), than just fully shut off alluploads. Looks like I was wrong!

During this time, no one could uploadanything and the majority of people Iknow in the Merch game decided tosimply take a break from the entire thingand come back to it after the holidays.This is wasted opportunity, but I cannotblame them. Merch can be stressfulhitting your uploads every day, researching, and then optimizing each listing to sell. Thatbeing said, there was a goal to reach here, and putting in the work when everyone else was“taking off” is the perfect way to get ahead.

In fact, this has almost always happened to me. When the going is good, you feel nearlyinvincible and that it will never decline. Q4 did this to a LOT of people. Even though you fullyrealize that Q4 is the biggest shopping season of the year, for some reason you feel like this

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run will not stop or go back to a normal level. I have done this with almost every onlineventure I have been in, and I am willing to bet most of the people reading this have too.

It only took 4-5 times of getting lazy and complacent to realize that if you are willing to put insome work when other people are not, you are setting yourself up to blow past them thenext year.

So, knowing all of this, and conveying it to the girlfriend every single day, she decided shewould take the time to upload more listings to Etsy which got healthy sales in December!

Read about how to sell your Merch by Amazon designs on Etsy here:

Sell Your Amazon Merch Designs On Etsy With The New Printful Integration

What Happened In December?With uploading to Etsy is a bit more involved than it is on Merch, building out your portfoliothat is ALREADY researched and vetted (through selling on the Merch platform) is probablythe easiest thing that could be done during this freeze. Each one of the platforms out therehas their own audience, and during December, they are all rapidly buying as much as theycan for presents and what not.

On December 14th, we all got this message in our dashboards:

The 14th they told everyone that they wouldbegin enabling accounts and restoringproduct search discoverability on a rollingbasis.

With all the excitement this caused,publishing on this account took a LONG timeto get enabled for some reason. From all thechatter in the groups, I am not really surewhat criteria they were using to decide whogot unfroze first.

That being said, the 14th was also a big daybecause the girlfriend graduated from her 1year accelerated nursing program! Nursing degrees here in the USA are typically 4 yearslong, and she got hers in a single year. Balancing 60 credits in 11 months and 800 clinicalhours in a hospital sounds hard enough, but through all of that she was able to grow thisMerch account to pay down her debt at the same time. I am very proud of her =).

To celebrate, we headed up into the mountains to go skiing (for the very first time ever).3/8


From someone who grew up in the Midwest, this was pretty intimidating, but ended upbeing incredibly fun!

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During this time, not much was done on the Merch account (still frozen), nor Etsy for a fewdays.

Premium Shirts and Long SleevesLast Christmas season, there was a giant throttle as well. One of my good friends, Ken Reil,likes to mention that premium shirts then saved his Christmas. At that point, I was notuploading premium at all. That being said, if you look back in this case study series, you canfind the point where my girlfriend started uploading on this account all her designs fromstandard over to premium shirts.

With history repeating itself, I would have to say that this pretty much saved Christmas forthis Merch account so a big thanks to Ken!

Standard shirts got throttled first, and even though that Premium shirts ended up gettingthrottled pretty hard as well, they did not get throttled first, which allowed for a LOT moresales. It seems that Long Sleeves were in the same boat, as premium and long sleeves madeup the bulk amount of sales for this month.

ReuploadsOnce the account was finally turned back on to publish, the first order of business wasuploading all the shirts that dropped off from the 90 day rule.

Last month’s case study showed nearly 1700 shirts uploaded. During the freeze, almost 150of those came down which is frustrating because they could not be instantly put back up.Oh well, better late than never!

I have been a proponent of putting up your 90 day rule shirts right away and I still think thisis a good idea. You did the research on these niches and got some good designs created (ordid them yourself). Giving a second look at the niche and then reuploading is perfect foryour account and typically these shirts sell the second time around.

Even with the loss of shirts, the account got SO SO close to $3k a week but never cracked it.$2,990 is the closest we saw, and of course I forgot to screenshot it!

The Results For DecemberBefore we get to it, here is a quick recap of the November numbers:

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https://merchinformer.com/merch-by-amazon-success-series-interview-with-ken-reil/

You will notice that November earnings are actually a bit lower than what was reported inthe case study. Actually scratch that, they are a LOT lower. This is because of Cyber Mondayand Black Friday taking up a ton of print capacity and thus the products got shipped outlate. We are almost $900 short, so the payment in January that it is added on to should bevery nice.

Almost all of the anvil shirts are priced at $16.99 while the premium versions are priced at$19.99. The long sleeves on the account are priced higher at $25.99 but give about thesame royalty as the other shirts on the account.

For the month of December, even with all the freezing, and throttling, there was still abigger spread of t-shirts and long sleeves sold than November. Reuploads, shirts thathaven’t sold before, and best sellers stayed strong as they popped in and out of the searchalgo.

Here is a summary of the totals for December 2017 from download the excel spreadsheet.

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1462 Asins sold, with $7,045.14 in royalties!

We were hoping that this account was going to hit $10k in the month of December. Itcertainly would have if it were not for the throttle but that is nothing that we can control, sothere is no point in dwelling on it. Creating an income producing property that pulls $7k in asingle month all while being in school full time and spending almost 1000 hours in ahospital is incredibly good I would say. If you are putting in the time and effort required intoMerch and are not reaching decent numbers, take a good look at your business and try tofind out what is going wrong.

What is more interesting though is the break down of shirts here. I mentioned above thatpremium outsold standard. Here is the breakdown:

Standard: 37.3%

Premium: 38.5%

Long Sleeve 24.2%

If you are ignoring either premium shirts or long sleeve shirts, you are not doing yourselfany favors. Get on it!

Sales were made using the Etsy integration but have not been included here as work hasnot been focused here.

If you are looking to replicate this success, then make sure to check out the newbie planMerch Informer just released. This plan is half the price and the girlfriend decided to releasesome coupons to celebrate the end of the year. You can use coupon code: casestudy for20% off the monthly $9.99 a month newbie price or coupon code: casestudyyearly for25% off your first year on the newbie plan. These codes are extremely limited somake sure to snatch them up before they disappear.


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About Author: Neil

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January sure was a month! Everyone was coming off those high Q4 sales where lots ofpeople were crushing all sorts of sales goals. January, for many, was a bit of a shock. Withsales dwindling, new royalties coming into play, and a new application process, many peoplestarted to get discouraged about Merch.

My girlfriend’s account saw the exact same decline in sales but a few things done in earlyJanuary were crucial to something that is beginning to happen in February!



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Quick Note: Merch Informer came out with a cheaper plan to help everyone new to theMerch by Amazon game really make sure they are making the best use of their time. TheNewbie plan is half the price and packed full of features. If you have not given the 3 day triala try yet, make sure to read about what you are missing here.

January saw a MASSIVE slump in sales but if anyone has been in the Merch game more thana year, you know this was expected. In fact, it is not just Merch by Amazon that isexperiencing this slump in sales.

