Is Amazon Merch A Legit Side Hustle?

Attempting to make an additional income with print on demand.

Amazon Merch is Amazon’s print-on-demand solution for what it sounds like… Merch.

It used to be only T-shirts. But now it’s expanded (and continues to do so) to include things like hoodies, tote bags, phone covers, pop sockets and, most recently, mugs. (Although I still don’t have access to that yet!).

The idea is that you upload your designs directly to the Amazon Merch platform and can add them to a variety of products.

You can then sell these products to multiple countries around the world if you’d like.

I personally only add my products to the US and UK now, because it’s a bit trickier with the trademark or copyright issues. You might be fine in the US, but not in Spain or wherever it happens to be.

Plus, I decided to go with the US and UK primarily and possibly put winning designs on other platforms. However, the majority of my sales continue to be in the US.

Just to make something clear, this isn’t actually a NEW side hustle for me.

It’s one I started many years ago, when Amazon Merch just started.

At the time, because I didn’t have graphic design experience, I struggled to create designs that I wanted to.

Of course, now with Ai, if you can imagine it then you can create it when it comes to design and that’s opened the door for me to be able to do it.

Over the years, while I have uploaded designs now and again… I would tend to have bursts of activity where I’d create a bunch of designs.

That would be followed by long periods of not uploading, frustrated when I didn’t make many sales.

So this time, when I started uploading again, I have been more consistent. Not daily, but most weeks, I have been uploading a batch of designs.

Interestingly; when I did get back to uploading designs to Amazon Merch, sales sudstarted to come in with more frequency.

But weirder still, a majority of those sales were from older designs. Some of which, I hadn’t even sold recently.

The new designs were not the ones selling!

It’s almost as though just being active in my account meant that Amazon was giving my designs more visibility.

The same is true to this day. A majority of the designs that have sold recently, are not brand new!

The majority of sales are from ones I published last year & a few throughout the course of the year, but not the onles I uploaded in the last couple of months.

I actually did try and run Ads to new designs, but to no avail. I accidentally left a few Ads running without checking and ended up spending about $40 with one sale. So, it was not a success.

So, I haven’t had success as yet with Merch Ads, I will try again in the new year.

All but one of the sales I made in November were completely organic sales and not via Ads.

So, that is another thing with Amazon Merch, it would appear that you can get sales on there without running Ads.

So, The Bad News:

When I last reached $100 on Merch a long time ago… Back in October 2017.. I had less than 60 designs live.

I didn’t reach $100 again in one month on Merch. But I can’t say I put much consistent effort into trying.

But this time, I have over 600 lived designs! Quite an increase on 60. And from what I gather, it isn’t unusual to have tens of thousands of designs before earning anything substantial.

I guess it depends on how you’re doing it. Of course this will presumably be less if you have built a brand and have an audience that eager await your new designs.

But if you’re just chucking designs out there and hoping some will stick, you’re probably going to find it difficult.

So, this is why I have a couple of brands in mind right now, whereby I am hoping to potentially build and audience.

But it’s all a bit new and theoretical right now and a very large project. So, whether I persist with that or end up doing something else, I’m not entirely sure right now.

In any case, I am very pleased to have reached this insiital milestone of $100 in one month on Merch.

In fact, it was $129…..

As you can see, the mass majority of the sales were in the USA. That has generally been the case for me so far.

Below you can see which products are selling the most:

As you can see, just the standard T-shirt is the main seller, followed by the sweatshirt and long sleeve top.

I am also now selling the odd pop socket, tumbler and tote bag.

However, I am very much looking forward to mugs being available!

So, I would have thought that December would be higher than November on Merch, but I’ve not been very active on there in the last couple of weeks, so I am wondering whether that will have any impact.

As I have taken my foot off of the KDP pedal for December, (aside from checking Ads, I probably won’t be publishing any new books this month) I will spend more time creating designs for Merch.

I’ve invested in a tool this month too, which I’ve been absolutely loving. It’s called Flying Research and while I got it specifically for Merch, you can also use it for KDP research.

It’s been really useful, not only for finding niches - but also, for creating Ai prompts for certain styles, that I can plug into other tools like Midjourney.

But How Can You Join?

I joined Merch many years ago. At the time it was very simple to join, even though you typically had to wait several months to be accepted.

However, I have heard from various people that they have TRIED to sign up to Amazon Merch, but they keep getting rejected.

I’m going to look more into this and seek out some advice, as far as getting accepted goes.

Let me know in the comments if you’ve tried Merch, or any other print on demand platforms! I will keep you updated.