Design & Sell Your Own T-Shirts With Merch on Demand
Artists and graphic designers can take advantage of passive income from Amazon Merch On Demand. This site allows you to create your own merchandise like t-shirts using graphics that you’ve designed yourself.
The biggest advantage to using this service is that Amazon takes care of all of the ongoing work for you. Your product gets listed for sale on Amazon’s website. When someone buys it, they’ll print and ship it for you on demand. You just sit back and collect a royalty check each month.
Amazon Merch On Demand
Amazon’s Merch On Demand is an excellent side hustle for anyone that enjoys art or design or simply people that want to build a passive revenue stream. Once you create designs and list them, your work is over. Amazon takes care of the rest and pays you each month for your share of the earnings.
The types of products you can put your artwork and designs on is fairly limited right now, but their offerings could expand with time. Right now they offer: t-shirts, long sleeve t-shirts, pullover hoodies, zip hoodies, sweatshirts, tank tops, v-neck shirts, raglans, pop sockets, phone cases, tote bags and throw pillows.
Amazon will drive sales to your products for you, but you can also gain even more sales by sending your own traffic to your designs. In fact, if you join the Amazon Associates Program, you’re actually allowed to promote your own listings with an affiliate link to earn even more on each sale that you’re referring.
Design Creation
You have to create the graphics that will be put on these t-shirts, pop sockets, hoodies and more. You can actually create a single design that can then be used to make one of each available product, so each design can actually be used for 12 or 13 different listings.
I’m old school and use Photoshop to design my graphics, especially since I actually went to art college for computer animation. This graphics design software used to cost $500 – $1,000 or more, but it’s now available for a monthly subscription plan around $20 per month. If you want to use other Adobe products, such as Adobe Premiere Pro for video editing, you can get access to all of their software for around $55 per month. See below for a link (not an affiliate link). Ultimately, Photoshop gives me much more power than anything else, but there is a bit of a learning curve to use it.
A free option that you try is Canva. While features can be limited compared to Photoshop, a positive is that you get access to a variety of templates and clip art that you can quickly utilize in your designs. While this does make things a lot easier, also keep in mind that everyone else has access to those free items, so designs using the same things may already exist on the market. I’ve also included a link for this site below so you can see which graphics design option will work best for you.
Recommended Tips
To help you maximize the amount of money you’re able to make with a side hustle on Merch On Demand, I have some tips and strategies to help you get started. First, keep in mind that competition can be high on this platform since it’s so easy to use and available to anyone. Earnings are also not very high for each sale, so you’ll need a lot of designs to really make decent money with this business. However, this is also a business you can grow over time. By adding new designs each month, your library will grow larger and earnings will also grow.
Making completely unique designs can be fun, but it may be more difficult for people to find those designs. Consider keywords that people may search for in combination with clothing and accessory designs. As an example, some people will search for ugly Christmas sweaters. By making a design that targets something that people actually look for, you’ll greatly increase your chances of earning decent money.
Amazon will send you some sales, but you’ll do even better if you can build your own audience. Try setting up a social media account, on Twitter for example. You can post links to your new creations on social media to build a following. By being able to drive some of your own sales to your listings, you’ll not only directly increase your revenue that way but you’ll also get more exposure and sales from Amazon.
Earnings & Fees
Your earnings from each sale of these products is rather low percentage-wise. However, physical goods have notoriously low profit margins and Amazon is handling 100% of the work for you except for the design. As a result, I don’t consider the profits from each sale to be bad on this site, but you will need a lot of listings and sales to earn a monthly check in the thousands.
The actual commission percentage that you earn is based on the sale price and the type of product. Each product type has it’s own commission structure. Six different price points for each product each offer varying percentages. Some are as low as 5.3% and as high as 37.6%. Commissions are lower with the lower price tiers. Higher priced items give higher commission percentages, but they can also be more difficult to actually sell since they’re more expensive. The trick is to find the right balance between a good price for customers and a price that delivers you a fair commission for your efforts. You may need to play around with the prices you sell at to find what works best for you.