January is actually one of the worst months by far in all of retail. People are out of moneybecause they spent what they had on gifts and presents for Christmas. People also have lotsof clothing they probably received as gifts. They ALSO probably receive a paycheck every 2weeks, so many people are just not looking to spend much money at all.

Not only did lots of the shoppers not really have any money to spend on our shirts, butthere was still a throttle going on which seems to be almost completely gone as of writingthis article.

All of this combined can make people very discouraged. Why would you put time into abusiness when you are not making much out of it. You feel as if you are wasting your timebut somehow forget the great highs of December. This brings me to something I keepcoming back to:

Motivation may get you started but it takes discipline to keep you going.

So, with that being said, let’s jump into January and what happened with the account.

What Happened In January?January was an extremely busy month of just straight studying to take her nursing exam soshe can work as a licensed nurse. Because of this, not many designs were uploaded to theaccount.

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https://merchinformer.com/new-plan-new-price-new-opportunities/'

As of publishing this article, SHE PASSED!

That being said, she did spend some time uploading to Etsy and has started making over ahundred dollars a month on Etsy. Etsy is pretty easy to get started, but one of the thingsthat no one thinks about when they get started with the platform is that they need toactually do customer service!

She got a good lesson in customer service when someone who ordered a shirt requested alarger size. Not only did she have to eat the cost of the original shirt (which will be mailedback to her), but she had to purchase the new size from Printful and email it to thecustomer. All in all, she lost about $3 which is not bad at all. However, dealing with thecustomer and figuring out shipping and shirt sizes can be frustrating. You should be doingeverything you can to make the customer happy though. Etsy is ALL about customerinteraction and doing what you can for them. If you go through the effort to make thecustomer happy, they will return the favor.

Even though she lost a few dollars and time on that sale, the lady was so happy she turnedaround and left the store a 5 star review which drastically helps get your store really going!

If you are interested in getting started on Etsy, we wrote an in depth guide here:


Now, back to Merch!

Hoodies and Sweatshirts!We have known for a while now that Hoodies and Sweatshirts were available to brandpartners and high tier accounts. This is why we added them extremely early to MerchInformer so you could search our product search and get ahead of the curve.

On January 2nd though, everyone got this update in their dashboards:

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This was super exciting! We now can sellhoodies during the cold season. Not onlythat, but we can take the SAME designs thathave been selling well during Q4 and getthose up onto different types of clothing.Since each design costs us $4 from our VA,the more products you can put that designon, the more ROI you can make per design.

Sweatshirts take the exact same dimensionsas t-shirts do for the design file. However,hoodies have a different size!

This left the entire community a bit confusedon how to properly resize all of these. Forsomeone in the smaller tiers, they couldsimply open up any editor and go througheach one. But what about the people that had thousands of designs that needed to beresized? This was going to be a MASSIVE time sink!

We got in touch with our friend Greg and quickly came up with a script for Photoshop thatwill go through all your designs perfectly. It even works with the Photoshop free trial soeveryone can make use of this method.

How To Resize Hoodies For Merch By Amazon

She started using an older desktop (7 years old!) that I dug out of my closet and rebuilt forher to strictly do her Merch business. This computer manged to resize just over 1000 uniquedesigns in a few hours. If you have a better computer, you should be able to crank throughall of your designs in even less time.

After all the shirts were resized for hoodies, she put up only the designs that had soldmultiples during Q4 onto hoodies and sweatshirts. This seemed to work pretty well in termof sales! Hoodies were certainly a better seller than sweatshirts though!

Tier Up!This account has moved fairly fast through all the tiers.

In early January the account jumped from tier 2000 up to tier 4000! This means that uploadswent from 40 a day up to 80 per day. As she was studying for her exam, this just was notgoing to happen.

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https://merchinformer.com/how-to-resize-merch-by-amazon-designs-for-hoodies/

At these higher tiers, things do begin to start getting harder to manage. The dropbox folderwith everything is an absolute mess and trying to deal (and find) all the shirts coming downfor no sales can be a bit difficult.

That being said, at these higher tiers with the drastic amount of uploads you can upload aday, you can really start making some money! So while they were not all filled every day inJanuary (no where close), even with dwindling royalties, this puts the account in a greatposition to dominate 2018!

Trending DesignsThe one main thing that was focused on during January was trending designs.

If you want to make sure you are ahead of the curve, you should be looking to the future tosee if you want to go after trending niches. While everyone else was getting discouraged, mygirlfriend noticed that she should focus on Valentine’s shirts because February was aroundthe corner!

After doing some research into the niche, she got a decent size batch together to send off tothe designer and put those designs up as soon as they were delivered about a week later.This meant that her Valentine’s day designs were up over a month before the actual date.This is CRUCIAL if you want to gain traction.

I will not go into the numbers here (next month’s case study!), but I can tell you this movewas very very much worth it.

Keep in mind, your strategy is going to depend on how many open slots you have to playwith.

Royalty Change – What Did We Do?This is probably the big elephant in the room. Merch by Amazon finally changed ourroyalties in January which we knew about. Not a single person was looking forward to it, butit was to be expected as the program grew.

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As you can see above, we all took a pretty large cut to our royalties.

I remember the days when you could make over $4 per shirt just selling at $14.99, but Idigress…

With the lower royalties, people have been talking about what they are going to do abouttheir prices. Will they raise them? Most of the community seems to think so! Will the 2 newproducts (hoodies and sweatshirts) offset the decrease?

I think it is actually a bit of both. The 2 new products are selling pretty well which helpsoffset the decrease in royalties, but people are trying to crank up their prices as well. If youlook at the data in the Merch Hunter, you will see that in the top 1000 BEST selling shirts onall of Merch by Amazon, there are only 51 results that are priced higher than 20 dollars.

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This should be a big signal to all of you. People on Amazon want to get the BEST price andabove 20 dollars, they are no longer impulse purchasing. I will probably write about my ownpersonal strategy later, but as of this post my girlfriend is NOT raising prices on her shirts.

The same strategy is still applying. Raise prices on shirts that get reviews or take off in BSRand leave all the others priced competitively. While January sales are a bit down, as ofwriting this, it looks like the strategy is working well.

Anvil Shirts Being Replaced!Before we wrap this up with the results for January, at the very end of the month, we gotthis in our dashboards!

It looks like Amazon is rolling our Portand Company shirts to replace all ofAnvil!

This is great news as the Anvil shirts wereawful quality (in my opinion), andSHOULD help with some of the negativereviews we have been receiving.

From people that have already orderedsome samples, the shirt is thicker, tighterwoven, and the print seems to be a bitmore vibrant. However, it has beenmentioned that they do feel a bitwarmer. We shall see how this new shirtdoes, but the change is a welcome one!

The Results For JanuaryBefore we get to it, here is a quick recap of the December Numbers:

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You will notice that December earnings are actually a bit lower than what was reported inthe last case study. In the last case study we were expecting an extra $900 dollars on thisJanuary payment, but it was off again. This is getting hard to keep track of, but the nextpayment they should finally be caught up and include it in that payment.

