hey guys it's sharon from digital nomad
quest and today we're going to go over
how i've made about 30 000
in profit on merch by amazon now if you
guys are new to this channel welcome i'm
all about teaching you how to build
passive income become financially free
and design your best live so if you guys
are interested in that make sure to
subscribe
and hit the bell button to be notified
of my latest videos now this was a
highly requested topic because i
released a tick tock video and a real
video on
instagram and it just blew up i got
millions of hits
so many dm so many people asking me how
to do this and they had all these
different questions so i kind of wanted
to go
over a bit of this in this episode so
we're gonna go over what
merged by amazon is and just kind of do
a tutorial on how it all works how to
find ideas for designs as well as how to
research
different trademarks and things like
that so that you can do it the right way
and start making money yourself here's a
screenshot of my earnings i've made
about 30 000 in profit this is all
profit by the way
these are the merch by amazon royalties
that are paid out to me
that 12 000 numbers essentially how many
shirts i've sold
as you can see the royalties aren't that
much in a sense of
it's probably about two to three dollars
per shirt if you're dividing 29 000 by
12 000 shirts right the reason is that
i'm pricing my apparel a lot lower than
probably most people i price it low so
that i can try to get more sales and as
you can see also it's not 30 000 yet but
by the time i release this video it
probably will be at that mark now the
great thing about merch by amazon is
it's so
passive it's basically passive income i
basically worked on this around late
2017 is when i got
in as well as 2018 and then i kind of
stopped really working on it
but it still cash flows me to this day
i'm gonna screen share some of my
earnings right now so
basically when i first started was as
you can see july 2017
and then i started making a lot more
money on merch by amazon pretty quickly
and then 2018 you can see making good
amount of money
especially in the later months like
december january
you start making a lot more because of
the holidays so november
december january is pretty good so
basically 2017
2018 i was working on a hard and then i
kind of stopped but last month i made
about 700
in profit it's still cash flowing me to
this day
obviously some months are better than
others it's getting more and more
saturated for sure
but that does not mean that you know you
can't still make money i
made money for example uh like i
mentioned i made 700 last month
so it's still doable to this day now
first let me go over what merged by
amazon is if you guys didn't know
merch by amazon is a print on demand
service essentially where you're working
with amazon to customize products like
shirts or tote bags you just upload your
digital files of designs
and they put it on you know custom
apparel and whenever
people purchase your listings they're
gonna actually print and fulfill your
orders for you
so you don't actually need to hold any
inventory you don't need to buy a bunch
of shirts that when people buy it you
can
you know ship it out to them you don't
have to do any of that work
they will actually handle everything you
just have the digital files up there and
they will do all the work so
it's really amazing and you know you can
essentially start with zero dollars so
for example you can even make shirts
through
canva and they have a bunch of templates
i'm gonna screen record right now
so as you can see here you can actually
just go into one of these templates but
you cannot just use this as a shirt okay
let me emphasize that you have to make
your own designs but they have
you know some templates that you can use
so for example let's click into this one
okay let's
change the different template and you
still need to make this your own so
let's
say like i love my dad or something like
that
and you can maybe move this heart over
so
you can basically edit on canva it's
actually really nice that you can do
this and you can put this up as a shirt
you just need to download it png format
you know i
export it 4500 by 5400 is what they
usually
recommend and 300 dpi png
i usually edit all my designs on
photoshop it's pretty easy to use
and if you have templates like this you
can just switch outwards really easily
and make a bunch of new designs
so that's the beauty of it okay let's go
back into merch by amazon
so before we begin going over merch by
amazon like let's talk about how to get
into the program initially in order to
get into merch by amazon you're going to
go to merch.amazon.com and then you're
going to click
sign up and then once you click that
you're going to need to sign into your
amazon account and if you don't have one
you're gonna need to create
your own amazon account no worries so
since i already have my merch by amazon
account i can't really show you guys
the screen share process because if i
signed in it would just go into my
account right so
basically i'm going to show you guys
this article from helium10.com
and it basically shows you what it looks
like so like i mentioned you're going to
click the sign up button
i guess now it's a sign up instead of
request invitation
and then when you sign up you're gonna
need your business contact information
your bank account and routing numbers
your social security or other tax
identification number
and you're gonna go into here and fill
out all those things so basically if you
don't have an llc
you can use your first and last name for
the business name no worries
so go ahead and do that and then you're
gonna input your tax info
you know your social security number and
all those things and after that
you're going to need to actually fill in
the application process
of like your additional information
which i think is the most important part
like all of these parts are important
right but the part that stands out to
amazon is what you say
here so i feel like those first few
parts it's kind of like showing your
series
you have to put in all these different
things and after you've completed that
you're going to need to add additional
information
so i would say you need to you know show
your design background like your design
portfolio if you have one
if you have a website you should
definitely share it if you have any
social accounts you can talk about how
you can bring your followers over to
merch by amazon
i think the way you should frame it is
that you provide value to the platform
you're gonna put your
awesome designs over there you're gonna
