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Follow Along: How I build a POD Empire (18)

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Welcome to my first eCommerce follow along.

Building a POD empire is probably a bit exaggerated but I will try to get a small side business on Merch by Amazon running with it.

Why do I do it?

I would like to show you some alternative ways to make money online besides of pushing CPA products

Why POD (Print On Demand)?

Once you have the basics running you can outsource lots of the work so that it can turn into a pretty much passive business.

Why Merch by Amazon?

It gives you the chance to sell directly on Amazon without the need to have own physical products.

Additionally there´s a great platform that helps alot to get started on Merch, more about it in a moment.

Ok, in 2016 a friend told me about Merch by Amazon and he had some nice success there.

I also tested a bit there but didn´t continue with it because I had enough other stuff running at this time.

In 2016 you could only design T-Shirts, nowadays there are several other products available as well.





My friend continued selling on Amazon Merch and took it to the next level and created Merch Informer together with another dude.

Merch Informer is basically a platform where you can research products that sell good on Amazon, you can do keyword research there, check for competition, find trends and much more.

Long story short, it helps alot to get insights about what sells on Amazon and what not so that starting there is no guesswork anymore but rather supported by real buyer data.



My friend and his partner will support me on my way so that I will hopefully have a good start but with these guys on my side I am pretty confident that it will work out well.

They probably know Amazon Merch better than anyone else

Well, I have to go through some other stuff before I can start working on designs.

Right now I am watching the trainings videos on Merch Informer to get used to the platform.

When I have finished the videos I will move on to the next step and update the follow along then.

I have my normal campaigns running as well so it can take few days but I do my best to post the next update as soon as possible.

Spoiler: There will be an additional eCom follow along from me soon

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AWESOME!! Been wanting to look into Amazon Merch for a while. Looking to learn a lot from your posts!



Amy


Sent from my iPhone using STM Forums

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Interesting.
Just yesterday I watched a POD video on youtube that was sponsored by Merchinformer.
Nice timing

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Thanks for sharing!
It sometimes is a bit scary though when Amazon does random bans. And I know people who were selling great (millions)on Amazon and suddenly Amazon contacted the manufacturer, took over over the product, and kicked the brand owner out!

Yet listings on Amazon sell like hot cakes. Nothing on earth is risk-free.
Thanks again for this amazing post.

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I am also excited to see how it goes

Indeed nice timing, maybe this is a good omen

As long as you run it clean there´s not much to be afraid of

Also nothing to worry about because Amazon is already the manufacturer.

Just to make it clear, I have no intentions to create my own products somewhere else and sell them on Amazon.

I only provide the designs to Amazon and Amazon itself produces the items then and sells it on Amazon.

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@twinaxe great! All excited to your results.
I had heard about it a long time back, but designs scare me... repressive forgetting, LoL
How much does Amazon pay out for this? Amazon fees for FBA is a lot. And they ensure merchant fulfilled orders always get a ding when there's a late delivery or a return. But FBA is considered fine because they themselves fulfill it.

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You can set your own prices

Merch is similar to FBA in some ways because Amazon also takes care of everything related to the orders.

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Looking forward to this!

I remember when teespring.com was the big thing, they also started with t-shirts, then added different products later on. I know that many affiliates made solid money with them, but then it cooled down a lot.

Doind this on amazon could really help, since they already have a huge user base. Definitely subscribing to this thread

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What's the revenue share with this model actually? Say you set the price to $14.90 per piece, how much would you get paid for a sale?

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If I am not wrong, there is a minimum price for every type of product. If you sell a t-shirt at 20$, you gain around 5$. If you sell to the minimum price, lets say around 13$, you gain 0$.
More or less

Inviato dal mio Redmi Note 9 Pro utilizzando Tapatalk

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Ah ok, makes sense. They have some expenses with this, so it makes sense they have a minimum price set.

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Exactly, I had to learn it the hard way.

When I started Merch in 2016 I made a very simple T-Shirt design with just the hashtag #blacklivesmatter

I set the price to something like $13, I chose a lower price in the beginning so that the shirt can rank easier and to get few early sales.

As I said, I didn´t continue with it so I also didn´t increase the price and also didn´t check the sales anymore.