Almost all the shirts are still priced at $16.99 while the premium versions are priced at$19.99. Long sleeves are priced at $25.99 to make sure they qualify for free shipping wheresweatshirts are at $35.99 and hoodies $39.99. These price points seem to be working wellfor the quality of the clothing as well as sales volume.

Here is a summary of the totals for January 2018 from downloading the excel spreadsheet:

623 Asins sold with $2485.29 in royalties.

This is a big drop from December, but still, not too bad for January and getting the royaltiescut in the middle of the month. As you can see from the numbers, and the earnings report

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from previous month, the account is still in a great position to increase in earnings. If$2485.29 is one of the worst months of the year, a typical month should be looking prettygood in the near future!

Here is the breakdown of the shirts sold:

Standard: 62.2%

Premium: 25.3%

Long Sleeve: 4.2%

Sweatshirt: 1.6%

Hoodie: 6.7%

It is interesting to see that standard and premium shirts are still what is selling the most.This is why they released t-shirts first and why this is what you should be focusing on. Insecond place is NOT long sleeves though, but hoodies. I suspect this may change in thecoming months as the colder months become a bit warmer.



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About Author: Neil

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The Merch Informer Blogmerchinformer.com/100k-school-debt-to-financial-freedom-merch-by-amazon-update-10/



February was an interesting month. A lot has happened in the world of Merch by Amazonbut not too much has happened with this account (except for some increased sales!).

While there has been talk of Merch throttling in all of the communities on social media, theaccount still managed to see increased sales. While it would be nice to compare this to lastyears earnings, this account does not have any earnings from last February. What I can tellyou that while Amazon is having some issues with search visibility, that there is not an actualthrottle going on.

In this month’s case study, we are going to go over a few things that happened in February,the switch over to the new mockups, the uploading strategy, and a quick reminder forsomething that may have gotten a friend suspended from the program!


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https://merchinformer.com/100k-school-debt-to-financial-freedom-merch-by-amazon-update-10/





February was still a pretty slow month for the account. From my own experience, I did notexpect it to raise too much from January as generally the new year is a slow start for retailsales. That being said, what we experienced and a lot of other people experienced has beena day or two of REALLY slow sales, and then all of a sudden a day that just explodes in salesout of nowhere. We are talking about 2-3X the amount of sales in a certain day followed byanother day or two of slow sales. In the Facebook communities this is being referred to asthe Merch Middle Finger (ha!). No one actually knows what is going on when this happens tosales. All I can speculate is that they are testing out something internally and I can only hopeit has something to do with search visibility.

Some have even speculated that it has something to do with the last MBA survey that wassent out asking about AMS ads. In case you did not get that email, here were the questions:

Q1: Which tier level are you?Q2: Are you familiar with Amazon Marketing Services (AMS)?Q3: How likely would you be to participate in a program that advertises your Merchproducts on your behalf in exchange for a percent of the royalty from each product soldthrough the program? This program would be in addition to the free organic search trafficyou already receive.Q4: If Merch were to advertise products on your behalf what is your level of comfort inallowing Merch to select which of your products to promote?Q5: I would sign up for this program if Merch charged me no more than the followingroyalty percentage for products sold through the programQ6: What sales percent increase would you expect from Merch through this program?Q7: At which tier level do you think this program would first become useful?Q8: On a scale from 0-10, how likely are you to recommend Merch by Amazon to a friend or

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colleague?

Could Amazon be testing running ads to our products (increasing our sales by 2-3X on somedays) internally? What do you think about this survey? Let us know in the comments below!

BIG NOTE: For anyone NEW to the game, it is currently not possible to sign up for AMS. Youmay have read our popular article about running Amazon Marketing Service adshere: https://merchinformer.com/ultimate-ams-amazon-marketing-services-guide-to-marketing-your-merch/ but I am sad to announce that currently, this is not possible to getstarted with as they have shut down the work around people were using to get accepted.This just goes to show that when we show you a technique to use, JUMP on it in case it getstaken away in the future. Anyone who signed up previous to them shutting this down, stillhas access.

Let’s get into what actually happened with the account in February!

What Happened In FebruaryFebruary was an interesting month for the account for a few reasons. The first is that notvery many designs were outsourced during this time. While the account got a tier up lastmonth, this month was focused on more reuploads and doing MANY trademark checks. Notonly was a lot of maintenance stuff taken care of, but Etsy also took up a lot more time withcustomer support and fixing orders from incompetent buyers.

Outsourcing was done this month, but only about 50-70 designs were created. The reasonfor this is because the account was tiered up, but there are hundreds and hundreds ofdesigns stored on the computer that got taken down because of the 90 day rule. Shewanted to get some new designs for the account (and a family member’s account that I willdiscuss shortly), but also is focused solely on tiering up. The account has more than enoughsales to get boosted to the 8k tier, but just does not have the slots filled up. Keeping track ofall these designs has become a living nightmare and has turned the uploading process intoa MUCH more time consuming activity than it used to be.

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https://merchinformer.com/ultimate-ams-amazon-marketing-services-guide-to-marketing-your-merch/

This is how the current system works although I have an idea of how we can clean this uplater. Essentially, when designs are created, they go into the All Shirts folder. From here,they are copied and pasted into the “Resize” folder to later be scripted to the correct size forhoodies. Then they are moved to each of the folders for the different products as they areuploaded. With the constant take downs for the 90 day rule, many of these need to be putback up so they are constantly moving folders.

Now, reuploading shirts or uploading new designs is not particularly hard at all, but one ofthe things that everyone should be wary of is trademarking checking EVERYTHING again.This is so important! Every night when she is uploading shirts, she has a second monitorsimply for TESS searches. While you can use Merch Informer trademark alerts to make surenothing is actually fully registered, what she is finding sometimes is that there are so manynew applications for trademarks. She is a lot more cautious than I am, so if she sees a newtrademark application and after reading the documents it looks like they stand a goodchance of getting the mark excepted down the line, she will simply move the shirt to the“Not Sure” folder which is pretty much the “NSFM” or Not Safe For Merch folder. Manypeople will tell you to put these designs on other PODs, but this is just asking for trouble ason other platforms you are often the seller of record and can open yourself up to a lawsuit.

Big Trademark News: We are all absolutely FED UP with the trademark trolls registeringcommon phrases and somehow getting away with it while taking down Merch shirts at thesame time. It just so happens that our friend Ken Reil has done a ton of leg work and foundsomething that actually seems to work to combat these. They are called letters of protest,and they are absolutely free to file. The community is growing quickly in a concentratedeffort to oppose as many of these claims as possible. If you want to join the effort, you canjoin this Facebook group where everything is beingorganized: https://www.facebook.com/groups/MerchWatchDawgs/.

