Hi Savings Ninja,

How are the monthly profits going with this? I'm considering giving it a shot!

Cheers,

Calum

Fascinating post! Tempted to give all this a go after reading through this. Unlikely I'll make a start before Christmas though, December is always a busy month. Thankfully January and February are usually empty, so I should have more time to look into it all.

With Merch Informer, can you cancel whenever you want?

Hey Dr!

Yeah, you can cancel whenever if you choose the monthly plan. Q1 is the worst time of the year for merchandise sales, but if you get your first 10 slots filled up as soon as possible, the more chance you'll unlock more slots before the second half of the year when the sales start ramping up again :)

Very interesting. Thanks for sharing. One of us is about to be made redundant and I see this as a great project to investigate for the next 3 weeks before our holiday and the job market (hopefully) picking up in the new year.

That'll leave me to concentrate on MBing :)

I've looked briefly at a few other Amazon Merch blogs and I understand we might be liable for 30% tax unless you get the right tax number from the IRS, is that correct? If it is is it easy to get the tax number?

Hey Pom!

We don't have to pay anything to the IRS as we're trading from the UK. I've forgot the exact option that you select in the set up process, but it's something like "We don't have to pay taxes." Or "We're UK residents so we're paying taxes to our own government." Basically, the option that states that you'll deal with tax.

We are of course required to declare to HRMC that we're earning and you'll be required to add profits/expenses onto your self-assessment each year. Or file your company accounts if you incorporate. Amazon makes this pretty easy due to keeping all of your payment dates filed. You just have to basically enter a figure onto the HMRC web filing website once a year (no need for an accountant).

Thanks for this, SN - very interesting.

This seems to have a bit more appeal to me than Kindle Publishing but still, there's legwork to be done and I'm not sure I will find the time to do it. What kind of profits would a newbie hope to make, to cover the $10 a month Merch Informer fees?

Worth me reading up more about it anyway and if I do sign up, I'll use your aff link!

Hi Weenie,

Thanks :D When you first start out, Amazon only gives you 10 slots, so you can only have 10 products live at any one time. Once you sell 10, they'll tier you up to 25 and so on.

I think if you spent a solid day researching and doing some basic designs (but most importantly the research), you'll be able to get 10 products and fill all of your slots (although it will take you 10 days to fill them as at tier 10 you can only upload 1 per day). I'm pretty confident that at least one of those shirts will sell at least once a week, hopefully, more if you researched correctly. That alone should cover your MI subscription. That one shirt should hopefully sell for years to come too!

Hmm is this just a way to get affiliate income from Merch Informer? ;)

In all seriousness I am buzzing about this... it ticks all the boxes for a good side hustle, practically zero barriers to entry and no costs... And I like (attempting) being creative as well so it scratches that itch as well! I've had ideas for funny T-shirt slogans in the past so it would be really cool to see if other people actually bought them. Having said that... I can't remember any of those right now so I will have to get my thinking cap on again! :)

Have already signed up for an account, they said average wait time for a review reply is 14 days so hopefully I can get a few in there for the Christmas rush... haha!

Cheers for this post!

Hah, awesome. Might be a bit late for the Christmas rush as it's mainly around now and it seems to take Amazon a while to get your product ranking (after it's been approved). I'd focus on some evergreen designs to fill up your first 10 slots.

Yes MI is an affiliate link (I've yet to put up one of those fancy warning banners). I whole-heartedly recommend it though. It's basically the only software you can buy to help you research. Without it, you're basically pissing in the wind :) It's almost like trying to matched bet without software.

With merch, it seems to be mainly about the research, I've heard it's a similar thing for Kindle publishing, but I think it's more so with merch. There are so many listings, what you think is cool may have been done 100s of times before, or may not have anyone searching for it. The best approach (especially when you're on tier 1 and only have 10 slots) is to find a niche that has some shirts available which are selling but doesn't have pages and pages of results (so your product doesn't get buried).

MI helps you find those shirts, it gives you a rating of A to C for if your keywords, like "Baking baseball Mom T-Shirt" is worth doing or not based on the current shirts and their BSR (Best Selling Rank). It also helps you find good keywords that will help your product get found, amongst loads of other stuff. It's so hard to research without this. Without it, most people will just have their 10 slots filled and never sell anything.

All my shirts other than the SN ones are currently on the American store. When I was actively adding products, there wasn't a UK option, merch has only recently come to Amazon UK. I'd still recommend focusing mainly on the US Amazon as they seem to like this type of stuff more and it's a bigger customer base.

Let me know how it goes! :) 14 days is really awesome, it used to take forever! I'd imagine a lot more people are going to start using merch.

That's awesome, thanks for the extra tips!
Was kidding about the aff link of course, I will sign up via your link when they've (hopefully!) approved my Merch account!

Watch out for theFIREstarter branded shirts coming your way soon haha (surely there must be a massive demand for that by now?!)

Cheers again

Thanks, Ninja - your post has actually spurred me to double-down my efforts on Merch. I was approved in March of last year and dived into it initially, yielding some very good sales over the following 4-5 months. Then, when I started my blog, each way betting and a few other side ventures Merch took a back-seat somewhat. I'm still getting some residual sales, but I found trying to fill all the slots at the higher tier's quite a time-consuming task. I guess this is the point at which many people start to outsource aspects of Merch (whether it design or uploading). But undeniably an amazing hustle. I recall, a mere 24-hours after uploading my very first t-shirt, getting a sale and it was an incredible feeling knowing that all I did was type a few letters - Amazon did the rest! As Merch widens to outside the US consumer, it remains a big growth area. Cheers

Awesome pursue FIRE :) I'm glad this post inspired you!

I ended up incorporating and outsourcing quite a few designs, but like you, got a bit side-lined with blogging and matched betting. For me, I got a bit fed up researching/finding designs even though I was outsourcing the actual designing. I had a few designers all set up on Trello boards :)

My next pursuit is Kindle publishing!