Few days ago when I checked my Merch account after 4 1/2 years or so I saw that the shirt is still generating sales and constantly did all the time.

But my price was so low that it was belowe Amazons minimum price to earn commission.

In the end I sold the shirt more than 100 times and made exactly $0 from the sales

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Ouch Not that it would be a huge financial loss, but still, making $0 from 100 sales sucks

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Good things take time and so it took a bit longer until I can finally update the follow along.

Unluckily I was so busy with all kinds of things that I didn´t find the time to take care of the Amazon Merch stuff.

Luckily enough I know some very cool people and so it happened that my friend Todor from Merch Informer offered to help me with to get my first designs running.

In the end he not only helped me but he and Neil (also from Merchinformer) basically gave me everything completely ready to upload.

Fresh and cool looking designs together with keyword optimized titles, bulletpoints and not only in English but in German and Spanish as well.

I uploaded the first batch for now only as Standard T-Shirts to amazon.com

The next batch will be uploaded soon.

Since my last post in this thread also something very nice happened on Amazon Merch.

Before you had the situation that you were limited by the number of products that you can submit per day.

1 T-Shirt on amazon.com = 1 submission
Same T-Shirt submitted to amazon.de = another submission
Same design as long sleeve to amazon.com = another submission

You see, exactly the same design can result in multiple submissions because every single product and Amazon marketplace is considered as a separate submission.

Last month they changed the rules so that now the submissions are per design.

This means that I can choose a design, submit it to all 7 Amazon marketplaces and use it for all different products and it would be only 1 submission.

That way 1 upload of a design can result in up to 60+ products.

Pretty cool, huh?

Unluckily they didn´t upgrade all accounts at once to the new structure and my account is still running the old style so I have to wait until the new structure is implemented for my account as well.

But when it´s done I can just edit my uploads and add the remaining options to the designs.

I will update the thread when something happens, let it be the first sales, new designs or when I got upgraded to the new structure.

In the meantime I will do my best to get more designs finished.

Neil told me today some good tips about how to get good ideas for designs and how to optimize the listings.
When that stuff is ready I will give the ideas to a designer who makes the design templates then for me.

And now I have a nice surprise for all of you.

As I already said in the opening post, I use Merch Informer for all the research stuff, to get ideas for the designs, research good keywords and competition and so on.

The founder of Merch Informer is a friend of mine and I asked him if he has some kind of discount or so.

He and Neil then created a coupon for STM for 20% off lifetime.

So when you are also interested in starting with Amazon Merch then this is your chance and a great opportunity to save 20% on the best Merch reserach platform out there

The coupon is STM20

Have fun and maybe we can see some POD success stories here soon

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Interesting to see other MBA sellers. You can definitely earn some money with Merch by Amazon.



I have been lazy for too long and need to scale up in terms of designs uploaded. My Tier 120k is almost empty and Christmas is so close

Downside to MBA is that you need to upload a huge amount of designs and rank your products plus copycats are stealing your sales by ripping your designs and you can't focus on reporting all because you will have no way of searching Amazon for all of your designs.

@twinaxe let me know if you have questions or need help with anything

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Thanks so much for posting this!

I would LOVE to ask some questions if you wouldn't mind! But I'm feeling torn - not wanting to completely hijack this thread with my questions.

Would you mind terribly if I asked that you start a new thread so I could ask my questions there? I'm sure I won't be the only one either.

No pressure or obligation of course - thank you either way!



Amy

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@kaizen502
- What is the tier 120k?
- Is it only the max number of designs you can upload, or do they offer other perks?

@vortex, we can still split the thread after you completely hijack it

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@kaizen502 Looks good mate

I am thankful for every tip you have.

I already thought about messaging you anyway because as far as I remember you said somewhere that you also run Amazon PPC for POD, would be great to learn more about it in combination with Merch.

My account just got upgraded to the new dashboard but unluckily it seems not to be as I expected.

I thought I can have 500 designs now instead of 500 products and that I can upload 10 new designs per day and then as many products as I want from these designs.

It´s true that I really can have 500 designs now that could result in up to 32k products.

The downside is that I now have only 10 uploads per day.

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