The one thing I should mention that was also this month is that she essentially took my ideaof “Franchising” Merch by Amazon and made it a reality. Both her brother, good friend, andher cousin have asked about her t-shirt business. Of course she will explain it to them, butas anyone in this game knows, it takes a while to actually become familiar with the entireprocess as well as the ins and out. She had them sign up for an account, and then hit themwith the offer to essentially help and manage the accounts for a percentage of the profit.This has worked out really well for me, and if you have no idea what I am talking about, hereis a long but informative video explaining the process:

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https://www.facebook.com/groups/MerchWatchDawgs/

Watch Video At: https://youtu.be/3Puc3COnLdQ

Moonshot! (Trending Design)I almost forgot to include this in the case study this month! Valentine’s day was in February,and like most holidays, people for some reason end up buying a bunch of shirts. Generallythis account has always put up a few shirts in these niches a good time before the actualholiday is here, but this time it was different.

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https://youtu.be/3Puc3COnLdQ

First, this shirt was uploaded in 2017 and did NOT SELL the first go around. In fact, thisparticularly design was put up not once, but TWICE because of the 90 day rule.

Yep, you read that right. This design was a “dud” twice in 2017 and turned around to make$900+ in 2018. This is the exact reason I always tell people to put their shirts back up. If youdid your research and determined there is customer demand there, as long as your designsare good, they will eventually sell at least once. And sometimes, they may sell 200 times.

Second, this shirt was originally priced at $14.99. The goal here was just to get that first saleon the shirt so it did not have to be subject to the 90 day rule. As the shirt sold originally andkept showing up in the analyze page within Merch by Amazon, she decided to bump theprice to $16.99. As it continued selling, she used the technique I generally talk about raisingthe price by a dollar every day or so up to $19.99 as it takes off. This ended up working welland sales kept strong through valentines day.

Third, this shirt has received multiple bad reviews. Not only did it receive multiple badreviews, but even when the price kept increasing on the shirt, sales actually picked up! Thisjust goes to show you that customers shop with their EYES first, and reviews later. If theylike the design, they will end up purchasing it, especially if it is for a special occasion.

Fourth, this was a semi text based design. Not the kind of text based design that you openup in photoshop/illistrator, type something and save, but still very simplistic. If you have anyinclination on how to use these programs, this design should have taken no longer than 10minutes.

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Fifth, this design cost $4. This is an ROI of over 19,900%! (This is after ad expensesbelow)There is a reason that I always tell people to outsource instead of creating designsyourself. When you create designs yourself, you are trading your time for money. Make thesystem work for you!

Sixth, this design started selling organically through proper keyword research (a third time),but used an extra boost from AMS ads. Here is what those looked like:

You will notice a few things right away. First is that the budget was set at $5 per day, andthat they all got plenty of impressions and clicks. We were testing different CPCs (cost perclick) when doing this, so you will see they are all over the place.

The estimated total sales are very low for the spend giving the campaigns a terrible ACoS.The reason for this is because AMS gives us TERRIBLE reporting. What that really means isthat if someone clicked the ad and then purchased a size that was NOT put into the ad, thiswould not show up as a sale, nor be included in the ACoS. So how do we know these reallyworked? Well, as soon as we started running them, sales increased. When sales increased,we just let them run to see how they would perform. To be completely honest, we did forgetto turn them off for a while.

You will also notice that almost all of these are headline search ads. These have continuallyworked well for me, and working on her account as well. Since you can put 3 products in theheadline search, what she did was pick 3 different sizes of the SAME shirt to put in the ad.Not only that, but these are “above the fold” meaning that they are the first thing a searcheris going to see. Above the fold ads are what you want when you are selling as you wantthem to be in the customers face, showing them products that they will love. If you usesponsored products, they will have to scroll, or it will not be the first product a customersees, so by the time they do see your sponsored product ad, you may have already lost thesale.

We wrote a very detailed write up of how AMS works here:

Ultimate AMS (Amazon Marketing Services) Guide to Marketing Your Merch

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https://merchinformer.com/ultimate-ams-amazon-marketing-services-guide-to-marketing-your-merch/

If you already have an AMS account, you can follow these directions near the end to seteverything up.

**If you do NOT already have an AMS account, I am sorry, but this process currentlydoes NOT WORK as they have closed registrations.

Breakdown Uploads/StrategyNow, this brings us to the way uploads are broken down and the strategy. I would say this isgoing to be drastically different if you are in a smaller tier. If you are tier 1k or below, I wouldreally suggest doing 1000 different designs. Use 1 slot for 1 standard t-shirt. Yes, yes, I knowyou have access to many more products but Merch is the a numbers game and standardshirts are the big money maker here. You drastically stand a better chance at making moremoney without uploading to other products at first because it allows you to either get a verywide spread in the niches you are in, or really go in and dominate a particular niche withmany different designs.

If you are a higher tier though, you should really consider uploading the designs you havecurrently onto multiple products. This is just going to be much more economical. Why? Well,at the current tier my girlfriend is at, she can upload 200 designs a day. If we are paying forthose designs, that is going to cost $800 a day. I do not know many people that could keepup that level of outsourcing for very long! I cannot begin to imagine how you value your timeif you are trying to create 200 designs a day yourself, which in itself is also not economical.

When this account gets new shirts, each one is uploaded FIRST to standard, then imidiatelyto premium. They are then uploaded to long sleeve and sweatshirts as well since these arethe same dimensions. Sometimes she will upload them to hoodies that very day, but oftenthey go into the Resize folder and those are done in batches the next day.

Even though you can see the breakdown of royalties by product at the end of this article,the real goal here is not to make more money (well, that is always nice!), but to tier up.Tiering up when Amazon is having search visibility you say? Yep!

The goal is to get this account to tier 8-12k as soon as humanly possible. The reason for thisis that when new products open up, she wants room to quickly come to market to get aheadof everyone else giving her the advantage. New products ARE coming *wink wink*.

As you can see, the account has a while to go:

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Mockup ChangesProbably one of the biggest things that has happened this month is that the mockups havestarted to change over to the new Port & Co mockups.

This is the old mockup:

This is the new mockup:

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The new mock ups look a bit more “boxy” and what a lot of people are complaining aboutare that the designs look way too big and stretched. I have not really seen many of thedesigns that look “bad” but the mock ups do look a bit more boxy. The reason they areswitching everything over is that the new shirts are supposed to be higher quality and cutdown on some of those bad sizing reviews. That being said, people are reporting that thenew mock ups are not helping with the bad reviews or with sales.

What are your thoughts here? Switching over to the new shirts is the most probable reasonwe are having issues with sales, but who knows! This is Amazon we are dealing with after alland they will fix the issues given enough time I believe.

*These are not my designs or my girlfriends designs, just an example.

Sweaters? Listen Up!I decided to put this in here as a PSA to everyone that may not be paying as much attentionto Merch groups as they would like.

