I'm a HUGE fan of the PrettyMerch chrome extension, and I'm honestly kicking myself for not building it on my own, because it was such low hanging fruit.
It will transform the bland, uninformative Merch dashboard into an absolutely beautiful one that displays data & shortcuts.
In addition to checking it daily, I use it to drill down into the data for my monthly income reports, as they transform your sales data from ugly tables that Amazon uses into easy to read charts.
In this article I'll do my best to convince you to give PrettyMerch a shot!
What Does The PrettyMerch Addon Do?
Prior to using PrettyMerch, I would log into my Merch dashboard and see how many shirts I'd sold over the past 7 days, because this is the only data point amazon shows you.
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If I wanted to check my daily sales I'd have to refresh the page constantly, and if I wanted an in-depth insight into what was selling, I had to head over to the analyze page & sort by date range.
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The brilliant people at PrettyMerch realized that the homepage was being underutilized, and found a way to pull your account data and display it in an intuitive way using charts & counters so that you no longer had to rely on the analyze page:
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Understanding & staying on top of your sales data is key to running a successful print on demand business.
Your new dashboard will help you do just that!
PrettyMerch Dashboard Sales Data
Instead of just seeing your sales over the past week, you can now see a number of important data points after logging into your Merch by Amazon account, including:
- Current # of products live
- Maximum # of products live
- Current # of products uploaded today
- Maximum # of products that can be uploaded today
- Today's sales (Sold / Cancelled / Returned)
- What products sold + size + color
- Yesterday's # sales + royalties
- Last 7 days # sales + royalties
- Current month # sales + royalties
- Previous month # sales + royalties
- All time # sales + royalties
Current # of products live vs Maximum
When you upload products to Amazon Merch, they will be available for purchase for a period of 180 days (it used to be 90 days). If the product sells, it will be available for purchase on Amazon forever.
This indicator is useful because you want to monitor when your products are taken off (after not selling), so you can replace them to make the most of your Amazon "real estate".
Current # of products uploaded today vs Maximum
Amazon Merch caps your daily uploads at a certain number, which gradually increases as your upload tier increases.
The "tier ups" take place based on how many sales your account has, & how many products you have uploaded.
I recently wrote an article outlining my 2019 pricing strategy by upload tier which talks about how to strategically price your products based on your account tier.
Today's Sales
Probably my favorite data point to track is today's sales.
It will show you how many products sold today & what royalties were generated, and it factors in cancellations + returns automatically (which are deducted from your bottom line)
The bottom portion shows product title, size, and color.
Historical Sales Data
Who wouldn't like to know their historical sales data? It's great for tracking the ebbs and flows of your ecommerce business.
One of the WORST times to watch your historical sales is in January of any year. While Q4 sales are through the roof, they tend to be followed by an underwhelming January full of returns.
Installing PrettyMerch
PrettyMerch is available as both a Chrome extension & a mobile app.
Either can be installed in about 2 clicks / taps.
Click the image above & click "add to Chrome" to install, then reload your Amazon Merch dashboard & you're done!.
Once it's installed you'll get a greeting message:
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As stated in the "welcome" message, you can also take it with you on the go with the mobile app!
The iOS mobile app is still having some kinks worked out & lagging behind the Chrome extension as of writing this, but if you're a hardcore Mercher' you'll probably still enjoy it!
Real Time Amazon Merch Notifications
After installation of the Chrome extension, you'll begin to notice real-time popups via the Windows 10 notifications system.
Following a sale, you'll get a popup (& an awesome cha-ching sound) displaying the product name & number of products sold:
It'll also notify you when you're logged out.
You might be wondering why that's something you'd like to know... but trust me, once you get used to the cha-ching popups notifying you of sales, you'll want to be logged in all day just to get those dopamine hits.
Upgrading To PrettyMerch Pro
Right after installation you'll get a popup recommending upgrading to Pro.
I held off on upgrading to pro for a while... I honestly didn't even bother reading what the benefits were.
Then when I began publishing my monthly income reports, I realized I had to upgrade to pro to access my historical data for my older income reports.
I paid the $9.99 for 1 month and got access to the data I needed:
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Analytics Tab
The analytics tab makes it easy to analyze sales over time. After selecting a date range, your sales data will be graphed onto a bar chart, and more in-depth information is also displayed underneath.
Here are the filters:
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Then you see a bar chart (similar to the one from the home page, but representative of your specified date range).
Under that, you see averages per day, averages per month, record days, record months, product performance, and the 80/20 rule.
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The next section shows top product types, top fit types, and top colors.
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The last section is similar to what you see for "todays sales" on the home page, where each product/ASIN is listed alongside it's product type, fit, color, and market:
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Auto Re-Login
The easy-to-access sales info was GREAT, but it's not why I'm still a PrettyMerch Pro customer to this day...
I purchase an annual license because I'm such a big fan of the automatic re-login feature!
Seriously though... I'm all about productivity and maximizing how much work I can get done in a period of time.
Not having to hear the "you've been logged out of Amazon Merch" sound, hit the login page and click the login button multiple times a day is PRICELESS if you ask me :)
Products Tab
At some point in the future, the PrettyMerch team will be expanding their products tab to offer "A better, faster way to manage your products".
- See which products have sold and which have not
- See which products are pending for removal and in how many days
- Get a percentage of how many of your live products have sold
- Filter by product type to see how many of each type you have live
- Use smart search to filter products using only few characters
- Large previews of the design so you can easily distinguish each product
- Quickly edit any product with one click
PrettyMerch Security
The only reason I can think of that you might not want to adopt PrettyMerch is if you're concerned that it might pose a security risk to your Amazon Merch business (stolen niche data, or even stolen accounts...)
Fortunately, the head of PrettyMerch was transparent about how it handles user data.
It actually runs locally on your machine as an app that only enables itself after you log in, & all of your sales data is kept offline on your local machine.
Here's a quote from the founder:
It's not in my best interest to secretly gather and use people's data. There are strict, international laws governing how data can be collected, stored, used and updated. As an entrepreneur I would not like to break those laws since the penalties are severe.
Just to help everyone understand in a simple way how secure this is, here are 3 important facts:
1) The PrettyMerch extension is only enabled after a user has logged in. You can see the icon light up after you have logged in. On the login page it is gray, showing that the extension is inactive. So there is not way the extension can collect your login credentials.
2) PrettyMerch stores some data locally on your computer in memory allocated by Chrome. This makes the extension faster since it doesn't have to load the data from scratch every time. This also allows PrettyMerch to synchronize your extension with other computers your are using Chrome on, making the experience seamless.
3) Three is A SECRET which most extension developers don't tell. The code of the all the extensions you're using in Chrome, is saved locally on your computer. So anyone with at least beginner level programming skills can open the source code and see how it woks. That means that if the extension is doing anything sketchy, then it will soon be discovered and called out.
TLDR; for non technical people: You should be safe in trusting the PrettyMerch app with your data... because they're not reading it or keeping a copy of it!
One last note - there's a few "copycats" of PrettyMerch going around that don't have the reputation to back using them, namely, "Merch Overview" (STAY AWAY). Definitely do your homework before installing something that could alter your Merch account.
