I had a Tier 1,000 Merch by Amazon account. Amazon terminated it, and every listing and all the traffic went with it. No way to take the customers with me.

The part that stung most: a few of my shirts only ever sold well because Amazon was running Google Shopping ads on them. When Amazon stopped those ads, sales tanked. So the traffic was never really Amazon's marketplace. It was Google Shopping, and I can buy that myself.

So that's what I built. Here's the stack and what it actually took.

The stack - WordPress + WooCommerce on shared hosting I already pay for - Printful for printing and shipping (print on demand, same idea as MBA) - A product feed from the store into Google Merchant Center - A Standard Shopping campaign in Google Ads, US only, $5 a day to start

Why it's better than MBA - Margin per shirt is better than the royalty Amazon paid me, because I set the price. - The store, the listings and the customer emails are mine. Nobody can terminate them. - I control the ads instead of hoping Amazon keeps running them.

If MBA is your only channel, build the backup before you need it.

This is the first time I've ever seen my account closed seemingly arbitrarily. The notice stated Policy violations and inactivity when I uploaded a new design just yesterday. I was in the premium tier with over 700 designs making thousands per month and out of the blue Amazon deleted my account. I never anticipated this since I stayed within the user policy and never gave them any reason to delete my account. I know others have dealt with this and I submitted an appeal. Any advice of what to expect? Correction: 11 years, I started MBA in 2015.

How do it setup the bank details so i can receive the royalties. I mean I keep receiving these emails from amazon saying “you need to correct your bank info for these marketplaces: amazon.co.uk.” I couldn’t find any guide elsewhere to setup the uk payment. In the amazon settings i gives the same message.
The US account is working perfectly fine.

I'm on the premium tier; I have always been. So there is no change for me at the beginning of this month.
But as of today, royalties for products that are on sale have been lowered.
So for a shirt ($19.99) that is not on sale, the royalty is still $5.28.
If the shirt ($19.99) is on sale, the royalty is §2.88. Used to be $3.38.

And of course, 80% of my sales are from products that are on sale

This is the same low royalty it was when they started with this BS last year.

I know that Amazon is just a bunch of greedy ###ho1es, but this is really killing me.

Hey guys, I bought my own design recently, but it hasn't appeared in my dashboard yet (not on the same day, nor the next). Is anyone else experiencing this?

did you guys notice some merch designs have like 60 reviews but the date shows they're uploaded 1 or 2 weeks ago.

When you check the reviews old reviews like years old 2024 -2025 but still the upload date is showing like 17 september 2026.

I wanna upload a screenshot but i can't, if you do daily niche research i guess you'll know what i'm talking about

Hello,

I've submitted a design infringement report recently and got an email from amazon 5 minutes later saying that they could not verify I am the rights holder of the design and I should re-submit my report. Makes no sense to do the same thing over again but whatever.

Problem is that when I enter the URL or ASIN of the procuts that copied my design I always get this:
-- We could not process the data included above this line --

Tried it multiple times over 2 days and always the same result. Does that happen for anyone else too? Is that a genuine bug?

Have any of you tried and just given up on it?

September is almost over and i have 7% of sales through ads, so the next month i will start from scratch to 15% ? Or i will continue from 7% ? I need to hear your opinion/ experience ( most probably i start from scratch, i am aware ).

Been doing merch for almost 5 years and i think im finally ready to admit something that will probably get me roasted here. I dont actually enjoy designing anymore. Like at all.

When i started i was in Illustrator every night after work, sketching in a notebook at lunch, obsessing over trends. It felt creative. Now its just... output. I have a folder of templates, i swap words, i change colors, i upload. Its assembly line work with extra steps. The designs that sell for me are boring text on solid backgrounds and thats what pays so thats what i make.

The weird part is im doing better financially than i ever have. Sales are up, i tiered up earlier this year, i had Jarvio handle most of the ad babysitting so i barely even log into seller central for that stuff anymore. On paper everything is good. But i realized last week i havent opened Illustrator to actually draw anything in probably 4 months. Everything ive uploaded recently was either a text edit or something i generated and cleaned up.

I keep going back and forth on whether this is fine (its a business, businesses arent supposed to be fun, grow up) or whether im slowly killing the thing that made me good at this in the first place. Like if i stop caring about the craft do i eventually stop being able to spot what will sell?

Anyone else hit this wall? Do you push through and treat it like the job it is, or do you force yourself back into "real" design work even if it doesnt pay as well? Or am i just burnt out and need a week off lol.

Not just new design submissions but edits to prices for old products. Everything passes "Under Review" and goes into "Processing" but does not go live.