10/13

If you are using the word “sweater” in your listings, NOW is the time to go and remove thisword from your listings. Either remove the word from listings, or remove the listing entirely,and I am not joking.

A good friend making thousands of dollars per month just happens to be from a countryoutside the USA that calls hoodies “sweaters”. Amazon has a big issue with this. His accountrecently got suspended and after crawling through all of the designs, he could not figurewhy. After talking with him extensively about this, it turns out he had over FOUR HUNDREDdesigns that called hoodies “sweaters”. That is a big big NO in the eyes of Amazon so hesimply removed them all from the platform.

Be careful out there!

The Results For FebruaryBefore we get to it, here is a quick recap of the January Numbers:

You will notice that the January earnings are a bit higher than report in the last case study.In the last case study we were off by hundreds of dollars and that seems to have got addedto this payment. It seems that we are almost caught up on the royalties that Amazon owesfor the products sold on this account.

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Almost all of the shirts are priced at $16.99 for standard, whereas premium are priced at$19.99. Long sleeves have been priced at $25.99 to take advantage of the free shipping at$25 dollars. Sweatshirts are priced at $35.99 and hoodies at $39.99. These are all thestarting price points, but if a shirt starts taking off OR gets a review, the product is bumpedby about $1 in price. This has resulted in more earnings but little to no slow down in salesfrom those products.

Here is a summary of the totals for February 2018 from downloading the excel spreadsheet:

841 ASINs sold with $3053.68 in royalties!

These royalties are up about 23% from last month whereas sales are up around 29%. Theaccount is selling more shirts but at a smaller royalty. I do not really see this as an issuebecause all experience points to MBA being a game of volume. This month has FELT slow. Infact, it has felt slower than almost all the other months I can remember but somethingseems to be up with Amazon search and no one is really sure what is going on. For thatreason, we are pretty happy with this increase from January which is notoriously one of theslowest months for retail anywhere.

Here is a breakdown of the shirts sold:

Standard: 70.6%

Premium: 15.8%

Long Sleeve: 3.7%

Sweatshirt: 3.7%

Hoodie: 6.2%

This month saw a lot more sweatshirts and long sleeves sold by percentage. By actualnumber sold, not so much. Standard shirts again were the big winner here because that iswhere the most money is to be made. Everyone wears t-shirts for the most part, evenduring the colder months.

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About Author: Neil

13/13


https://merchinformer.com/100k-school-debt-to-financial-freedom-merch-by-amazon-update-10/#

The Merch Informer Blogmerchinformer.com/100k-school-debt-to-financial-freedom-merch-by-amazon-update-11/



March was one of those slower months in terms of what happened in the world of Merch byAmazon but also how the business of this account has been running.

Earnings were up a bit and it looks like search visibility is slowly changing in our favor onceagain as sellers. As we are nearing the 12 month mark of this case study, my girlfriend hasreally started to look at putting more systems in place for her business and is now focused abit more on delegation to scale up outside of just a single account. This is what we aremainly going to talk about in this month’s study. I think it is important that once you “get it”about how everything works, that you really take more of a delegation role in your businessinstead of such a hands on one. Look for interesting ways to scale up and branch out. Printon Demand is such a big industry and there is so much you can do with it.



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What Happened In MarchI am not sure if I have ever talked about it in this case study series before, but I think nowmay be the time. There are some people in this business who are nothing but vultures. Wehave been dealing with one of them for about a month and a half now. I am talking aboutfalse take downs. My girlfriend received a take down from Amazon a few months ago nowfrom a third party seller who is also on the MBA platform. Now, where this gets weird is thatnothing in the title, bullets or description is trademarked. Not only that, but all of theimages used on the design are in no way copyright or protected. Yet somehow, this otherseller was able to report the design and get the competition removed.

This is a BIG problem and a problem I know a lot of people reading this have faced as well (Ihave talked to many of you!). So there are a few things I want to note here. The first is that ifyou are not doing your own designs, make sure you can trust your VA. Virtual assistants aregreat, but are a danger to your account if you have no idea how to manage them or check iftheir artwork is original and unique. I wrote about that here: https://merchinformer.com/3-easy-merch-amazon-mistakes-avoid/ where you can read about how to find copyrightdesign elements to ensure you are good to go.

But wait! What happens if you or your VA design original artwork and you are still gettingfrom Amazon because of people reporting you? What can you do?

Well, I want to make it very clear that Amazon IS aware of this very serious issue and theycertainly do not want to see you get terminated for someone else’s shady practices. What Ican say from talking to my connections is that Amazon does read every single response tothese take downs so make sure you respond.

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https://merchinformer.com/3-easy-merch-amazon-mistakes-avoid/

Do not respond emotionally (as I know many of you want to). Respond with evidence andwhy you believe you are in the right in this situation. This can include trademark resultsfrom TESS, showing photoshop/illustrator files, hand drawn graphics, so on and so forth.Lay it all out in a polite but unemotional email and click send.

You may get a robot response. In fact, you probably will get one. I know that my girlfriendgot the same, but I also know that a human being read that email and it was marked downon the account so that they have a record of this happening.

This is not a perfect solution, but at least you will know that it has been noted!

“Franchising” Merch by AmazonOne of the things I have talked about many times and something I personally have put intopractice is franchising Merch by Amazon. To make this really simple and to the point, thinkof your account as a singular business. Making money from a singular business is awesome,but you know what is even better? Making money from multiple businesses!

So how do you do that? After all, you only have a single account and you are only oneperson. Well, if you have figured out how to make thousands of dollars per month, youknow enough to do it again, and again, and again.

The thing is, Merch wants GREAT sellers on the platform. If you can teach someone to be agreat seller on the platform, then you can make money from their account as well. If you goback to last month’s case study, I actually did a video where I discuss how all of this works.But if you are interested in the basic idea, you get people to sign up to Merch by Amazon,and you help them grow their accounts for a percentage of the profits. Eventually they aredoing the majority of the work and you are sitting back collecting checks. This is on TOP ofwhat your own account is making.

My girlfriend took the first steps to do this in the last case study, and there has been someprogress here. So far, two people she knows have some designs, gotten set up on Etsy, andthen have applied for Merch by Amazon. They put up shirts on Etsy first for someexperience and for the links they can put in the application form.

Now, time for some real talk here.

If you decide to take this idea and run with it, you are going to run into a LOT of people whoare all talk, but end up doing nothing. Almost everyone you speak too is going to beinterested int he concept. Some might be interested in getting set up. After they get set upthough, they are unwilling to put in the work to actually see some fruits from their labor.This is what my girlfriend has already run into.

It is actually kind of funny hearing comments like “why would anyone want to go out and3/8


spend $150 a night drinking when they could be spending that money on growing theirbusiness?”. That sounds like something I would say, but now it is coming out of her mouth!It really goes to show that reinvesting money back into your business is what you should bedoing. In order to get to that point though, you have to take action.

So if there is one piece of advice I can give, it is to only spend the time with people who aredetermined to make it work (not just people who talk a lot!).

