Avoiding Design Rejections

I probably open up every Merch by Amazon article talking about how important it is to protect your account.

There's no shortage of new sellers applying for Merch accounts on a daily basis, and their manual review team isn't trying to spend all day reviewing uploads that toe the line between infringing and being acceptable.

Merch by Amazon is the single most valuable print on demand platform around right now, and will be for the foreseeable future. When your application gets accepted, don't waste this opportunity.

My "Golden Rule" of print on demand can be studied in-depth in an older article of mine that I would highly recommend reading: How to Avoid Trademark Infringement.

Assuming we understand how to ensure we're not infringing on someone's trademarked text or graphic, lets talk a bit about how Amazon Merch polices content.

A Brief Recap - How To Protect Your Account

If you don't have time to read the aforementioned article, I'll attempt to sum up the most important parts:

1. Use tmsearch.uspto.gov to confirm that your designs aren't trademarked
2. Install the free Merch Security Chrome extension, which flags your brand/title/bullets/description in bright red if you include a known "bad" word that would get rejected
3. Design strategy: Play it safe (especially if you offer youth sizes)
4. Content strategy: Play it even safer (especially if you offer youth sizes)

Did you install Merch Security yet? Good.

Merch Design Rejected - Text

The Merch content policy has, & will continue to change over time. In this section, I'm talking about applying the content policy as it relates to the text in your product listing (not text on your png design file).

But keep in mind, it's far from definitive.

The first two things it lists should be obvious:

1. Copyright: Don't steal other people's work
2. Trademark: Don't infringe on other people's trademarks

If you plan on doing either of those in order to get a leg-up on competition, you should strongly re-evaluate your decision - it won't work out in the long run.

Beyond the obvious, there's some things to note about what text can be included in your listing, and I'll give you a strategy you can use to avoid a design rejection.

My favorite example to illustrate this is a "Beer Olympics" shirt.

While the phrase "Beer Olympics" is not trademark protected for use on shirts, it does have a record in the USPTO database, but the record was ABANDONED:

This means that legally, we're good to go if we want to come up with some creative, original designs targeting college kids that need t-shirts for their upcoming beer olympics party.

But here's the kicker -

Just because it meets the legal requirements doesn't mean it meets the Merch by Amazon content policy requirements! * IMPORTANT *

Amazon's content algorithm doesn't like the word "Olympic", or "Olympics" AT ALL, and won't let you create a listing that contains it in the brand/title/bullets/description.

* IMPORTANT * Please keep this in mind when uploading to Merch: Even if you think you should be allowed to upload a Beer Olympics shirt, they don't care! stay OFF their radar!

p.s. My personal favorite is that if you put a design on a Premium T-Shirt and type the word "Premium" anywhere in your listing, it will get rejected. * cough * Use Merch Security.

My approach:

With the Merch content team continuing to tighten the clamps with word censorship combined with continued tier-ups (currently tier 8,000), I've decided it's not worth filling out bullets or descriptions in my Merch listings.

It makes the uploading process take longer & increases the likelihood of a rejection... just to be indexed on secondary keywords that could just get you ranked on the 2nd or 3rd (or 15th) page of search results.

If I'm dead set on getting a design up:

You can upload the beer olympics design without including the word "Olympics" anywhere in your listing content.

You're running a bit of a risk in doing this, and you wont get your listing indexed organically on the primary keywords "beer olympics", but you can target similar words or phrases that wont get your listing rejected and hope for the best.

In my Merch by Amazon course (coming soon), I show you how you can still drive traffic from "illegal" keywords to your Amazon Merch listings, without threatening your account.

Merch Design Rejected - Images

Beyond avoiding using copyrighted & trademarked works, the content policy lists content/design categories that aren't suitable for Merch by Amazon:
Pornographic Content, Child Exploitation, Profanity, Promotion of Hate or Intolerance, Human Tragedy, Promotion Of Violence, Nazism Promotion, UK Specific - Mental Illness, & Youth Size Policy

These need to be avoided at all costs, you shouldn't be uploading anything remotely close to meeting these descriptions.

As for the new Youth Size Policy - this was the product of a late 2018 change where any shirt that's made available in youth size will be subject to an even stricter content policy.

The Amazon Merch subreddit has worked together to compile a list of banned words that can no longer be used on youth shirts, and it's definitely worth checking out before you click that "Youth" checkbox again.

As it relates to graphics specifically, they explicitly state that you should avoid:
Blank Designs, Content mismatch/spelling, Inaccurate product descriptions, Solicitations for positive customer reviews, External Contact Information, & (poor) Design Quality

You can get away with more when it comes to your actual PNG design file content, as Amazon's automated detection has a harder time detecting infringement on graphics than on text.

That said, they definitely still do run your uploads through automated checks for infringement.

I was never overly ambitious... Yes I was, I've been banned from Merch before - lets save that for a different day. But one time I tried to upload a Leeroy Jenkins shirt (it's a World of Warcraft meme), & used the in-game character model as the graphic - it was rejected instantly.

In my mind, these instant rejections are the most dangerous type - they're the "wtf are you doing" rejections that get you banned even quicker.

I'm sure if you uploaded an NFL team logo or something similar, the outcome would be the same.

Play it safe: Stick to uploading original graphics & designs.

Merch By Amazon Safe Upload Strategy

Now that you've learned from my first hand experience how to protect yourself while uploading to Merch, I'll share one last nugget of valuable information: My safe upload strategy.

When you tier up to 2,000+, uploading the same design to multiple products will become more common. For instance, you might take a single design and put it on:

• 1x Standard T-Shirt
• 1x Premium T-Shirt
• 1x Longsleeve Shirt
• 1x Hoodie
• 1x PopSocket

You might also upload the same design to multiple standard shirts and select different background colors. Make sure to protect yourself!

When you see "Processing" under your "Manage" tab, you're good to go.

Assuming you used the same brand and title (give or take a few words), this will protect you from getting multiple strikes against your account if your submissions would've been rejected.

The Perfect Amazon Merch Seller

Ultimately, the ideal Amazon Merch seller is a quiet one.

The less strikes & manual reviews you trigger with your submissions, the better.

Think long term. This is an incredible opportunity to make passive income that requires NO INVESTMENT! And because the products are prime eligible, the potential customer base is HUGE.

Don't squander it because you got greedy - Play it safe!