I didn't want to make this post, but I've been watching the Merch Dojo sales pitch videos and cringing almost the entire way through it.
I'm sure Chris Green & Brian Burt are great guys, but their sales pitch about why you should pay them $597 to join the "T-Shirt Revolution" is a bit ridiculous.
Here are a few problems I have with their sales pitch:
Get to the Point
I'm almost 40 minutes into the webinar replay, and they still haven't mentioned any actionable factual information related to Merch by Amazon that you could use to benefit your business.
Neither Chris nor Burt has offered up any of their personal sales figures either... so why should be trust their expertise?
It's very likely you can find the information behind the $600 pay wall for free on websites like this one.
Unrealistic Figures
They spend around 75% of the time hyping up how much money you're going to (somehow) make if you join Merch Dojo. When they finally get to talking about high-level strategy, they are very vague.
When they FINALLY actually got to the part where they break down numbers, this was their pitch:
Almost NOBODY makes $7.50 royalty per sale, so I don't know why they picked this number.
The most common royalty is around $3.87, earned when you sell a standard shirt @ $17.99. Do they even sell on Merch?
All of their math about how you could afford multiple Range Rovers & a 1-million dollar home (I'm not lying about either... they pitched this) assumed that you would be selling shirts at this magical $7.50 number, which I'd say is largely unattainable.
Upsells (in addition to the $597 fee)
Design Research
During their segment where they talk about selling t-shirt designs that are already validated, they recommend using "MerchResearch.com" which just redirects you to Merch Informer with an invisible affiliate link appended to your session.
Design Resources
They provide 5 different platforms for doing your graphic design, 4 of which are paid resources, and one of them is Fiverr.com which is notorious for selling you stolen designs that infringe on other people's intellectual property.
No where did they mention that they offer simple tutorials about how to use the software recommended above to produce quality designs. Hopefully, for $600, they do this behind the paywall.
I'm also pretty sure Chris owns make-merch.com... Yet he doesn't even grant you free access to the tool, which is laughable if you are paying him $600 for a course about how to use a 100% free resource in Amazon's Merch program.
During the "Bonuses" discussion, Burt mentioned he will offer you a free trial to his overgrowth Amazon tool as well. Again, only a TRIAL, so this should be considered an upsell. I also laughed when he claimed it "voted the #1 Amazon software in 2017" without is an incredibly broad claim and didn't mention who voted for the accolade.
How they Portrayed Merch
Chris & Burt called Merch "the best kept secret" even though their webinar took place in 2018 when it's pretty well known amongst passive income circles.
Back when Chris Green initially touted Merch by Amazon, it was truly unknown and he helped make a bunch of people a ton of money by sharing his insights. Again, he is a good guy, this isn't a take down piece - I'm just sharing my thoughts and trying to protect prospective customers.
They mentioned that Merch would soon be expanding to the UK in the webinar. This was a big red flag - we've been able to upload shirts to Amazon.co.uk & Amazon.de for months, why are they portraying this like it's still in beta testing?
(This made me suspicious that they lazily sent a months-old webinar replay to their email list)
Marketing & Traffic
Here's their slide from the sales pitch about how you'll be driving traffic to your listings:
Native Amazon Traffic
I agree that you should intend to make money off of native (or "organic") Amazon search traffic. It is, after all, the biggest ecommerce website in the world.
BUT Chris then proceeds to talk about how you should write out well optimized titles, bullets, & descriptions in order to rank better, implying that he thinks you should be spending time trying to pack in keywords here.
I vehemently disagree with this.
I'm writing this article in November of 2018 (Their marketing email with this sales push was received on November 5, 2018). As of today, it's a terrible strategy to slow down your upload process to anything other than primary keywords into a listing title or bullets.
The Amazon catalog is flooded with similar listings, so getting cross-listed on secondary keywords where you rank off the first page is useless.
They're also more & more strict with what words can & can not be included in a listing. Not to mention the recent youth t-shirt policy where they banned an additional long list of keywords from t-shirts offered in children's sizes.
Again, there is a disconnect from what they are preaching & the reality of being a modern day Mercher.
What they SHOULD be mentioned is Amazon Marketing Services (AMS) advertising, which is the most viable way of promoting your Merch listings, AND you can see the impressions & conversions metrics. But there is no mention of AMS at all in the webinar.
Influencers
I mainly agree with the point they made about influencers.
