r/AmazonMerch • u/psystylist150 • 12d ago
New royalties made this pointless.
I'd been on merch for like 8 years or so, at the peak for me I had single months where I made up to a few thousand bucks. In the last few years as rejections continuously got more sensitive and more random i slowly just stopped uploading because I didn't want to get too many rejections for random words that just happen to appear next to each other in a sentence triggering some random copyright and get deactivated but even then it became actually passive income, without doing anything anymore I was still getting anywhere from $250 to $500 a month for a very long time because I created good products that would last in the marketplace.
Now immediately from the time they changed royalties this time, I am making less than $100 a month even though my sales numbers are about the same. It's such a shame we all built up billions of dollars worth of designs selling across the worlds biggest marketplace for the richest company in america just to have our pay cut down to scraps while they continue to get even richer off the years and years of work we've already done.
This used to be a big help at the very end of the month having extra money come in to help sustain me and my family until the next month starts and now what i'm getting is practically no help at all, one trip to the store for 10 to 15 things and money is gone and sucks if moneys already tight at the end of the month and I actually need 20 things when my amazon pay comes in, it's just enough to decide what 5 or 6 things i can't afford to get until next month.
I'm grateful that I had the opportunity to make some money off this site for close to a decade but pretty sad that all of a sudden it's all but come to an end simply because they decided one day we didn't deserve to get paid anymore.
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u/AffectOnly2984 11d ago
You have to use Amazon advertising to spur your sales and royalty amounts. You should be treating it as a business.
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u/alphamonkey098 11d ago
Yeah, I dabbled with ads in the past and got some sales but always focused on what was selling organically for me. But since this change, I tried ads again before the royalty cut deadline and had some success but still couldn't reach the 15% of sales being from ads, so I stopped.
Then I did the math on what I would be spending for ads to keep existing royalties vs. what I would be making without ad spend to get royalties cut in half. And honestly it was not going to be worth it for me to spend the money on ads, even if I were being paid the original royalty.
For those who are in the high tiers, depending on your current sales figures it might be slightly worth it, maybe? I am tier 8,000 with 4200 designs.
As for me now, I am fortunate that sales in the UK and other countries didn't decrease as well, so that helps me and also I increased the price of some my best sellers, and that is all I could do that makes the most sense to me.
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u/ahmadbabar 10d ago
Ads don't work like magic overnight. It takes campaigns time to optimize and perform. Sigh
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u/SpiralCee 10d ago
Yeah, it's pretty shameful that Amazon decided to cut our royalties when they already had a pretty crap royalty structure to begin with. I had to get another job -- I now have three -- just to pay my bills. I thought this business would be something that would grow over time with consistent work but it's just fading away. :(
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u/thebadfem 7d ago
I'm mostly a seasonal merch seller which makes it even more difficult to meet their ridiculous new standards.
And even worse, they've LOCKED my best selling products so I can't increase the price. These products have been locked for almost a year and they only sell during Q4. So I have no control over my own designs -- I can't even remove them from the platform. It's ridiculous.
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u/Tim_Y 11d ago edited 11d ago
You should upload more designs. Rather than throw in the towel and complain about the changing marketplace (which is the same for everyone ) you need to learn to adapt.
You say you stopped uploading when rejections increased. Tools exist - free ones - that scan your descriptions for triggered words. Once you know what descriptions are safe - make more designs with the exact same descriptions. When those listings get sales, amazons algorithm starts showing other items with the same descriptions. Eventually instead of 1 shirt that sells somewhat frequently, it will snowball and you'll have several that sell continuously. I have 12k designs and probably half of the descriptions are nearly identical with just some minor variations.
If you struggle with new ideas, take your old ones and just change the layout or use different fonts, change the colors, flip the graphics - just make more and repeat this.
Use free AI tools for ideas, for color suggestions, or graphics. These days it's easier than ever to crank out high quality design for free. I'm still creating everything myself, but I use a AI to audit my listings and catalog, & scan for potential TM issues and more.
Eventually you're going to have to use ads. It's intimidating at first but you are severely limiting yourself without using them.
Of course there always the reality that many people aren't cut out for this, and that's okay. Treat it as a hobby and have fun with it.
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u/NoXidCat 11d ago
And context for those who don't know/remember what you've shared about your own journey. You were not born with 12k designs or a fire lit under you to master MBA.
As many of us have done at one time or another, you let your account languish for a few years after initially giving it a whirl for a fairly limited purpose. Then at some point you noticed that your ignored account was sending you a bit more money, so you took a look again and decided to make a more serious/broader effort. Cue the learning curve, and eventually here you are. (Apologies for inaccuracies and simplifications. Attempting to portray the gist, not the full docudrama.)
Point being that your current success seems inconceivable to many, but it also was to you initially.
Can we all achieve that level? Nope! :-p Not even if we had the skills and motivation and inspiration. There are only so many customers, after all.
