How to Get MORE SALES on Merch by Amazon (Merch Informer Tutorial)

Hey guys Sharon from digital nomad quest and today I’m super excited to share with you guys the best YouTube tutorial on merchant former now if you guys are new to this channel welcome I’m all about teaching you how to build passive income become financially free and design your best life so if you guys are interested in that make sure to subscribe and hit the bell button to be notified of my latest videos now merchant former is basically the best tool to use for your merch by Amazon business and my previous video on how I made over $30,000 on merch by Amazon was really highly requested by you guys. And it ended up getting a lot of views. So I know you guys really want to hear about this topic. And that’s why I wanted to interview the founder of merchant former today where he’s going to share how merchant former is really going to uplevel your merch by Amazon business. So if you guys are in that phase where you want to grow that merch by Amazon business but you don’t know how to scale it this is a great tool to come up with sure ideas to do trademark research off the bat to think of new niches and there’s just so many more benefits to using this tool. Now if you guys are interested in Merchant former the team was nice enough to give me a discount code to provide to you guys so if you guys want 20% off, you can use the code Sharon 20 and use the link in my description below. Now without further ado, make sure to enjoy this tutorial of merchant former Hey guys, it’s Sharon from digital nomad quest. And today we have Neil from merch informer. He’s the founder, he’s gonna do his awesome walkthrough of merchant former which is basically the best place to do niche research to trademark protection to do all these other different features that you know, merchant former has to offer. It seems like you guys are building out a bunch of new features, right?
Yeah, we’ve been working on a merchant former for the last five years now. And it has grown quite a lot from when we first launched it, which was like one little niche research tool. And you know, being sellers ourselves over time, you hear the community saying, Hey, I have a problem with this trademarks being a massive one, oh, hey, this would be really helpful. So we’ve been kind of just building off of that. And as merch by Amazon kind of evolves and changes and adds new products. So just trying to keep up with that as well as coming out with tools that help people find out what’s actually selling so that us as sellers can offer products to the market that will actually sell through which ends up making everyone money.
Yeah, that’s awesome. I remember when I first started out with merch by Amazon, this was definitely like the most popular tool. People were definitely using this to find their shirt ideas. And I think it’s just like a super powerful tool to grow your business. So why don’t you go ahead and take it away, and you know, share screen and we can kind of see what merchant former is all about.
Alright, so this is the homepage and merchant former, we’ve designed this, you guys can read through this, if you want. I’m going to be showing you pretty much any full tutorial because there’s a million and a half things inside here. But we’ll go over some niche research and how I do things and how I think a lot of people are missing certain steps. But you can read through this, we have a built in designer, we have a trademark protection plug in everything under the sun for an attorney. So let’s just go ahead and jump in. This is what you’re going to see when you sign up for three day trial. We want to make sure that this is right for your business. So if you don’t have merch by Amazon account, the first thing you need to do is actually go sign up for one way back in the day, they didn’t use to have a signup process, they were basically trying to get this in the hands of people that were creating apps like phone apps, they thought, hey, it’d be really great if you could advertise your shirts and phone apps. I don’t know why that was a good idea, you know, developers or developers, not t shirt sellers. But things quickly moved forward. So we came up with merchant former to kind of combine all that data so that you can get it in one place and figure out what you want to sell. So first thing you want to do when you log in here is watch all these tutorials, they’re short, I promise, they’re like two or three minutes long. Okay, so I don’t want to bore you guys that there. But this is a tutorial page. And what people usually do when they first log in is we created this tool called the merge Hunter under product research over here. So I’ll go ahead and click that what this is, is kind of like a recreation of the merch by Amazon database. So you can come in here and you’ll see that you can enter in keywords, we’re gonna do the top 100 sellers in the US marketplace category of T shirts, I’ve already gone ahead and click search. But why this is important is depending on what time of year it is, what’s