It's a great idea to sell things that other people promote for you. In the case of "influencers", all they're saying is go where people's eyeballs are already looking and see what is being put in front of them. Leverage the fact that other people will promote designs that you can sell.
BUT Burt then proceeds to recommend reaching out to influencers and requesting a partnership where they push traffic to your listings from their social media posts.
This is where I disagree. Influencers are well aware of the value of their outreach and are already capitalizing on selling merch to their followers. Any such partnership will cost you money up front and will likely be a losing proposition.
Paid Traffic & Funnels
In 2018 it's INCREDIBLY hard to make money sending paid traffic to Amazon Merch listings from external sources.
Also, ther is no mechanism to track conversion rate and know if your campaign is operating at a profit or a loss.
Amazon does not let you do this for Merch listings, and only recently in 2018 allowed you to kind-of do this for FBA listings.
It's still possible to run successful paid advertising campaigns selling print on demand products, but doing so selling Amazon Merch products is incredibly rare and nearly impossible due to the pricing structure (Amazon takes a massive cut comparatively to off-Amazon platforms like Gearbubble).
The Merch Dojo "Pro Tips"
Finally, lets analyze their "pro tips" for accuracy.
This one is common sense... how is it a pro tip at all? "If you upload more and increase the quality of your uploads, you will make more money"? Wow, very insightful!
Again more common sense here... sales spikes take place around the holidays, we get it. What they don't mention though is that Amazon Merch will throttle listings around the holidays (do a Google search for Christmas 2017 Amazon Merch suppressed listings), it was rampant last year and many Merch sellers were highly disappointed.
They proceed to talk about how there are niche holidays like "National Boxing Day" that you can create t-shirts for. That's not a valuable insight in my opinion.
This is actually an incredibly valuable insight.
My problem with it is that it's not original! Mike Gual was interviewed by the awesome guys at the Merch Minds podcast in episode #077, where he shared that he has made over $1,000,000 on Amazon Merch by employing this strategy.
You can listen to that podcast episode for free on YouTube, so why pay $600 for them to regurgitate that insight?
Do NOT Join Merch Dojo
This was a classic sales pitch for so many reasons. It followed the standard sales funnel flow:
- "The webinar is full, don't leave - you wont be able to get back in"
- "You're going to make so much money!" ... proceeds to spend more time talking about what you will do with the money you made than talking about HOW you will make that money
- Offer "Bonuses" that are really upsells disguised as additional free resources
- "The course is worth $2.997 but we are offering an 80% discount" ... if you attend webinars at all, you've probably seen this $2997 number before
- Pitch a special bonus item offered only to the first 100 people to register (again, this perk should've been included in the $600 registration fee)
I really disliked how out of touch they felt with the current state of Merch by Amazon.
Also, they aren't forthcoming about the fact that Merch by Amazon is a free program, but were quick to mention that it would cost around a million dollars to start a small competitor company to Amazon Merch.
They make the pitch feel like their course is somehow tied to the Merch program itself, instead of being forthcoming about the fact that it's only intended to be supplemental.
At no point do Chris or Burt try to mislead you into thinking that they themselves are successful at Merch, which I appreciated. That said, they spend an entire lecture pretending to be experts about Merch which is funny in itself since they offer no supporting evidence. My guess is neither of them have uploaded a t-shirt to Merch in months.
They actually go out of their way on the webinar to remind you of just how much they are doing OTHER than using Merch by Amazon, which is a pretty strong hint that they aren't actually even participating & uploading regularly (if at all).
What makes Chris & Burt a reputable source for Merch by Amazon insights?
They claim to be successful FBA sellers, so purchase an FBA course from them! Yes, a lot of valuable insights from selling FBA products helps translate into success on Amazon Merch, but is it worth $600?
I share many of those nuggets on this website for free.
Outside of their FBA success, they mention how successful Burt is driving paid traffic to sales funnels, and even mentioned his personal accolades awarded to him by the founders of clickfunnels.com
Essentially what they're saying is is that they're successful at selling on FBA, and at selling information. Chris is also the admin of the largest Merch by Amazon Facebook group, which doesn't mean anything other than that it probably ranked #1 in Facebook search results.
I can't help but be reminded of how "Kevin David" appeared to be knowledgeable about FBA, Shopify, & Facebook ads solely because the YouTube algorithm decided to promote his videos.
Don't be fooled by a high number of subscribers or FB group members. Listen to them speak on what it is they're trying to sell you - do they know what they're talking about? Are they practicing what they preach?
In the case of Merch Dojo, I strongly doubt it.
