If you’ve had a chance to try out Merch by Amazon then you know what I mean when I say the big Freeze is on! I’ve been on Merch since June 2017 and I’ve currently tiered up to 500. October, November and now December have been quite good and steadily climbing in sales. Since I’ve sold 671 t-shirts and I’ve maxed out my uploads, I’m anticipating I’ll qualify for the next tier up to 1000 when the next round of tier ups occurs which doesn’t look like it’ll happen till sometime in the New Year.
Below is a screenshot of my stats from Merch by Amazon. I’m using a Chrome plugin called Pretty Merch to create this display. I’ve blurred out the numbers for this post, however, I do enable the preview if you’re a student in my course.
Each month has seen a steady increase in growth. Since the sales have now slowed down due to Amazon throttling our accounts I’ve been testing different ways to sell my t-shirt designs.
I focus primarily on current seasonal designs with a mix of evergreen as well. For example, I uploaded a few hundred Halloween themed designs during the month of October and that’s when my sales took a big jump from the less than stellar month of September. Some of my most successful designs were a distressed text only design.
Then for the month of November I uploaded Thanksgiving themes and Christmas themed designs. Some of the Ugly Sweater Christmas themed designs I created turned out to be good sellers and are currently still selling even though Merch by Amazon has frozen our ability to upload and sell any new designs and is simultaneously throttling our best selling designs to a certain degree such as removing the designs from the search and hiding the BSR the amazon (Best Seller Rank) numbers.
In light of Amazon freezing our accounts, I recently opened an Etsy store using the new Printful integration. I already have designs uploaded with my current Printful account so it’s very easy to connect your Etsy store with Printful’s new integration. You can use existing designs from your WooCommerce / Printful store uploads or just upload new designs to your Printful/Etsy store.
Etsy/Printful Integration
If you’re not on Merch by Amazon or you’ve applied and have not yet been accepted, I suggest you continue creating your t-shirts and uploading either to your own WooCommerce store or start with Etsy. I believe this is a excellent opportunity for you to look into especially if you’ve already created your designs, and/or are currently selling your existing designs either on Amazon or other PODs (print on demand) sites. Even if you’re just starting out, perhaps you’ve just setup a printful/woocommerce store like I’ve described in the course so now you could just as easily dive right into building up an Etsy store and selling your designs to a whole new market. One of the reasons I chose to setup an Etsy store with Printful, aside from the fact that I’m already familiar with Printful and their products, is that the entire process is automated.
I suggest the first thing you do is watch the videos on Printful’s site:
https://www.printful.com/landing/etsy-print-products-fulfillment
Next create an Etsy account which is free to do. Go to the Etsy.com site and select Register. Or if you like you may use this link to get started and you’ll get free 40 listings for your store: http://etsy.me/2AhLcnw . Please Note: I’m not collecting any information here, if you register from this link Etsy is collecting all the information when you set up an account with them. I missed out on this free 40 listings because I didn’t know about it at the time I registered my store with Etsy.
Etsy charges you 20 cents per listing for each time you upload a product/listing from Printful to your Etsy store, in your store the product will be in draft mode till you publish it. Once you publish your product live to your store Etsy then charges you 20 cents.
Here’s an online guide that walks you through the process of setting up your own Etsy store.
https://merchinformer.com/printful-etsy-integration-ultimate-guide/
Follow this guide and you’ll have your store up and running in no time. This is a good opportunity for you to develop your brand. Once you register your store keep in mind that all of your designs will fall under this one brand. Also note: while you are going through the stock your shop registration process it will ask you to add in your listing. You must add in at least one product which you can delete later once your shop is online. All subsequent products will be added through Printful and automatically pushed to your Etsy store. In the Etsy store the Printful products will appear in draft mode. Then you can publish it live.
You can sign up for my course Build a WooCommerce eCommerce T-Shirt Store with WordPress using the link below: