Black Friday came with a bit of a bang and the fallout from that is that my sales have really started to kick in for Merch by Amazon.
I’ve got nearly 1000 designs live now and on Black Friday I managed to pass the barrier of selling 10 shirts in a single day. Might not sound like a lot but to me it’s great progress as I’ve only been doing this for a few months and it shows that this really can work if you put the time and effort into it.
I’d been hovering around 5-8 sales for a few days, so the Black Friday bump really helped me, but even better is that sales have not stopped since then and I’ve been consistently selling around 10 shirts for the past week or so.
Christmas Strategy
Previously my strategy has been to price low to get a sale and ensure that I get a BSR (Best Sellers Rank) on my product before rising the price, but I’ve figured with Christmas price is less of a factor and if people really like your design then they’re going to pay a few extra bucks for them.
With this in mind I’ve pushed my starting price up to $16.99 per shirt to get a bigger royalty and the sales haven’t slowed down.
AMS Ads (Amazon Marketing Services)
Another reason for increasing my prices is that recently I have been given access to AMS, which allows me to advertise my shirts. I’ll do a full article on this at some point later, but the basic principle is that for each T shirt or group of T Shirts, you can place a bid so that it shows higher up the page for keywords related to your shirt. Higher up the page = more sales.
One thing I learned fairly quickly is that you can burn a lot of cash on this quickly if you’re not very careful and my Acos (Average Cost of Sale) was running at about 50% to start with, and ideally this needs to be down around 5%.
After a bit of tinkering and lowering my default bid to 0.15c per click, I’ve started to get this down to about 7% which is not so bad.
Etsy Printful Integration
I went a bit crazy last month with my Etsy account and added 1200 designs for mugs and shirts, so I’m going to need to sell a load of products this Q4 in order to get that investment back. I think it’s going to be difficult to break even on it, but my strategy is to see what works this year, and build up the credentials for my store. As soon as I get better reviews I can then focus on the smaller set of products that I sell (probably my best sellers from Amazon) and can embelish my listings with better mock ups and descriptions.
Currently I’m selling 2 – 3 products a day on Etsy so things are ticking along.
Amazon / Gearbubble Integration
The other thing that is finally starting to pick up after months of next to nothing is my sellers central account and the integration with my Gearbubble products (mugs and travel mugs mainly)
I’m selling 2 – 3 products a day at the moment and have just managed to get the Buy Box on all of my products. This means that I can now use AMS advertising for these mugs!!!
Orbitkit Multipod
The final thing worth mentioning is my progress with Orbitkit which is a platform that automatically uploads your designs to multiple Print on Demand Partners.
Whilst it’s not a massive earner, I’ve got most of my 1000 designs up on these platforms now, so they should fairly passively trickle in some income over the next year.
So far, I have the following running totals:
- Zazzle.com – $34.36
- Spreadshirt.com – $42
- Spreadshirt.co.uk – $40
- Teespring.com – $0
- Cafepress – $25.69
- inktale.com – $0
- fineartamerica.com – $5
- redbubble.com – $8
- society6.com – $0
So Q4 is definitely kicking in and the sales are starting to grow. I just wish it was like this all year round…
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