Unless you're getting original designs made for a few bucks a piece, don't spend your money on Merch designs.
Merch by Amazon has been clearly trending towards favoring bulk uploads & quantity over quality, as they've made tier ups less significant and easier to achieve over time.
They also opened up AMS to all Merchers, allowing sellers to bid on advertisements for their print on demand products, and ultimately bringing Amazon an additional revenue stream.
Take it from me - hot selling design's don't need to be graphic and fancy - simple text designs sell EXTREMELY well!
Make sure to do everything possible to avoid eye strain while building new Merch designs.
Or better yet, check out my articles on how to create simple designs that sell:
My Experience Buying Merch Ready Designs
I had my first trending design get hot in June of 2017, and I reinvested some of those royalties into learning from a "guru" who at the time, was regularly making more royalties than I was.
I reached out to an admin of a popular Amazon Merch Facebook group who said he sold designs. After some back and forth with him over Messenger, he seemed like a good guy and had answered my questions willingly, so I decided to pay PayPal him his going rate of $150 for 10 Merch ready designs.
Here's the email he sent me when he delivered the designs:
From: <NAME OMITTED>
Attached are all of your designs (More than 10). Upload all of them twice that way you get double the uploads and you maximize color of shirt options to the buyers. The file names are the keywords that you want to use within your Title and Bullet Points. I went with a few different Niches that I saw had a good bit of potential. As it is summer time and all of these tops are very very popular right now that you can easily make a LARGE amount of profit from these if you play your cards right. You have complete rights to these designs as you Purchased them from me for Commercial usage. Take your time when creating the listings. The keywords are some of the most important things when it comes to selling on Amazon, that is what gets the shirts infront of the customers, and to some Merch might be a hobby but at end of the day you are in it to make money, just like the rest of us. I am sorry about the delay in these are two bad events happened one after another. My MacBook is somewhat working but it only stays on for about 15 minutes, but I am back in my office now. So for the next 3 days I am giving you a discount on another order if interested. And they will be delivered MUCH faster.
Another note: If you have used AMS run ads on these, throw a few dollars at the ones you think have the best success and get sales Much quicker. The great thing with AMS, everyone that has ran ads for about a week straight, they have all seen their sales go way up. It might not be on the shirt that you are running the ad on, but overall they see sales go way up which is the goal. With AMS you only pay if someone clicks on your ad, and you pick how much each click costs. So if you get 50000 views on the ad but only 100 people click on it. You only pay for the 100 clicks. And if it is set at $0.10 per click you just paid $10 for your shirt to be seen by 50,000 people.
Thank you and I hope you enjoy and the best of luck to you Ryan.
The Designs
And here are the designs (click to enlarge):
So first and foremost, I need to mentioned that I'm completely against this approach to graphic design for t-shirts.
I almost NEVER use borders like this - I think it looks cheap and tacky.
Also, outside of the "Grill Seargant" shirt, I think the niches being targeted are relatively low volume. The data would back this assertion up, and I've only received about 5 total sales since posting (& re-posting) these designs for 19 months as of writing this article.
The Advice
So the designs were pretty damn crappy, especially for $15 a piece.
That said, the advice he provided was actually pretty valuable.
While it doesn't necessarily translate today, at the time, I think the multi-upload + targeting broad keywords was a good recommendation.
Also as the time of him writing the email, recommending that I take a hard look into AMS advertising was a great idea, as AMS wasn't open to Merchers unless you got in through Vendor Central (which is an old trick that doesn't work anymore).
But leveraging AMS and becoming more familiar with it ended up helping both my AMS and FBA businesses, so even though I paid $150 for trash designs, I made it work for me in the end and definitely would say it was a profitable learning experience.
The big takeaway here is that no one will care about your Merch business as much as you do.
Enjoy your hard earned money - don't spend it on someone elses designs - most likely they're either low quality, or they're stolen (especially if you're looking at Fiverr).
One last note: If you do buy cheap designs, and they are trademarked or stolen, you will be held accountable and could possibly be putting your account at risk, so remember to always protect your Amazon Merch account!