going on in the news and everything you can come in here, do absolutely nothing and click on search and you’ll know the top sellers on merch by Amazon. Now that doesn’t mean that you can necessarily go well I’m going to make that T shirt. I’m going to make that T shirt but it just kind of gives you an idea of what our customers want and what are they buying. So we’re gonna go ahead and click search here and we’re looking at the top 100 sellers through merch by Amazon. This isn’t just like every single of their shirt. Okay, this isn’t pop sockets or hoodies, there’s just the T shirts just to get an idea what’s going on. So what people usually do, they’ll come in here they’ll click on search and they’ll scroll down and you’ll see right here this is exactly what I looked at top 100 In this sales rank range now just to explain sales rank if something had a BSR or bestsellers rank of number one that would be the best selling t shirt or whatever category you’re looking at in that entire category. Okay, so when you see something like this shirt right here with a BSR currently of under 1000 It’s selling very, very, very well. I don’t know if you’re familiar with it. Have you seen all this in the news this let’s go brand and stuff I have not. Okay, so just to give a real quick rundown, some NASCAR guy won a race and he was being interviewed by some reporter, and the whole crowd was screaming, F Joe Biden. And the reporter thought that they were saying, Let’s go brand. So it’s all based around NASCAR, right. So you really can’t do any type of shirt that’s based on any other intellectual property or brand. In this case, NASCAR is massive. But you can see here that people want to buy this kind of stuff, people want to buy edgy things. So if we click through some of these, you can actually open these up, it leaves the dog. So Amazon is clearly taken down some of this stuff. But you’ll see right here we have the sales rank and the average sales rank. So you can go on Amazon and just type in like, Let’s go Brandon T shirt, and you’ll be able to see this sales rank right here. But what you’re not going to see is the sales rank averaged out over a period of time, because you could see something that’s sold like really well for a single day, and then it never sold again, and you’d have no idea just by looking at the BSR might be like you know, 2 million or something I sold once in the last month. But this is also really helpful to look at here, something else people usually do is they’ll come in here, and they’ll just stay on just the top 100. And I’m telling you guys, right now, if you go in and you try to make a shirt, like let’s go Brandon, or, again, you can’t do shirts like this, because this is an actual Disney brand, right? So they’ll come in here and be like, Oh, here’s a Halloween shirt, right? That’s not based on any intellectual property, it says, boo, I’m going to do the same exact shirt. So they’ll make one, they’ll throw it up on merch by Amazon, and they will never sell it. And they’ll do that 10 times because you’re in a 1010 tear, you’re able to upload 10 shirts, they’ll never sell everyone will get disappointed, and then they will leave. So that is not the way to do this. One other thing I should point out in here, if you do find something interesting, you can actually click this little live Details button. Here we go. So you’ll see if you click that little details button, it’s going to pull back the title and features, but it’s also going to pull back potential trademark issues. Now in this case, you know, go no problem, right. This is trademarked fake his trademark through the features and bullet points. But just because it’s trademark doesn’t mean you can’t use it, we can go into that when we get to the trademark section. But right here, this is what you want to look at. If you find a good selling shirt, and you’re like, hey, I want to enter that niche, I don’t want to copy that niche, I want to go in and actually enter it, you’ll be able to see the sales rank over time. So you’ll see up here it started at like 5000. So it took off immediately. And then it started to dip. So the lower the sales rank, the more sales it’s getting. But more importantly, you’ll be able to see their kind of pricing strategy. So I’ll do this a lot is if I’m going to enter a niche, I’ll find kind of the niche that people are going into or something I want to look at. And I’ll say alright, what should I price this shirt at most people are either pricing it at $0 royalty, so like $13 can work, but then you’re making no money on the back end. Or you can kind of price it towards what the market expects. And you’ll see what happened. Here’s they priced it at 1698. It started selling it started selling and selling even better, even better. And finally they’re like, You know what it’s selling so well why don’t I bump my price from 1698 to 1790. So they bumped it $1 They’re making more money on the back end. And because they have that sales velocity, they’re making a lot more money. So something to keep in mind when you are creating different types of T shirts. So yeah, this