Building The TeamOne of the most important things that happened this month is that my girlfriend took thefirst steps to actually start building out a real team.

As much as we probably all like full control over our business, the only real way to grow tonew heights is to step back and take more of a managing roll instead of trying to doeverything. If you are trying to do everything yourself, you are still trading your time formoney. I am not some big conference guy by any means, but one of the most importantthings I ever learned at the first one I attended was to work ON your business, not in yourbusiness. I have really taken this to heart over the last few years.

Since she was bringing more people onto the platform as part of the “franchising” concept,she realized that she would need to stop depending on my designers. The search started onUpwork after reading this article:


Now, if you have ever attempted to hire anyone after reading that article, you probablyended up copy and pasting my script. It still works, but if you actually go search on Upworkyou will see page after page of the SAME thing. I included that script as a guide so it isalways best to change it up. This is exactly what she did, and this is the exact script that wasposted:

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Her way with words is a little more eloquent than my script. It ended up working great withover 40 applicants to the project.

A lot of them were quickly denied from the position for answering the questions incorrectlyor showing examples of past work that were not up to par. My two favorites were someonewho said the 16th president of the USA was Obama, and another applicant who said he was

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not sure and was too lazy to look it up!

She narrowed them down to 3 applicants, and ended up hiring 2 of them on trial periods.Each applicant was required to send links to any artwork that they used in the designs so itcould be checked. One of them was even a custom illustrator who created all her ownimages.

YES! You can get a custom illustrator for $4 per design following this method. Not bad if youask me!

The Results For MarchBefore we get to it, here is a quick recap of the February Numbers:

You might notice that February earnings are a bit lower than what was reported in the lastcase study. This payment was an entire 2 dollars short! I think it is safe to say, all the moneyhas finally been caught up from what was missing from previous payments. This is becauseyou get paid in the period when the item ships, not when a customer purchases it.

Currently, all the shirts are priced at $16.99 for standard and premium is being priced at$19.99. We have had some discussions on switching this up. She is wondering if she shouldraise her prices on the standard and drop the prices on the premium (just until they gainsome traction), but as always, the earnings are good so she does not want to mess that up.

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Long sleeves are being priced just above $25 to take advantage of the free shipping.Sweatshirts are priced at the recommended $35.99 and hoodies are at $39.99. Prices donot change very much but if a shirt is really doing well or has a review, she will bump theprice by about $1 which has resulted in a small amount of extra earnings.

Here is a summary of the totals for March 2018 from downloading the excel spreadsheet.

964 ASINs sold with $3181.34 in royalties!

These royalties are up just a bit from last month but nothing impressive at all. While she didhit Valentines day the previous month, this month was really not spent on trending designsat all. This probably equates to some money left on the table for sure but the entire goal istiering up now for when future products drop. Amazon search is still a little whacky BUT thelast week or so sales have started to improve so I think something must be changing. Thisofficially wraps up Q1, which is always a slow time of the year, so the seasonality of retailmay have something to do with it as well.


Standard: 77%

Premium: 17%

Long Sleeve: 2%

Sweatshirt: 1%

Hoodie: 3%

Top 3 Colors Sold:

Black: 291

Heather Grey: 211

Heather Blue: 166

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Really no surprise on the colors. They look the best with most designs and you can see thatthe customers really like it.

What I was not expecting though was such a low percentage of long sleeves, sweatshirts,and hoodies. Even though technically winter is over, it is incredibly cold out both here, andacross the country with snow still flying on both coasts. I would assume that would equateto sales outside of the standard shirts but I guess not. Premium once again brings upsecond place so if you are NOT uploading to premium, you are simply leaving money on thetable.


About Author: Neil

8/8

https://merchinformer.com/100k-school-debt-to-financial-freedom-merch-by-amazon-update-11/#

100k School Debt to Financial Freedom – FINAL Merch byAmazon Update

merchinformer.com/100k-school-debt-to-financial-freedom-final-merch-by-amazon-update/

100k School Debt to Financial Freedom – FINAL Merch by Amazon Update


Hello Fellow Merchers!

Melissa here (aka “the girlfriend”) to wrap up this year-long case study. Where have the last12 months gone?! Anyway, let’s jump right in and discuss the highs, the lows, mistakes andthe realities of selling via Merch By Amazon.

As mentioned in the first month’s write-up, my Merch journey started in August 2016 when Iwas accepted to the program. At that time I had just finished up my first Bachelor’s degree(Psychology) and decided that I wanted to pursue a career in medicine. In the midst ofapplying to Nursing school Neil got the itch to leave Madison, Wisconsin and move to goodole Colorado. I quit my full time job back home, didn’t know if I’d gotten into any schools outhere and essentially had zero income. Neil and Todor had recently launched Merch

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https://merchinformer.com/100k-school-debt-to-financial-freedom-final-merch-by-amazon-update/

https://merchinformer.com/de/100k-schuldverschuldung-zur-finanziellen-freiheit-final-merch-by-amazon-update/


Informer (maybe you’ve heard of it) and were still figuring out the entrepreneurship —basically life was a hot mess. Neil pushed me to upload my shirt limit (25 at that time), whichI did very excitedly, expecting to make sales immediately………*crickets*

A whole $0.00 in the first month. AWESOME! Sales waxed and waned. Of course my shirtsran into the 60 day rule (now changed, thank god) so I was finding myself uploading thesame damn 25 shirts that weren’t selling well anyway. I started nursing school in January,hence the $100k in student loans, and this trend in sales continued until April 2017, the firstmonth of my case study. At that time Neil stated the following about my Merch accountresults, “As you can see, very unimpressive.” <—RUDE.

In May 2018 Denver was hit with a MASSIVE hail storm and the Grand Cherokee I had justbought a few months previously was destroyed. The drama continued, no car (no way to getto school), 100k in debt, and no income. What is my life?

Now, I’ll admit that I can be stubborn at times. I was sad, exhausted, car-less — yet Neilharassed me everyday about keeping up with my uploads. I didn’t know how to use MerchInformer, what I had been doing clearly wasn’t working. I felt stuck. After a million and onediscussions about taking action I finally decided to create my very first Merch Informer“Favorites” folder. It was actually kind of fun seeing the ridiculous designs that sold. I learned

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all about BSR, keywords, my target audience and the three main modules that MerchInformer had at the time (Brand Search, Product Search, Favorites). In May 2017 I promisedNeil that I’d give Merch a good old college try.

At this point my rage and competitive edge took over. I’ve accomplished a good amount in26 years on this planet, I can damn well sell some shirts on Amazon. I used Merch Informerto find new designs that sold and was quickly at T100. From then on I found myselfuploading during class, in between classes, at lunch, after a long day of clinicals at 9pm andduring every waking moment in between. I’d found my stride — which I’ll talk about later–isprobably the hardest part of getting your Merch business off the ground. Once I startedseeing results and found a method to the madness I continued to tier up, I bought a newcar, paid down $35,000 of my student debt. I’ve now graduated from Nursing School andwork as a Neuroscience Nurse. I’m still making it a point to upload shirts on my 3-4 days offeach week and am proud to announce that I’ve officially sold more than 10,000 shirts in thelast year! My mind is absolutely blown.