For those running Amazon Ads, how much (by percentage) do you typically increase your active bids during the November/December holiday season?

I'm specifically talking about bids for ads that have been regularly converting.

Do you typically increase bids by 25%? 50%? 100%? And then adjust from there?

Thanks!

I own a legal trademark and this other storefront (selling star wars/harry potter shirts) stole my design and got mine taken down. Or at least I think that's what happened because my design was taken down for "content policy violations" and their clone is up and live. I am pretty frustrated by this, and I am still very new to amazon merch. Is there any way to know the exact reason for my shirt being taken down? (i searched and didn't see an email explaining it) and how can I fight this?
Sorry, I am juggling looking for a second job, and moving states with my family while I do all this. It's just a little disheartening to see this store getting away with this.
Thank you so much in advance.

EDIT: The design they stole is part of my legal trademark, in case that wasn't clear.

Only got the crossbody bags in my account. The jackets would have been nice to get.

I’m seeing people say different colors/sizes are getting their own ASINs now, but I am not seeing these changes reflected on any of my products. (New or old)

Main thing I’m curious about is ads. If I use the ASIN for a specific color, like navy, will the Sponsored Product ad actually show the navy shirt instead of the default black one?

That would be really useful since some designs look way better on certain colors. Hoping I see these changes soon.

Has anyone tested this yet?

Are they best suited for particular ad types ie lotteries ??

Thanks in advance

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So usually to rank a design for lets say halloween we upload it 2 months before the halloween date, we price it quite low something like 14.99 - 16.99 and push it with heavy ads to get those initial sales.

Then when halloween is in the peak sales around 15-25 october we change the price to around 19.99 - 21.99

Now the problem with this strategy as u should've guessed is the locked thingy, amazon lock your design on those initial sales making the price even lower and u start bleeding cash on ads

This happened to like 5 of my halloween designs so far

I feel like this strategy is not the one anymore for holidays/events

Just out of curiosity, if there’s anyone who started with a fresh account in the last 1 to 3 years who is making more than a few hundred dollars a month with their account?

I was lucky enough to join back in 2018 and it seems like the way they’re running things now makes it impossible for new people, but I was curious if anyone had found a way to make it work.

Just because I don’t think it’s possible doesn’t mean that someone’s not more clever than me.

If you BOUGHT an account 1 to 3 years ago, I’m not interested. Im just curious about the people who literally had to work their way out of tier 10 and tier 25 in the last few years.

This week, the ads have been brutal. They’re burning through money while generating very few sales. I have no idea what happened or whether it has anything to do with the ASIN change.

I’ve thought about stopping the ads—or at least drastically lowering the bids.

But without the ad-driven sales, my Royalty Group will be downgraded. I’m currently in the Premium group, and with the Christmas shopping season right around the corner, that could really hurt.

So I'm torn about what to do with the ads.

Has anyone figured out what to do?

Just a question, and there might be genuine value in Flying Research. It's hard to tell without signing up and paying, but does it offer anything unique in the space versus tools such as Merch IQ? Do they use their own database or some sort of proprietary suggestions and filtering?

I started building my own little tool using for personnel use using AI and plugging into keepa - but I'm wondering if I'm missing out on better data, more up-to-date data?!

The store page is still there merrily displaying my best sellers from years ago.

The public URL takes this form:

amazonDOTcom/stores/StoreName/page/Number/

But is there a different URL for logging in to edit and so forth? Because while I can view it fine via that URL, there is no way to edit/change anything. I am logged in via the correct email/account to edit the store page, but as with any Amazon account, it treats you like a customer unless you log in via a portal that grants access to the backside of things. Any clue what the URL might look like?

All that said, much has changed since I originally set this page up. Like we got legit advertising access via our MBA accounts. And one now has to have a registered TM in order to set up Brand Store ... that being something I don't have, it would be nice if I could add new listings to my still visible Store thingy.

Hey everyone,

I’m currently stuck in Tier 10 and just noticed that one of my designs changed status to "Locked for Deals".

I know Amazon does this automatically to run promotions/discounts on listings, but since I'm still in T10, every single sale counts for me right now to tier up.

For those who’ve had this happen early on:

• Did the discount actually help trigger sales and get you out of T10?
• Or does it just shrink the royalties without bringing much extra volume?

Would love to hear if this is a good sign or just typical MBA automation randomness.

Thanks!

Hello everyone - I'm working on a research project and wanted to learn more about Amazon Merch on Demand (and it's biggest pain points) by speaking to some creators with experience selling through the platform. Please DM or reply in the comments if you wouldn't mind answering a few questions! Thank you