Amazon's Merch program offers participants minimal resources for understanding the policies that they enforce.
Their poor user interface also makes doing something as simple as checking your daily sales a tedious process, or correcting typos that result in uploads getting rejected.
Fortunately, a some proactive people decided to do something about it and had tools created to make the lives of Amazon Merch sellers easier.
Find Amazon Merch Niches
Generally speaking, how much money someone makes from Merch is a function of how many shirts they have listed.
Occasionally you find sellers in lower upload tiers making an absolute killing.
The difference: targeting profitable niches.
More people searching for your product raises the ceiling for your sales potential, and unbeknownst to some people, Amazon actually lets us know how well every product in their catalog is selling via this data point:
Best Seller Rank, or "BSR" for short is an indication of how well a product is selling at a moment in time. I'm a huge fan of two free Google Chrome extensions that help us do niche research by more easily monitoring BSRs:
DS Amazon Quick View lets you see Amazon product best seller rank on the search results screen, making it one of, if not the fastest way of validating how well a niche is selling.
Simply type the keywords into the search bar & go. After about ~5 seconds, the BSR's will be injected beneath the product listing star ratings.
Remember that the lower the BSR, the more sales that product is getting.
Similar to DS Amazon Quick View, Keepa is great for spying on a product's BSR.
The difference between the two is that Keepa will display a product's BSR (+ other metrics such as price) over a period of time, where the latter will display the current BSR as of when you're looking.
Together, they give us insights into how well an entire niche is selling and allow us to drill down into how well specific products sold over time.
Premium Option: Merch Informer
This article was meant to share free tools so Merch Informer is a bit out of place as it's a paid resource, but it does have a free trial option.
Merch Informer costs $9.99/mo for the beginner license and works similar to JungleScout in that it scrapes Amazon product listings and records metrics like Title & BSR.
They then use that information to algorithmically rate the level of competition on those keywords & gauge how well that niche sells.
In short: Merch Informer is a search engine that you can query to find out how competitive specific niches are.
PrettyMerch Chrome Extension
This chrome extension is in a class of its own, because it does such a great job of transforming the entire Amazon Merch UI into a clean, intuitive, informative one.
Here's a peak at the Amazon Merch (blah) dashboard BEFORE PrettyMerch:
And here's how awesome it looks AFTER installing PrettyMerch:
Before we move on I have to give PrettyMerch Pro a shout out.
At $9.99/mo (which can be paid for with 2 t-shirt sales), the automatic re-login feature alone makes it worthwhile in my opinion.
I never imagined that I'd pay a monthly fee for an unnecessary Merch extension, but ever since I tried it out I've been absolutely hooked.
Protect Your Merch Account
I consider Merch Security a must have for protecting your account.
How it works: If you type a known "bad word" into your product info, it will turn the field red until you fix the problem.
Simple, right? And the extension is free!
One of the most common reasons a shirt gets rejected is due to the same simple typo: Missing the letter "r" in "t-shirt".
Or there was the time that Merch updated their content policy, banning additional sets of words, including the word "Premium".
This would be fine, except for the fact that one of the products you can print your designs onto is called a "Premium T-Shirt"
If you typed "(Design Title) + Premium T-Shirt" as your product title, you'd get an instant rejection for the word "Premium" - how ridiculous is that?
Merch Security had been flagging the word Premium for WEEKS beforehand, preparing those of us that use it for the coming changes.
Don't chance it - install Merch Security today and protect yourself from easily avoidable mistakes.
* Note: Merch Security does NOT perform trademark validation on your behalf. Use tmsearch.uspto.gov for that.