bring your followers over there and your
traffic over there because
amazon will think of it as beneficial to
them if you are able to bring all that
over to them okay
don't sound like you're begging them to
like
you know please let me into merch by
amazon don't say
stuff like that you need to be like you
know i have value that i'm going to
provide
if you have designs that you've already
put up on like teespring or redbubble
you should probably do that and then
show them that that you have designs
already
and another thing you could probably
talk about is that you're not going to
infringe on copyrights
or trademarks or anything like that
because amazon has to spend so much time
sifting through and making sure that
there are no infringing
designs you want to make sure that all
your designs are original you're not
copying other people
you're going to be really good about
making your own stuff so
like the more you say about that the
more you talk about the value you're
going to bring the better chance you're
going to get into merch by amazon
after that you should just wait and see
if you get accepted sometimes it will
take weeks sometimes it will take months
because it really depends on
how amazon is rolling out their invites
so
hopefully you get in okay and that's
kind of my tips on how to get
in let's go into the actual dashboard
now once you get into merch by amazon
you're gonna notice there's a tier
system so let me go over the tier system
real quick now as you can see here there
are tier levels so in order to move up
from the 10
tier a content creator will need to sell
at least 10 products from those they
have created to move up to the 25 tier
okay so it's not just by sales but also
the quality of the product so you need
to make sure they are high quality
products as well don't make like bad
designs with bad resolution you got to
make some high quality
products so when you are leveling up you
start at 10 so you need to sell at least
10 shirts to move on to 25 then 100 then
500
i am currently at 10 000 which is a lot
it means that i can put up that many
designs and now they've actually done a
thing let me show you guys so as you can
see
recently they introduced an automatic
product upload feature to maximize your
reach on merch so that's really cool
they are going to leverage your existing
designs and translate product info to
create new listings across other merch
products and marketplaces so before
i had you know thousands of published
designs like
that they basically said i have maybe 5
000
left but now i have over 9 000 designs i
can publish
on top of the 583 i currently have
basically
i have like over 5 000 published but
it's because i have multiple types of
products
now they've created a way where they can
automatically put that design
onto other types of products so you
don't need to manually keep
uploading it on other types so for
example if you want to sell it on shirts
but also hoodies and also sweatshirts
that counts as one design
one published designs but you have all
these different products you can upload
it
too so that's really cool so i still
have so many more i could fill up if i
wanted to
now let's go into the creation process
so you're going to tap create
and you're going to basically upload
artwork onto
the platform i'm just going to do an
example design here so i have photoshop
open and i usually design 4 500 by
5400 so i'm just gonna do the same thing
that i mentioned
earlier that i love my dad or i love my
mom so that
might be a design right you can put it
up
you can do something like this you can
make
this bigger
right one sec
so something like this looks pretty
decent
let's make this a little bit wider
okay cool cool
let's see let's do this let's make this
a bit bigger
all right now we basically have a design
literally can make sure it's from just
putting up text let's remove the
background let's export this
and we're going to save this as png
i love my dad all right that is a design
now
now we're gonna put this on the artwork
but one thing we should do
is we should go to uspto.gov now this is
a way to make sure that you are not
infringing on any trademarks i've
literally
had a shirt that said like lifeguard on
it and
i thought it was fine but that word was
trademarked and it was
in violation okay so you need to always
make sure you're doing this research
because
if you have too many violations they can
literally kick you off that's what
freaked me out a lot okay so you gotta
make sure
you are not infringing on trademarks all
right so let's let's check
you know if this is okay in uspto.gov
okay as you can see there's nothing
trademarked of i love my dad
okay and these are dead trademarks like
these aren't valid and it doesn't say i
love my dad so we are good with i love
my dad so let's put that one
[Music]
up
okay let's put this design up i'm just
gonna do this process with you guys okay
because i could just put this shirt up
let's just put up one
one thing i usually do is that i will
deselect them all and i'll just put up
one shirt
because i want to make sure that it
doesn't violate trademarks because
if it violates trademarks then i put it
up on all these different
apparel all of them get rejected now i
have like 20 violations on my account or
something like that i get really wary of
that but i'm kind of probably more
paranoid about it
so that's why i do that first i just put
up one and make sure that one's accepted
then i'll put it on
all the other garments but we already
checked it for uspto
like trademarks right but still i want
to make sure it's all good it's like one
of those things just
you know just trying to be cautious so
we can put on multiple colors like this
uh you know let's see red
like it's a lot harder to see some of
these so let's just do
these colors maybe i'll put blue in case
people like that
we'll just do this okay it's very easy
so i like to price them maybe like 14.90
okay that's pretty low right you only
get a dollar 38 for sure but if it
starts selling
then it's all good then you make it up
through volume
if you want you can like do this until
it ranks and then you can increase the
price later
but this is all up to you you know if
you want to price higher that's fine
i just think that it might work in your
favor to price lower
in order to beat out competition now
you're gonna have to add a design title
a brand
feature bullets and things like that
this might work for you to write a gift
for dad it might be like something that
works for seo and stuff like that so if
someone search for that
they might land on this it's pretty
unlikely but you know i like to put that
there so you might want to