My NumbersMy monthly earning for the past year are as follows (April 2018 not posted yet – $4000)

Did I Reach My Goal?3/13

Let’s talk about what this means in terms of my goal — paying off ALL of my student loandebt. This year has been about building my Merch account into an asset – tiering up andconsistently doing research/uploading. While I didn’t gross $100k and pay off my loans inone lump sum, I have paid off $35k.

At this point my account has averaged $4160/month for the last 6 months (thank you Q4).This type of business typically has a multiple of 25-35 monthly royalties depending on theage of the business, number of unique designs and processes in place to automateworkflow. In my case, using the 6 month average of $4160/month and an expected multipleof 30x monthly royalty, my business is currently worth:

$124,735

In 12 months I was able to make $41,500, but also turned my account into a $124,735 asset.Combined, this means I’ve created a business worth $166,235 putting in a few hours ofwork each and every day.

I can’t believe how far I’ve come! Thanks to Merch Informer I’ve learned how to expedite myresearch process, hit my upload limits and sell a crazy amount of shirts!

For those of your just starting out — this goal is attainable. And for that reason I stronglyencourage you to sign up for Merch Informer today. Don’t waste hours and hours doingmarket research when this tools gives you all the same information in ONE PLACE!

The TechnicalitiesMy biggest initial obstacle was the fact that while I’m a millennial and use electronicsconstantly, I didn’t know how to go about selling on Amazon. I buy stuff online all the time,but how do I know what other people want? Sure, I can outsource to a designer but how doI know that people will buy it?

After making my favorites folder I first used the Product Search (and later the Merch Hunter)module to find products in the 100,000-600,000 BSR range. Typically I look for shirts pricedabove $16.99 with poor keyword optimization and 0-3 reviews.

To start, I priced my designs low. When I say low I’m talking $12.99. Now, price seems to bea hot topic in a lot of Facebook groups, so let me explain my rationale. Of course I’m in thisto make money and at $12.99 I may as well be giving the shirts away for free. However, I’mplaying the long game. I want to sell shirts quickly so that I can continue tiering up. If I pricemy shirt at $19.99 right off the bat my chances of making sales and getting those reviewsare lower/slower but my profits will be higher.

Now that I’m at tier 4K, and Amazon has changed their royalties, all my standard shirt base4/13

prices are $16.99 until they get about 20 sales or at least one review. Then, depending onthe BSR I increase the price to $19.99 for a basic tee. Again, this is just my personal strategyand people can choose their own methods.

Understanding Trademarks/Copyright

Neil referred me to TESS, the United States Patent and TrademarkOffice website, and after a quick discussion I understood the basicsof infringement. I use this website every single day. It’s a staple inmy process and in my opinion absolutely essential for keeping youraccount in good standing. I even check and re-check shirts as theycome down from the 90 day rule because trademarks areconstantly changing. Again, I’m thinking long term.

My advice is if you have even an once of doubt about whether a word or phrase istrademarked then simply stay away from it. Those few extra sales aren’t worth the risk,especially for those higher tier accounts that are truly assets. That being said, I still hollerquestions to Neil in his office at least once a day about trademarks — which I’m sure heenjoys.

Outsourcing designs

I’ve been outsourcing designs from the very beginning. Now, in many of the Facebookgroups there seems to be a negative stigma around hiring designers, which I don’t quiteunderstand. My motto is to work SMARTER. I work 3-4 13 hour shifts a week as a Nurse andhave an upload limit of 400 shirts a day. It doesn’t make sense for me to create all of mydesigns myself — and based on my artistic skill I’d say I’m doing the customers of Amazon ahuge favor.

If I designed every single one of my four THOUSAND shirts that’d leave me very little uploadtime, not to mention time to do anything else that I enjoy on my days off. I know there aretons of people with kids/grandkids and people that work much longer hours than I do. Soplease, while we harp on hitting those upload limits everyday we all also have lives outsideof Merch. So by all means, if hiring a designer for $4/design gives you a little bit morefreedom — DO IT!


Just make sure that they’re providing you with quality work, they aren’t infringing on therights/designs of anyone else and again that you always TESS check and reverse Googleimage search everything.

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http://tess2.uspto.gov/


This leads me to the most recent update to Merch Informer — The Merch Informer ProductsDesigner, which gives people like me some help in the design department. I had a chance toplay around with it this morning and made a pretty awesome looking shirt in 5-10 minutes!This is what the designer looks like below:

Types of shirts

I know that all accounts now have access to sweatshirts and hoodies, but back in May 2017when this case study started I was only able to upload standard and premium tees. Iuploaded unique standard designs until I hit tier 1000, and then uploaded those designs topremium. I gained access to long sleeves around month 7 and then sweatshirts/hoodies inJanuary (month 9). I’m still currently in the process of uploading all my designs to all formatsand am hoping to tier up to 8k very soon (based on 10k sold)!

Etsy

I also created my own Etsy store in September 2017 and uploaded 100 of my shirts to seehow sales compared to Amazon. Remember, Etsy doesn’t get nearly the about of traffic thatAmazon does, however your profit per shirt will be considerably higher (~$8 for a standardtee). Over the last 4 months I’ve sold 60 shirts and gotten 13 5 star reviews for my shop. Myoverall numbers are as follows:

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My goal for the next year is to put the majority of my shirts up on the Etsy Marketplace tocontinue increasing the value of my business. This is one area, I admit, that I still need somehelp with. There are some Merchers on Etsy with just a few hundred shirts up absolutelycrushing their competition. I’d love to reach out to them for any tips or advice. If you’re oneof those people, PLEASE drop some knowledge in the comments below! Do you run trafficto your shirts? I’ve integrated my stored with Printful to expedite the production andshipping process and have been generally pleased.

My only complaint is that I’m constantly getting messages from customers asking aboutshirt color options. The shirt displays/colors aren’t as consumer friendly as the Amazonlistings are.


The ProcessRight now I want to discuss my exact method — from research, to my designers, touploading and sales.

Merch Informer

My one and only research tool (SERIOUSLY). While you all probably think I’m slightly biased(I won’t argue with that), I will say that even if I wasn’t dating a Merch guru I would stillwithout a doubt pay for Merch Informer.

AIN’T NOBODY GOT TIME FOR MANUAL RESEARCH!

Seriously, I don’t have time to do research for even more than hour a day, let alone 8 hours(how long it’d take me to do research that would keep up with my 400 upload/day limit).

