Merch by Amazon is probably the single best passive income opportunity available today.
It makes selling t-shirts on the world's biggest eCommerce platform a breeze, and it's available for free!
If for some reason you haven't applied for your Amazon Merch account yet, please do so now (& thank me later).
Back in late 2016/early 2017 I had to apply for an account twice, and I ultimately waited 5 months before finally getting accepted, so don't give up!
A mere 6 months after making my first Merch sale & finishing the month with a net total $14.47 in royalties, I had my single-best day and sold 107 shirts in a single day, earning $737.04 in royalties.
(I didn't get a screenshot of the final sales number)
In this article, I'll walk you through exactly how I achieved this level of success in such a short period of time.
Merch by Amazon Royalty Changes
I'd be burying the lead if I didn't mention that the royalty structure has changed since October 2017.
Back when I made over $700 in one day, I was making $7.19 for each standard t-shirt sold at $19.99.
As of writing this, we make $5.38 in royalties from a $19.99 standard t-shirt sale sold at $19.99.
And only a few days ago, Amazon informed us that the royalty would be cut again. Beginning January 30, 2019 a standard shirt sold at $19.99 will net a $5.23 royalty.
While it may seem a bit daunting, there are still plenty of people making thousands (even tens of thousands) of passive income thanks to Amazon Merch, so you shouldn't worry at all about changes to the royalty structure.
To sum up the royalty changes that I've seen since joining Merch by Amazon in March of 2017, see the table below where I list the payout per standard shirt sold at $19.99:
- PRE January 15, 2018: $7.19
- POST January 15, 2018: $5.38
- POST January 30, 2019: $5.23
Sales Breakdown By Product
As you were probably able to guess, I didn't have a 100+ sale day by selling only evergreen t-shirts.
A single listing that was responsible for 81% of the royalties earned, while the remaining 19% were from evergreens.
There were 7 cancellations, making the final number for the day:
- Sales: 100
- Revenue: $1,970
- Royalty: $691.35
If we were able to hit these numbers daily for an entire year, we would make $252,342.75 in annual passive income from Amazon Merch!
My Best Selling Merch T-Shirt Design
As I revealed in my How To Find Profitable Merch Niches post, my best selling shirt was the "Thumbs Down" t-shirt.
The design itself is incredibly simple: it's just a blue, thumbs down design with pinstripes & no text.
To my knowledge it was made popular by New York Yankees players Aaron Judge & Todd Frazier. The funny thing is, I'm not even a fan of baseball.
Fortunately, one fateful day I had playoff baseball on my tv (muted), which is located directly above my three computer monitors. I glanced up and noticed Aaron Judge wearing a shirt with a thumbs down on it, and decided to throw it onto a Merch t-shirt - because, why not?
It received a sale or two almost immediately after the listing went live, but nothing too crazy. The following day, I shot my friend who loves the Yankees a text and asked him to buy the shirt & drop it a 5-star review as an experiment (this wasn't a common practice for me)
He agreed, so I changed the price to the minimum (around $11.50 I believe) and had him buy one. Even though I told him not to, he immediately reviewed it, having not received the shirt yet.
Luckily, the (obviously fake) review was NOT removed, and it helped vault my listing to the #1 organic spot on Amazon, behind the two sponsored listings.
When the Yankees went on a bit of a playoff run, the shirt sales would spike following each game. When they won their biggest game of the season on October 18th over the Astros by a score of 5-0, sales went CRAZY!
Sales data from Keepa
I ran AMS headline ads as well to drive additional traffic, as AMS was not open to the Merch community at the time.
* Pro Tip * You can advertise your listing on "banned" keywords through AMS that would otherwise get you kicked off of Merch by Amazon. For instance, I can index my listing when someone searches for "New York Yankees Shirt" via AMS, but if I included that in my Merch listing, I'd probably get my account banned.
My $19.99 price point was likely also appealing to customers, as the two sponsored listings ahead of me were $24.99 & non-Prime. They still sold well, because people will seemingly just buy whatever the ads tell them to.
This is why I always preach that you should try and sell shirts that you see celebrities & influencers wearing, as it's essentially free advertising! Just be sure to avoid trademark infringement.
Upload & Advertising Strategy
The first time I sold a trending shirt was in June of 2017.
The biggest takeaway from that experience was what to do when you find one of these hot niches:
- Create multiple listings with the same design on different variations of the same product (standard black shirt, standard royal blue shirt... etc)
- Create listings with the design on as many different products as possible (standard shirts, premium shirts, longsleeve, shirts, sweatshirts, hoodies, popsockets)
- Advertise your listings in AMS (especially using Headline Search Ads)
- Added Bonus: If you're using the Printful / Gearbubble integrations, add the design to even more products through the Seller Central integrations
As I love to say, you want to occupy as much internet real estate as possible!
You're also making it harder for your competition to take your sales:
If you have 1 listing out of 10 with the same trending design, you occupy 10% of the search results.
If you were to upload the design 10 more times, you would occupy 11 of 20 listings, or 55% of the search results. It's OK to be ruthless!
Your listings will most likely be mixed in by Amazon's algorithm and not necessarily just rank in chronological order based on when they were uploaded, so don't hesitate to roll with this strategy.
It's worked for me many times!