add bullets like i would just kind of
think of different keywords
so sometimes i just write this is a
great gift for dad fathers
for father's day for your dad's
birthday get this
gift to show your appreciation for your
dad
and the reason why i like added all
these keywords like
uncles like i just put in multiple words
to try to get it ranking
you could just write details like this
if you want to do it more
elaborate i'm just putting something out
here right now but like
if you want to do it more elaborate you
might think of different keywords you
could try to rank for and try to do seo
keyword research
on the platform and see if it's working
i think you should definitely do that
but right now i'm just showing you how
it works to upload so like i'm just
going to put this here so i can show you
guys
let's just put this up you should make
sure it's searchable so that it's in the
search results and you can get it
ranking
and you can make money on it if you want
to though you can make it non-searchable
if you want something that's just for
you or your friend and you want to just
put it up there
go ahead but basically i'm just going to
publish this okay
this is how real time this is going to
be so we're going to publish this now
this is going to say published and
they're going to review it and see if
it's going to be approved
hopefully it's going to be approved i
mean we did the research so it should be
fine so now you can see the status says
under review and we will see what
happens with it
now afterwards when the status is good
it'll
say live and that will be when it's
actually on the amazon store
now let's talk about ways to get ideas
for shirts okay you might want to look
up like
gifts for dad's shirts and this is a way
to think of different ideas you can do
for merch by amazon okay so like here
are a lot of different ideas
you should screenshot your favorite ones
but you should not copy it these are
just to think of ideas and you can also
do something where you go on amazon
and you can see the bestseller rankings
so let's do one right now
let's look up an i love my dad's shirt
okay let's look at this one
if you click into here it's got 20
ratings basically if you scroll down
here you see their best seller ranking
you can see
how much it's selling it's basically 417
000
in clothing 34 000 in men's novel
t-shirts basically
anything under 100 000 is probably
selling really well
so what i like to do is see how much
competition there is
so there's over 2 000 results so there's
gonna be a lot of competition for this
obviously it's very
general so it's probably going to have a
lot of competition you can also
get this chrome extension so this chrome
extension is called ds
amazon quick view you can basically see
at a glance
what their best seller rankings are so
this one is 174
459 that's a really good ranking
so that will allow you to see oh okay
these shirts are selling these aren't
but you should just get ideas from this
and think of what kind of shirts you can
create yourself
you want to be original you want to
think of different ideas by doing
research on etsy
or on pinterest so for example you can
look up funny dad shirts and then just
look up
all these different shirt ideas you can
look on redbubble
on t public on teespring like all these
different places will give you a bunch
of ideas okay so
i use a lot of these different sites
give me ideas i also use that amazon
kind of research tool
to see what's selling or what isn't but
you do not want to copy okay you do not
want to copy and you want to look up on
uspto
if you're infringing or not that's
really important you want to do keyword
research that's kind of the keyword
research you can do right you can see
the amount of competition
you can see their best seller rankings
and you should just start making your
own
versions you you want to be original
with it and put up shirts on merch by
amazon
so when you are ranking up for tears you
need to try to get to
tier 25 quickly okay so what you could
do is you could actually buy your own
shirts if you want to
i would probably set it at the lowest
price you can
and then buy it that way so you don't
spend a ton of money but it's a good
idea because
the more shirts you have the more
ability to get sales
it sounds obvious but like i think a lot
of people just spend so much time trying
to perfect this one but there are no
guarantees what's going to sell or
what's not you can do that keyword
research to
help your chances which i totally do and
i check the best seller rankings i check
the amount of saturation but like
ultimately the more shirts you have the
more chances you can make a lot of money
so that means you have to tear up as
quickly as possible so that you can have
more chances of putting out more shirts
that's like one of the biggest tips like
that
as well as the uspto thing because you
do not want to get banned
you want to get as many sales as you can
and you do not want to get
violations as much as you can another
thing that's helped me
when i started tearing up was that i
would make a template
and then i would replace words for
example
if it was like a profession shirt i
could probably switch out the name
of the profession and make that a whole
nother shirt or an anniversary shirt
or a birthday shirt you can change the
age of it or the year of it and that can
be a whole nother shirt and that has
more chances of ranking and
it makes it a lot faster for you to
churn out new designs
so that was like one of the biggest
things for me in order for me to level
up it just allowed me to do a lot faster
as well so i hope this helped when it
comes
to creating shirts and putting it on
merch by amazon getting into merch by
amazon
and finding ideas as well as how to kind
of avoid those
trademark violations it's really
important to understand all these
different concepts when you are selling
on merch by amazon these are the things
that help me cash flow with this
business
and it still cash flows me to this day
even though i don't really touch it
anymore
i'm going to try to get back into it
looking at how many slots i have
that i should probably fill up but i
hope all these learnings
helped you guys i know this was a highly
requested topic so i really wanted to
make this
for you guys hope you guys enjoyed the
tutorial let me know in the comments if
this has helped if you have any other
questions
and if you guys like videos like this
like where i talk about side hustles
where i talk about investing
where i talk about personal finance make
sure to subscribe hit the bell button to
be notified of my latest videos and i'll
see you guys
in the next one
you