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My three go to modules are the Product Search,Merch Hunter (**my favorite) and Favorites.Product search is great for looking up real timedata about niches that I’m interested in. Forexample, maybe I want to see all of the shirtsrelated to camping that are selling right now.Just type that into the product search and youcan see the latest data about all shirts in thatniche. Even sort my price, don’t waste your timecompeting with shirts priced at $12.99. This alsoshows your shirts with reviews. Again, don’twaste your time competing with shirts that havemore than 5 good reviews.

Maybe I’m having a hard time coming up withshirt ideas/inspiration that day — then I headover to the Merch Hunter and take a look atwhat’s selling well in general. I’ll take a look attop selling shirts with 0-100k BSR to get a feel for the market. Where are consumers headsat? What are they spending their hard earned money on? Are there any trends orsimilarities between designs? Is there a holiday coming up that I’m now aware of? Then I’llbroaden my search to all shirts with 100k+ BSR to find shirts that are evergreen and haveless competition.

In terms of product breakdown I try to keep 80-85% of my designs evergreen. I want shirtsselling consistently so that I can keep increasing my royalties each month. The other 15-20%of my designs are based around holidays and trends.

Once I’ve got a favorites list of about 50 shirts that have peaked my interest I go through thelist and check all sayings/words on TESS. If a shirt is image only I’ll reverse Google imagesearch. Another important point is that I generally avoid text only designs. The less uniqueyour design is the easier it will be for a competitor to report you as infringing on their work,and I don’t want to be any part of that.

This process will likely weed out at least 25% of favorites folder.

Next, I often leave these designs in my favorites folder for a number of days. Then I’ll re-open all the shirts and check their current BSR. If one has dropped from the 100-600K rangedown to 1million+ BSR then I’ll delete it from my list. Clearly there isn’t a true demand andI’m not going to create a design for that. I’ll also take a look at the Trend Hunter modulewhich shows you BSR trends. This graph can also give you a good idea of whether or not theseller is running traffic to their shirt.

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Outsourcing

I’ve had to hire 3 designers to keep up with demand for my account and I found them all onUpwork. You can check out the related article on how to do this above.

Side note – after that article went out there were a huge number of copy/pasted scriptsfrom the article on Upwork. If you’re going to hire, make yours unique. You want designersthat can answer your questions, be honest with you and are always on time. I’ve built arelationship with my designers but I strongly suggest having them attach any clip art ofimages (other than their own) that were used. That way you can continue checking theirwork and make sure that your design isn’t infringing on the rights of anyone else. I typicallysend out batches of 30-50 shirts at a time and set their deadline for 1 week.

Once the designers send me their work, I go back through my favorites folder and makesure that the new designs are different from the originals.

Uploading

Uploading is a process. Typically I open up 10 new tabs on my computer and put 2 designsup in all 5 forms. This expedites the process because you can copy and paste your brandname, title and bullet points.

Earlier in the year I ran a test to determine whether Brand Name truly mattered. Myresults…IT DOES. Make sure that the Brand Name you’re using is related to the design insome way. This works in my favor by becoming one more keyword that I can use to youradvantage. Again, always TESS check your brand name and all keyword combinations in thebullet points.

In terms of shirt titles, keep it professional. Capitalize the first letter of each word and typeout “T-Shirt” (or other type of product) at the end. Make sure it’s an accurate description ofyour shirt and includes appropriate keywords (e.g., Best Mom Ever Cute Mother’s Day T-Shirt)

My biggest pet peeve — DON’T KEYWORD STUFF. Don’t enter keywords in list format (e.g.,mother, mother’s day, mama, mom, best mom, favorite mom). You want your audience tobe able to read sentences about your design and have them make sense. Utilize a few greatkeywords in the most valuable way possible. Then copy and paste this bullet point into theproduce description so that mobile buyers can also see it.

Again, my upload limit is 400/day. Do I often hit this limit? No. But I do make an effort on mydays off to try and put up 100-200 which is enough to deal with all my shirts hitting the 90day rule. My point, don’t forget to take some time for yourself/family/significant other too. Is

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your business important? Of course, but remember to keep it in perspective too and don’tbeat yourself up if you decide to take a night off (easier said than done).

MistakesWhether you’re at T25 or T100,000 you’re going to make mistakes. That’s a fact of life. Andthat’s okay. We live and learn and that’s the important part. That being said I thought I’dtake a moment to openly talk about my Merch screw ups!

I’ve had a total of 8 shirts removed for Content Policy violations.

Things I’ve learned — stay up to date on Japanese cat cartoon characters (they aren’t justcute cats), no swearing, uploading the same design to 5 different products can sometimesbackfire on you, and finally some people just suck.

Three of these were false takedowns, which I could prove by upload date and TESS/Googlecheck. In these cases I submitted all of that information to Amazon.

The most important thing to remember about rejections and take-downs is to RESPOND tothem. You want Amazon to know that you’re serious about your business and you’remaking your best effort to keep your account in good standing. If you were at fault, it’s okayto admit that and state how you’ll prevent the same mistake in the future. If you believe thedesign was falsely reported, build a complete and respectful case for yourself that Amazoncan reference if there are any questions in the future.

ConclusionI can’t believe I’ve been at this for a year already! It’s been a rollercoaster of emotions – fromlife changes, to tier up, changes in royalties, take downs, etc. Though this can be a timeconsuming and stressful process I am grateful beyond words to Neil for introducing me tothis platform. It’s helped me to not only gain financial freedom from student loans but alsoopened doors for a future in business that I never would have had.

Merch Informer is truly the best and most efficient tool for your account andNeil/Todor/Dimitar and the rest of the Merch Informer team amaze me everyday with theirdedication to improving an already great SaaS.

I also want to thank everyone that has taken the time out of their day to keep up with andread my monthly case study updates. I hope that they’ve been helpful but most of all I hopethey’ve been real. This is my reality. I have proven to myself that I can make this businesswork and I hope that I’ve also proven to all of you that your business can be successful aswell.

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My current short term goal is to reach 8K tier very soon and continue to upload/design. HellI may start making some of my own designs too. In the long term I also want to get all mydesigns up on Etsy within the year and potentially other POD platforms. Also on the list todo is sign/contract some designers onto my account via Behance.

I’ll check back in with everyone around the 18 and 24 month mark to let you know how myMerch journey has continued to pan out. Feel free to let me know how your account is doingin the comments below!

The Results For AprilBefore we get to it, here is a quick recap of the March numbers:

You might notice that March numbers are a little different than was reported in the last casestudy. This is because you get paid in the period when the item ships, not when a customerpurchases it.

Currently all the shirts are priced at $16.99 for standard and premium are being priced at$19.99. Long sleeves are being priced just above $25 to take advantage of the free shippingwhile sweatshirts and hoodies are priced at the recommended price.

Here is a summary of the totals for April 2018 from downloading the excel spreadsheet:

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$4,032.29 in royalties with 1,167 products sold. Not bad at all!



Debt: $64,584.3412/13

Royalties: $4,032.29

Debt Remaining: $60,552.05

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Business Worth $124,735About Author: Neil

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