Reflecting On My First 2 Years

It's crazy to think that is was 2 years ago (April 2017) that I had multiple major milestones in my passive income journey in the same month:

• Sold my first few t-shirts through Amazon Merch
• Made my first sale on Amazon.com

You can check out my first month's passive income report here.

It's crazy to reflect on how excited I was to make 5 sales that month, to take home a whopping $14.47 in profit :)

I've come such a long way since then!

Starting Out On Merch

I spent the first few weeks on Amazon Merch without a clue what I was doing, and really undervalued and misunderstood the opportunity that I had been affored when my second application was accepted.

(I had applied about 5-6 months prior and never heard back... once something popped up about Amazon Merch again on Reddit, I reapplied & got in within a month)

By the way... if you have any questions about the application process, check out my article on how to sign up for Amazon Merch (including international accounts).

Anyways, once I was in, I don't think I took the time to upload a design for the first week or two.

I'm not sure what the catalyst was that made me sit down and take the time to design something & upload it for the first time, but if I remember correctly it was a design that I thought was hilarious & as related to one of my favorite TV shows, South Park.

I made sure not to infringe on anyone's trademark, meaning neither the graphic or the brand / title / bullets / description contains the phrase "South Park" and nothing about the design was trademarked.

To my surprise, a few weeks later someone found the design and it sold!

This was likely a very lucky event because the design wasn't being sold on Amazon when I first uploaded it! It was just a funny phrase from the show that my friends and I recycle when we text each other in group chats.

From that moment on, I was hooked.

I made a point of uploading a single design, every day, until I hit my maximum upload allotment of 10 slots.

At that point I began auditing my live designs and replacing the ones I considered to be sub-par with better ones.

When you're starting out on Merch & only have 10 slots available, make sure you are SAVING your designs in an organized manner on your computer so that you can re-upload them in the future!

^ Re-read this and take it to heart - one thing I wish I did a better job of back then was saving my designs... I kind of learned the hard way to be organized and to back my designs up out of necessity.

When you're struggling through the early tiers it's easy to max your daily uploads and reach your upload limit of 10, 25, 100, even 500. When you get to tier 1,000+ you will wish you saved your older designs that may have fallen off of Amazon due to lack of sales - there's nothing wrong with re-uploading!

At some point I realized the best way to story my designs was in separate folders alphabetically:

* click to expand

This way whenever it's time to re-upload my shirts (they used to fall off every 90 days if they didn't sell) I create a spreadsheet in Google drive and mark off when I'm done uploading the designs that begin with each letter... for example, I start with designs that begin with "a", then move on to "b", etc.

I also upload my designs using Filezilla to my web server space that I pay Fatcow.com a few bucks a month for. The cool thing is that I pay them for website hosting (including this site), but they include unlimited disc space with all their hosting plans.

Check out Fatcow.com web hosting & back your files up to the cloud »

The benefits of this include NEVER losing a design, as well as being able to access them from multiple devices.

But back to the story of my first few months using the platform-

Initially, I felt pretty lost. Amazon's Merch team does a poor job of making resources available to their sellers, and I'd still say that this is true to this day.

For instance, the Merch content policy was very vague back then... and to this day, people are still often perplexed as to why their designs get rejected sometimes.

It got to the point where someone on the Amazon Merch subreddit decided to put together a list of "Gotcha" keywords that we know are rejection triggers for shirts offered in youth sizes.

I guess it's worth pointing out that Merch by Amazon was intended to be an easy way for developers on their app store to offer branded t-shirts & make a royalty on each sale, but quickly ballooned into something much bigger once people realized how much money could be made by selling POD shirts on Amazon.com - but that would help explain the lack of resources.

But in short, my first few months on Amazon Merch could be described as very driven & determined to be successful. I spent a ton of time obsessing over simple designs, and overanalyzing how I should fill my available slots.

My First Big Win on Merch

In June 2017, my hard work finally began to pay off in a big way when I experienced my first major in on Merch.

I received a push notification highlighting a funny t-shirt that a famous athlete was wearing to troll other athletes, and the light bulb went off in my head to recreate that design & upload it to Amazon (without naming the athlete obviously). The result was a 10x increase in my Amazon Merch royalties month-over-month.

This was a huge boost to my Merch account & to my spirits in general. It revitalized me and made me hungry for more success.

I also joined communities on Reddit & Facebook to keep my finger on the pulse of what was going on in the Merch community.

I'm also a big fan of the Merch Minds podcast where they share valuable nuggets of print on demand info. Check it out on YouTube:

I keep a long-term perspective when it comes to my passive income streams... I am always thinking along these lines:

If I can make $10/day, what's stopping me from doubling that to $20/day?

Once I'm making $20/day - why can't I 10x that to $200/day?

The beauty of truly passive income models is that there is NOTHING stopping you from SCALING the businesses to new heights!.

When I put in long hours of hard work into sourcing new FBA products, creating new Merch designs, or writing articles like the one you're reading, I think to myself "KEEP BUILDING!"

I believe in myself and & ability to take any business of mine to any level of success within reason, because I am willing to put in the hard work to achieve it if it's important enough to me.

For the first year/year and a half on Amazon Merch, I had an unwaivering dedication to growing my account and was willing to sacrifice sleep to ensure I filled my daily upload slots.

I can recall bringing my laptop on the way to an out of state music festival and using a mobile hot spot to create & upload simple text-based designs while I was in the car.

My friends thought I was crazy back then for doing it, but now when they see they all want to know "how do I make money on Amazon Merch?"

My 100+ t-shirt sales in June were enough to bump me up to tier 500, and I remember for the first time feeling worried that I'd struggle to read my daily upload limit.

