Merch By Amazon | Pods In 2020

Merch By Amazon Going Downhill

Well, I decided to write this about things in the first two months of 2020 POD.

While there seems to be a huge slowdown for Merch by Amazon, Redbubble stays pretty constant with sales every month.

I don't follow the community anymore since they all went GURU, yes it happened, so I can only guess there is something new that is in the works or being implemented.

Down by 90% since Dec 2019, I haven't seen this since the big throttle of 2018.

End Of 2019                          

The 4th quarter of 2019 by far was the best we (my wife's account and mine) have ever done sales-
wise on Merch.

All of our sales were actually generated by only a few designs, with both accounts doing well with pop sockets.

Redbubble was as usual steady with no surprises. And definitely outperforming Merch by miles for the first part of quarter 1.

Teespring and Teepublic were the usual couple of sales.

All Organic

All of our sales were actually generated organically and naturally, with a few tweets and Pinterest pins.  

This is on all PODS including Merch.

Nothing paid.

This is entirely possible. Just use good keywords and common sense.

The Designs

We changed up a bit and started doing pretty simple text designs, unable and unwilling to invest the time in our own designs and unwilling to invest money for designs from a designer.

There really are some super good designers there that we could not compete with even with our best.

This is a part-time gig now so there's no outsourcing at all.

Strategy For Popsockets

This pricing strategy doesn't seem to work for us with Tees but worked well for pop sockets.

Get a few sales priced at $12.99 after you sell a few just increase to $14.99 and wait, this usually takes a couple of weeks to kick in for some reason, but then sales resume at the normal rate.

We see about 20% more sales on pop sockets than t-shirts.

The designs are hit and miss the same as tees but are pretty easy and fast to set up.

New Create Interface                                                        

At first, I really liked Create, as I could fill my slots up pretty fast, till I realized I got lazy with things and started using designs on all products.

This is not really productive.

If I had time I would start to take them down and get more designs up with pop sockets and tees only.

UK and German markets are so so, I do better with the UK, with only a handful of sales in Germany.

As time permits I will change things up again. FBA takes a lot of time.

Etsy

I can't write this article without mentioning Etsy. If you are in POD as a hopefully full-time thing Etsy is a must.

Time-consuming and has a curve but is the way to make money for POD or maybe a few other things as well, you just need to look to see )

I set a friend up in a different area and they are doing great there. But it does take a lot of time and customer service.

All in all, I would certainly still stand by POD as a good side or a potentially full-time gig, depending on your ideas.

As always watch out for the GURUS they are everywhere today.

Some are the real deal, but too many are just cons. If you find the need for help, Choose very wisely!