Home > Paid Traffic Sources > eCommerce

Merch by Amazon (9)

06-03-2021 05:52 AM #1 kaizen502 (Member)
Merch by Amazon

This is the follow-up to @twinaxe MBA FA

Quote Originally Posted by kaizen502 View Post
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
Taking questions now @vortex

Quote Originally Posted by jeremie View Post
@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

@jeremie
Tier 120k is just the amount of designs/products you can upload. I think you start out at Tier 10. You need to sell 10 products to get upgraded to the next tier. I should have more than 120k products sold, but I think I will be upgraded only when I am close to reaching the cap.

There are no other perks that I know of. I would be open to some perks though

06-03-2021 02:52 PM #2 twinaxe (Senior Moderator)

Will follow and try to fetch some tips for my thread from here

06-07-2021 12:13 AM #3 vortex (Senior Moderator)

Quote Originally Posted by kaizen502 View Post
This is the follow-up to @twinaxe MBA FA



Taking questions now @vortex




@jeremie
Tier 120k is just the amount of designs/products you can upload. I think you start out at Tier 10. You need to sell 10 products to get upgraded to the next tier. I should have more than 120k products sold, but I think I will be upgraded only when I am close to reaching the cap.

There are no other perks that I know of. I would be open to some perks though
Woohoo! Thank you @kaizen502!

Here comes my initial questions...keeping in mind I have zero knowledge/experience about Merch:

1)How original do the designs need to be? Do you absolutely have to get a designer to come up with 100% original designs, or could you use images purchased from stock image sites?

2)What did it take for you to reach tier 120k?

3)How many hours did it take to get to this level of earnings? Are you outsourcing? If so what percentage of the work is being outsourced, and which tasks?

4)You mentioned how annoying copycats are - how different does a design need to be from all the designs in their database, in order to be accepted?

5)Are you driving traffic yourself as well? Or just been uploading designs and taking advantage of amazon's own organic traffic?


That would be all - for now! Thanks very much @kaizen502!




Amy

06-18-2021 07:33 AM #4 kaizen502 (Member)

@vortex sorry for the late response here. I have not been very active on STM lately.

1) I found most success with original designs, but of course there are a lot of designs that just take an existing idea of a bestseller and put their on spin on it. Text designs can work as well and you can really start with simple designs made with Canva

2) It takes at least 120k sales to reach this tier. Not sure if that answers your questions, but you need to have a lot of designs online because not all designs become bestsellers that can be sold profitably.

3) Not sure, but I invested a lot of time in the past years since I have been doing a lot of the work myself and avoided building a system. Yes, I am outsourcing the design creation, the research process including TM checks, writing the texts for Amazon (bullet points and the description). I have someone inhouse that uploads the designs because I do not feel confident sharing my account credentials that is linked to my personal Amazon account and other accounts like KDP. I am focusing on the advertizing myself.

4) Amazon does not check the designs itself. You can get away with uploading ripped designs, but if you get too many copyright infringement complaints your account will be gone fast. Amazon checks trademarks which can be super annoying at times, because they are very careful. For example if you wanted to upload designs in the diesel pickup truck niche it can happen that all uploads are rejected because the fashion brand "Diesel" has a TM on Nice class 25. Obviously that isn't going to be a TM issue.

5) At the beginning I used to purely rely on organic traffic. Nowadays 80% is Amazon PPC and I also try to incorporate some outside traffic, which might be super helpful in ranking products, but I have no data. It is just a common belief that Amazon loves outside traffic.

I hope that was helpful. Let me know if you have more questions

06-18-2021 08:03 AM #5 twinaxe (Senior Moderator)

One more question.

Did you consider to also make a Shopify store or so for your designs?

And do you only sell shirts on Merch or also phone cases, pillows, popsockets?

06-19-2021 02:55 AM #6 vortex (Senior Moderator)

Quote Originally Posted by kaizen502 View Post
@vortex sorry for the late response here. I have not been very active on STM lately.

I hope that was helpful. Let me know if you have more questions
Thank you so much for all the insights! I'm also curious as to what your ROI is like, just based on the costs of outsourcing and running ads?

Thanks again!


Amy

08-02-2021 07:56 PM #7 kaizen502 (Member)

Sorry for the late response guys. I was traveling to Colombia and was busy with other stuff.


Quote Originally Posted by twinaxe View Post
Did you consider to also make a Shopify store or so for your designs?

And do you only sell shirts on Merch or also phone cases, pillows, popsockets?
I have a Shopify store, but I use it for other products I sell on Amazon FBM. As for the shirts it is difficult to be profitable with a Shopify store since AOV is too low. I think it is better to sell higher margin products like ShineOn and so on or personalized things which can be sold with a higher markup.


Quote Originally Posted by vortex View Post
Thank you so much for all the insights! I'm also curious as to what your ROI is like, just based on the costs of outsourcing and running ads?
Difficult to say. The profit margin on the ad spend is around 20%, but of course with Amazon you get also a lot of organic sales once the product is established. It just takes longer until you have a bestseller.

08-03-2021 06:54 PM #8 twinaxe (Senior Moderator)

I have a Shopify store, but I use it for other products I sell on Amazon FBM. As for the shirts it is difficult to be profitable with a Shopify store since AOV is too low. I think it is better to sell higher margin products like ShineOn and so on or personalized things which can be sold with a higher markup.
Alright, thanks for the info.

08-23-2021 01:16 PM #9 buck johnson (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by kaizen502 View Post
@vortex sorry for the late response here. I have not been very active on STM lately.

1) I found most success with original designs, but of course there are a lot of designs that just take an existing idea of a bestseller and put their on spin on it. Text designs can work as well and you can really start with simple designs made with Canva

2) It takes at least 120k sales to reach this tier. Not sure if that answers your questions, but you need to have a lot of designs online because not all designs become bestsellers that can be sold profitably.

3) Not sure, but I invested a lot of time in the past years since I have been doing a lot of the work myself and avoided building a system. Yes, I am outsourcing the design creation, the research process including TM checks, writing the texts for Amazon (bullet points and the description). I have someone inhouse that uploads the designs because I do not feel confident sharing my account credentials that is linked to my personal Amazon account and other accounts like KDP. I am focusing on the advertizing myself.

4) Amazon does not check the designs itself. You can get away with uploading ripped designs, but if you get too many copyright infringement complaints your account will be gone fast. Amazon checks trademarks which can be super annoying at times, because they are very careful. For example if you wanted to upload designs in the diesel pickup truck niche it can happen that all uploads are rejected because the fashion brand "Diesel" has a TM on Nice class 25. Obviously that isn't going to be a TM issue.

5) At the beginning I used to purely rely on organic traffic. Nowadays 80% is Amazon PPC and I also try to incorporate some outside traffic, which might be super helpful in ranking products, but I have no data. It is just a common belief that Amazon loves outside traffic.

I hope that was helpful. Let me know if you have more questions
It was very helpful, thank you.

Home > Paid Traffic Sources > eCommerce