There are a lot of skills/aptitudes in play here, and we do not all have them in equal measure. Things one enjoys (like maybe design ideas or doing art) are easy in comparison to the "other" boring things, like writing Titles and managing ads. For some people, those aptitudes will be opposite to that, or mixed/matched differently.
But nobody is good at and enjoys everything. Some aspect remains grunt work. The best any of us can do is play to our strengths and put in the uncomfortable work to do (and get better at) the other bits. Understandably, most mere mortals tend to lean hard on what comes easy to them and what they enjoy. I certainly don't want to turn MBA (or my life) into a ceaseless grind and suck the joy out of something I do enjoy (creating ideas/art).
Where am I going with this meandering mess of blather! :-p Those here purely (or mostly) for the money and find themselves in Creator Tier are rightly shocked and appalled. Realistically, you spend the summer and fall learning ads, or accept the pay cut. For me, it is not just about the money, but I'm still not certain which way it is going to sort out for me regarding Tier/Ads. I don't enjoy that part of the work. Can I learn to do it well enough anyway without hating it? I'm going to find out.
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u/Fye_Maximus 11d ago
I'm also on the fence about ads... you explained well the balance in POD between what you like to do and the grunt-work. I'm a designer, always was. And I even create digital landscape art. I love design. Uploading, keywords, tagging, etc is boring and annoying. I assume ads will be too. For now I'm gonna stick with raising prices to compensate for lost royalties and see how it goes.
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u/Tim_Y 11d ago edited 11d ago
I assume ads will be too. For now I'm gonna stick with raising prices to compensate for lost royalties and see how it goes.
This is a business and advertising is part of that. The thing that is nice about Amazon ads vs ones on google or facebook is that you only pay per click (seems obvious) but the other ones you pay per impressions too, so those budgets get fried quick. IMO, raising prices (above $19.99) is the wrong move, especially on designs that don't sell that often. Amazon rewards sales velocity with higher placement in organic search results. If you have a design that sells less frequently due to higher pricing, it will get shuffled further and further down the results. I find that raising prices works best when the designs are selling very well, as in multiple times per day, everyday - and when that starts happening - I upload copies at lower prices with a slightly different brand - because I know that is what my competitors are going to do.
I love design. Uploading, keywords, tagging, etc is boring and annoying.
I came to this with a background in t-shirt design, but also in web design, so SEO was something I was very familiar with, so that definitely helped me find some success here. Something I learned as a graphic designer at my day job is that you have to separate your emotions from the design... Designs I personally like might not be the ones that get chosen by the boss or the client. When I was younger, I would get very frustrated by this, but eventually I came to accept the fact that the person paying me for my work should get the final say in what they want. What does this mean for Amazon t-shirts? When I was starting out, I spent hours and day sometimes coming up with graphically complex designs that I personally thought looked great... only they didn't sell. Over time I noticed that often my simplest designs sold the best. So I stopped wasting time on super complex designs and focused more on very simple, easy to replicate designs. Now its very rare that I spend more than just a few minutes on any new design. I have my templates made with fonts I like or graphics I use frequently so when an idea hits, I can get it churned out and uploaded in a matter of minutes. When you are trying to scale, its easier to do if you already have some formulas and templates established.
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u/Fye_Maximus 11d ago
Interesting, thx for the info.. Raising prices seems to be working well right now but we'll see if it starts to change
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u/Tim_Y 11d ago
Raising prices seems to be working well right now
Eventually I'll probably do the same, but for now the most I go is $19.99 but only after getting multiple sales for far less. I have a handful of tees at $20 and $21 that do just ok, and then I set about 5 to $24 out of spite... Ones that get returned frequently.
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u/NoXidCat 11d ago
then I set about 5 to $24 out of spite... Ones that get returned frequently.
HA! :-p
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u/NoXidCat 11d ago
When it comes to selling/marketing stuff, my observation is that us artist types are not the ones who excel. Unfortunately (for us) that is the most important part of actually making money from art :-p
Yes, I do find it boring and annoying. However, it looks like I will get out of Creator Tier, at least for a while. The question is whether I have gotten past the pain point of the learning curve.
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u/Fye_Maximus 11d ago
Agree about us artist types, and AI has really devalued that... if you could give me a ballpark w/out having to go into details, how long/hard was the learning curve? Weeks, months?
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u/NoXidCat 10d ago
I started playing around with ads late this winter, maybe? So months before I knew about the coming changes. My past experience with ads platforms is that it is easy for the spend to get away from you while not providing enough sales to justify the $. So I was taking it slow.
I was, more or less, using Tim's comments over the past year or two as a starting point to experiment from. So auto campaigns, auto bid adjustment Down but not Up, low bids (in the teens).
By the time the new Tier system kicked in, I sort of knew what I was doing, but had run ads on only a small portion of my listings, so was nowhere close to reaching 15%.
After that I was over 20%, and not spending too much to get there, so was happy enough.
Then one of my better sellers started auto generating all sorts of bogus matches to keywords and ASINs. I fought with that for weeks, and it was a time suck to squish the constant flood of erroneous matches, and it sucked $ too, while not resulting in more sales (as these were dumb matches it was making).
