Another bolt of lightning struck me this week, when I found out about another potential stream of online revenue that I could be getting into and its called 'Merch by Amazon'.
I've spent a few hours this week looking into it and it looks like a pretty cool way to stock up your cash reserves and seems like a pretty passive way to make money once you're open and running, so here's a brief over view.
What is Merch By Amazon?
In a nutshell this happens:
- Sign up for a Merch by Amazon account
- They give you an account where you can create 25 T-shirts
- Create a T-shirt design and upload it to Amazon
- Amazon will create a product listing for your T-shirt
- If your T-shirt sells you receive a cut of the overall sales price
- Amazon will print the T-shirt and send it to the consumer
Pros of Merch By Amazon
For me the best thing about this business model is the low barrier of entry. If you have a few decent T-shirt ideas then you can start using this model without purchasing any stock.
This is perfect timing for me as I have a few ideas of a niche that I want to go into which has specialist clothing and this would be an ideal way to test the market.
The other beauty of this market is that Amazon handles all of the customer service. All you are doing is uploading the designs and the rest is taken care of for you.
Cons of Merch By Amazon
Unfortunately, it takes anywhere up to 3 months or more to get your account approved by Amazon, which will probably put a lot of people off.
The other thing is that initially you are restricted to 25 T-shirt designs until you sell the initial batch and get moved into the next tier where you have up to 100 designs. Not a massive issue, but is a bit of a pain as well.
My Summary
Well, I think overall this is something that could be good to get into. I've applied for my account already and will be looking into this more over the next few months. This business model has a lot of similarities to the other things I've been looking at and relies on you researching you niches, finding best selling products and more than anything, adding as many T-shirts as you possibly can to broaden out your reach and chance of selling.
However, at the moment I don't want to get distracted by my main streams of work so I'm just going to keep my eyes on this until I get a bit of breathing space.
Weekly Goals
I'm pretty pleased I managed to crack last week's goals of:
- Add 5 articles to niche website
- Research 200 more products for eBay
On top of this I also created a massive list of 16,000 keywords that I wanted to check for the Keyword Golden Ratio and have already outsourced this on Upwork. With a bit of luck this will provide me with hundreds of KGR keywords that I can use on my affiliate site over the next few months whilst I build it out.
This week's Goals
OK, well I know I'm not going to have a huge amount of time to do anything this week, so I'm just going to set myself the simple goal of:
- Upload 3 articles to my niche website
Number one, you begin with 10 designs not 25. Their teiring schedule is sporatic, not solely based upon sales, rejected designs can be used against you.
Secondly, you could be approved in a day or it may take 8 months, maybe even longer to get into Merch By Amazon. “Up to 3 months” is not accurate.
This business is 0 risk as you have no inventory and is 100% passive. You can hire designers to take care of everything from designs to keyword research. Cost to start is simply just time.
Hi Brayden,
Thanks for your quick response. I’ll update the article to reflect the initial tier to 10. All the material I read so far, shows 25 designs, so I guess this must have recently changed. I’ve heard that their tiering is a bit random, which is why I added the most frequently touted number of 3 months, but yes, you’re right, this could be more and could be less.
Sounds like you’ve been doing this a while, is this something you think is worth pursuing? I’d be interested to know how much time you’ve had to dedicate to it and what returns you are getting?