* click to expand

Fortunately I was able to keep the momentum going and followed the month up with:

• 118 sales in July
• 179 sales in August
• 279 sales in September

But things got REALLY crazy in October 2017 when I had a design go absolutely viral and sell over $700 in one day

It was a similar story to my first big wine back in June where essentially I capitalized on a celebrity promoting a shirt design that wasn't protected, by being one of the first to market with it on Amazon.

I also paid a friend to buy my shirt and drop a 5-star review on it for me, something I hadn't tried before but felt this was a good time to test the waters as I knew the niche had potential.

Check out this sales spike:

* click to expand

Before cancellations, I sold over 100 shirts in a single day!

For perspective, I also worked my 9 to 5 job that day, found time to hit the gym, and taught 2 college courses ALL WHILE SELLING 100 T-SHIRTS ON MERCH & MAKING FBA SALES!

Passive income is the real deal & the time to start building your income streams was yesterday.

Banned From Amazon Merch

I should mention that I was actually banned from Amazon Merch for toeing the line between what's allowed and what's taking it too far, one too many times.

When I received the email letting me know that my account was closed, they said I could send a response essentially asking for reinstatement, which I immediately did.

After a full month of not hearing back, I decided to re-apply for reinstatement... because, why not? I had to apply twice to get accepted into Merch initially, and I had nothing to lose at this point.

P.s. While you are banned from Merch, you still collect a royalty on your sales

About a week or two after my second request to get my account back, I received an email notifying me that it was granted! I was back in business!

Lesson learned: don't play with fire when it comes to the content policy.

My First Q4 on Amazon Merch

I was hyped for my first 4th quarter of Amazon Merch sales... from what I was hearing in the community, 2016's Christmas sales rush resulted in some sellers doing 10x-20x their normal monthly sales volume.

Unfortunately, what ended up actually happening couldn't have been further from that!

Amazon wasn't prepared for the spike in demand for their print on demand shirts and sold out of many color + size variations really early on in December.

To curb the demand for their sold out inventory, Amazon was throttling Merch listings from search results and sellers were going CRAZY on Reddit & FB complaining that they couldn't find their own shirts on keywords that they used to dominate!

Fortunately for me, I used an old trick (that no longer works) to get an Amazon Marketing Services (AMS) account and used that to promote my products so that even if they were suppressed in the organic search results, my Sponsored Product, Product Display, & Headline Search Ads were all still running and effectively bringing me sales.

One of my most surprising best sellers was a design inspired by Mish Brows (which my girlfriend loves), it was a play on how she got her eyebrows microbladed in NYC and I made a shirt parody of how much better they looked in a before & after comparison.

* click to expand

While many people were largely disappointed in their holiday sales and only brought in a fraction of what they were anticipating, I brought in $3,985 of profit on 752 sales.

It was around this time that I also realized I could make additional income using my Amazon Merch designs by uploading them to additional print on demand platforms. I began offering them on more products using:

• Gearbubble + Amazon
• Printful + Amazon / Etsy

If you haven't already, I recommend signing up for Printful because it had no monthly fees to use & very easily integrates with the biggest eCommerce websites.

Join Printful today »

Once you have your GTIN exemption, you can create ~50+ print on demand Amazon listings every day through your Seller Central account!

The Next 14 Months Of Amazon Merch

Unfortunately, the next 14 months on Merch weren't nearly as exciting as the previous 10.

After tasting some of the highest highs that the program has to offer, experiencing anything less than that became almost annoying in a way.

No one can predictably get out in front of trends and make massive profits off of them... so when they come, enjoy them!

But 2018 was off to a bad start immediately, because on January 15th Amazon introduced a change to the royalty payout structure, and you can bet it was NOT in our favor. In fact, they followed that up with ANOTHER hit to seller royalties in January of 2019 as well:

• PRE January 15, 2018: $7.19
• POST January 15, 2018: $5.38
• POST January 30, 2019: $5.23

It was a lot easier for me to make $700 profit in 1 day when I was making $7.19 per sale @ $19.99, but those days are gone.

One interesting thing about moving your way up the Merch tiers is how the "gamification" of Merch becomes more and more daunting.

Wikipedia defines gamification as "the application of game-design elements and game principles in non-game contexts."

Amazon Merch's "level caps" in terms of daily uploads & maximum uploads is absolutely a way of gamifying the platform and tapping into the human psyche & incentivize us to upload a certain # of products each day.

They do after all only make money when we do.

The issue I had was that in lower tiers, I had a Gung Ho attitude about reaching my daily upload limits every day until I was at my maximum live product cap.

It was like a game with real-life incentives for being dedicated & reaching your goals.

My problem was that once you hit Tier 1,000+ your daily upload limits get crazy & honestly become almost unreachable!

When I was in Tier 500 I remember shifting from a 1-off design approach to a templated design approach which allowed me to crank out similar designs with 1 or 2 works swapped out on each. For example: "World's greatest " + [mom, dad, brother...].

When you have 60+ daily uploads it can seem like there's almost no point in trying to hit the goal, and before you know it you're having to choose which days will be "upload to Merch" days... instead of before where every day had time set aside for uploading.

* click to expand

Ultimately my approach to uploading Merch products shifted from one driven by a desire to expand my Merch catalog, to one driven by my uploading to OTHER eCommerce website as well as offering FBM products via Printful's Seller Central integration.

I felt that my Seller Central catalog deserved priority since those products will always be available, unlike Merch where they can be removed for not selling.

Anyways, my approach was stagnant for much of 2018 and I still made out pretty well, accumulating $21,970.81 in roalyties... much of which was for work done in the past.

* click to expand

And here is my progress thus far in 2019:

* click to expand