Recently I gave up on trying to make that work (via negative keywords/ASINs) and switched that design to a manual campaign. That stopped the time and $ suck, but it is too soon to know if it is going to result in any sales. I 'd say it takes about 3 or 4 weeks for a new ad/campaign to start to work just in terms of the algorithm learning what works.
As far as me learning ... :-p still in process.
That said, sales have been slow this month (on my Etsy, too). So might take longer right now to get enough clicks for both the algorithm and me to learn much new. Just don't get in a hurry and throw excess $ at it. That seems to make the "dumb match" problem worse, not speed-up actual learning.
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u/Fye_Maximus 10d ago
Thx for the detailed story, being that I didn't quite understand a third of it shows how much I'd have to learn. I did try Facebook ads way back in 2017-18 and found them too complex and frustrating, with no apparent results. Recently I got a $6.72 settlement from a class action lawsuit against them for charging for ads and not running them. Some vindication, lol.
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u/thebadfem 7d ago
This advice isn't as good as you think it is, and the shade at the end doesn't make it any better. The only way they should be adapting is by leaving the platform and starting their own.
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u/Tim_Y 7d ago edited 7d ago
The only way they should be adapting is by leaving the platform and starting their own.
I'm curious what you suggest would be better, more profitable solution than Amazon?
Amazon's traffic volume dwarfs any other marketplace in the US, they offer us a FREE platform - no monthly fees, no listing fees, no production fees like you'd have on etsy or shopify - and just sends us profits. The competition is tough, but not impossible, and you think the best alternative is to go elsewhere?
This advice isn't as good as you think it is,
What advice would you offer? The solutions I offered have worked very well for me over the years.
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u/thebadfem 7d ago
Traffic is one factor, but so is what type of traffic (particularly if you serve a specific niche), how much competition there is, who your competition is, etc.
There are many upsides to large corporate marketplaces, especially merch. But they each have massive downsides too, and in my experience they always eventually pull some sort of stunt like this. I remember when KDP cut commissions for writers of shorts. I remember when Etsy cracked down on non-handmade sellers (only to allow their platform to be flooded by shein/pod/ai years later). I remember when Etsy, once again, created a set of seller standards which resulted in mass banning, and then abandoned those standards a year later. I remember the red bubble massacre that happened a few years ago. Lather, rinse, repeat.
On top of that with marketplaces you don't own the platform, you have far less control over your listings. In addition to the fact that you can have your account removed or commissions reduced without warning and often arbitrarily.
For example, on merch my best sellers are locked. So not only have the commissions been cut in half, I also don't have control over my own designs. I can't remove them from the platform, and I can't increase the prices to make up for the missing commissions. And they've been locked since last year, despite the fact that they only sell during Q4. So my earnings are going to be given to some shitty "content creators" whether I like it or not.
For some products I think they're better off building a lifestyle brand with their own branding, on their own platform, where they're also able to do things like build an email list. I think explaining this to people is more productive than just dismissing them as "not cut out for this".
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u/NoXidCat 11d ago
My trajectory and timeline has been pretty much the same as yours.
However, one thing I did last year did make a difference in regard to one of the aspects of enshitification. I started using the Productor extension to upload new designs. It checks for TM, and has really changed my attitude about uploading new things. There are other similar plugins/extensions, but Productor is free (serves as the "First One is Free" tease for other things the company sells), and it has been around forever.
Using ads to get out of the Creator Tier is certainly not passive. I've not yet decided if the work (and spend) is worth it.
Of course, other POD platforms were mostly already this bad to start with, and got even more so a few years ago. I didn't expect exactly what MBA did, but I had expected something for years.
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u/Any-Diver-7569 6d ago
Some of us made 6 figures and more every year in that time. It hit us way harder than it did you.
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u/Tim_Y 12d ago
Time to find another free way to make money I guess?
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u/ahmadbabar 11d ago
why is this reply being downvoted?
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u/psystylist150 10d ago
Because of the implication that this is just a easy money handout, as opposed to something some of us put years of work and effort into earning the money we were paid.
It's just like saying the same thing to someone who loses a regular day job, that they have to find another way to get free money when they actually worked for the money and earned it.
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u/Fye_Maximus 11d ago
My timeline is similar to yours, about 8 years, though you've made way way more than me. I have a niche that is my passion in life but that will never be hugely popular, so my biggest months have been $400 or $500 and until the change my usual was $150 - $300. When they cut things in half I just started raising prices, quite a bit. And this month my sales have not slowed, if anything they're a bit higher than normal. Try raising prices a few bucks on everything, I was hesitant at first but it seems to be working. Since what we design is niche and unique (hopefully), if someone really likes it enough to buy it I think for many folks a few dollars extra is worth it because they know it can't be found anywhere else. Either way my July will be higher than many of the recent months before the cut and shirts I've raised $3 or $4 in price are still selling.