T-Shirt Design Strategy For The SERP

In this article I'm going to highlight the importance of how you render designs on t-shirts when uploading to Amazon Merch.

Apply for a Merch by Amazon account today »

If you were looking for tips on how to design t-shirts, check out these related articles:

• Simple T-Shirt Design Ideas
• Simple T-Shirt Design Ideas, Part 2

And if you need help targeting high demand, low competition niches you should consider the Merch Informer free trial. Their software evaluates niches by BSR and attempts to analyze the competition, allowing them to suggest high profit potential shirt ideas.

What I'm going to share here relates to standing out in the search engine results page (SERP), which is where half the battle is won these days on Amazon Merch, as the number of sellers & upload limits continues to increase.

Believe it or not, the best design doesn't always win out, and assuming most listings are targeting the same primary keywords, don't think that somehow keywords are solely responsible for one listing out-ranking the rest.

How To Stand Out In The Serp

Assuming your designs don't suck :), you can increase your sales by differentiating yourself in the SERP whenever possible.

If this was a post about Amazon FBA, we could go in-depth about what our listing's primary product image should be, as that would be a huge determining factor in our click-through rate (CTR).

There's also some additional tricks up our sleeve when it comes to FBA listings, including the "SERP Hacks" pictured below:

Anything that makes you standout from the crowd is good! But Amazon Merch listings are limited in what's available to them.

We aren't able to offer coupons, and the inventory will never show up as "only left in stock" as they're made to order. All Merch listings are prime eligible by default, so that's also a wash.

That leaves us with (2) two "weapons":

• Amazon's Choice
• Reviews

Amazon's Choice will be applied to our shirt if Amazon's data shows that we're converting & satisfying customers successfully over time, and it's really the "prize" for having both a winning SEO strategy + a winning design.

Reviews can & will be left organically over time, but if you really think you have a "flash in the pan" type shirt with big upside, I recommend having a friend or family member buy it and drop a 5-star.

I only ever used this strategy once to date, you can read more about it in my How I Made Over $700 In One Day article.

p.s. My $700 in one day t-shirt earned the "Amazon's Choice" badge... it had the double whammy.

My Design Strategy To Stand Out Amongst Competition

Since this is Amazon Merch, we need to focus on what we have control over to help us stand out in the SERP. Specifically, I want to focus on how we utilize the design space on a t-shirt.

This is one thing I found myself reiterating to my Merch/POD mentees time and time again.

The funny thing is that many of them are better graphic designers than I am, but that can be to their detriment at times.

Let me elaborate:

I believe there's two high-level approaches to designing t-shirts for sale online:

• Designing shirts that look good in real life
• Designing shirts that stand out in the SERP

Unfortunately, the two don't usually go together hand in hand.

When I create product feature images for FBA products, I ALWAYS try to use up as much of the graphics real estate as possible. BIGGER = BETTER!

Let me illustrate my point-

Which of these shirts do you think is more likely to be purchased by an Amazon customer?

You can bet that the one all the way to the right would get the most clicks, and you'd be right.

Don't believe me?

Based on the immense data Amazon's collected, they recently changed the way designs are displayed over hooded sweatshirts. They now appear ~33% bigger in the renderings!

In real life, the over-sized designs likely aren't going to look as good... and this is where people with real graphic design skills might get hung up.