is really cool to be able to see kind of the history of like each shirt and like the performance, the price changes and everything like that. And also, I think you mentioned a great point of trademarks are super, like crucial to look into when you’re doing this business. You want to make sure you’re not infringing on anything. You’re also you also want to make sure you’re not like copying anything, you know, you still have to, you know, create your own ideas and just use this tool as more of like, you know, for ideas and trying to think of what to get into let’s touch
on trademarks real quick because I mean, there’s intellectual property, right? Like there’s NASCAR, there’s the NFL, there’s the NBA, those are huge brands. And when you list something online, you basically have to ask yourself one is the only reason this would sell because of X you know, an X would be either the big brand or like a large event there is a little bit of a nuance there. Politicians are typically free game but I don’t want to say you know, absolutely, but that’s number one. Number two, though, is that there are so many trademark issues we’ll let’s say you come up with this unique phrase. And I can actually give you example that so let me go over trademarks, we have this tool called the trademark Hunter where you can actually upload your asin so the unique identifier for these products and we’ll actually read through and look at your title your features, your description, so I have a few in here as examples. Okay, so this one right here, this shirt says eat pasta run faster. Okay, pretty, pretty funny. This one says live in the dream. In no sense of the word would I ever think that those phrases if you will are trademarked but as you can see right here, we’ll go ahead and click This when you enter an ace in here and it comes up as red, it means there is a trademark for that in the clothing category. So I’ll open up this one too. And it’ll bring you over to the USPTO. So this is the United States Patent and Trademark Office. It’s a horrible, horrible government website that looks like it’s from the 90s. But you’ll be able to come through here, and it’s really important that you guys actually learn how to read these pages. So let’s see the mark here. And what you’re looking for is two things. If something is actually live like it’s gone through the nine month registration process, it’ll have a serial number, and it will have a registration number. So if it’s got both of these, it’s actually live mark, you can see right here, it’s live. So the second thing you want to look at is the mark information. Okay? So it’ll say, Hey, this is a standard character mark, which means if you put this on a t shirt, you’re technically trademark infringing, because this isn’t like an image that they’ve trademarked. It’s actual words. Okay, so that’s the first thing and then goods and services, you’ll be able to see, hey, yep, it is in the teacher category zero to five. Now, sometimes you can go to the Documents tab here. And you’ll be able to see exactly by looking at like the drawing of the specimen, we’ll click on the specimen, see what pops up here. So they have this shirt here, where they just put the text on a shirt. This is exactly the picture they submitted to the government in order to register this trademark. So you can see yes, it is unfortunately on a shirt. So it is trademark Now does that mean that they’re going to go to Amazon and take everyone down? No, but it means they could they could definitely email merch by Amazon say I own the trademark for this. I don’t want any single shirt up in if you put that up on a shirt today, six months ago, a year ago, Amazon doesn’t really care because they don’t want to get in a legal battle, they will just take all your stuff down and give you those nice rejection emails or infringement emails, if you will. Those. That’s why we built this tool. And we also have this one right here where you can just come in here and enter in like, a keyword or phrase. And I’ll just come back here. This is a test account. But I’ll come back here and I’ll look through like every day. So let’s say I put I’m a Firebug on a shirt. Okay, right now it’s safe. This isn’t actually trademark, you can see all these actual like, you know, Nike clearly trademarks, but right now it’s safe. Let’s say I come back, you know, 13 months from now and it’s still safe. Okay? On the 14th month, someone trademarks, this, because they have a really hot seller, they go to Amazon, and they’re like, alright, I now have this trademark, I want to know before they send that email, so I can either go take it down or something because you know, as you progress through the merch by Amazon tiers, it becomes more and more important as your catalog gets bigger to make sure that you’re staying as compliant as possible. Because I mean, that’s when you start making money, you started making more money, you’re reinvesting your profits into your business, you do not want to lose that over something as stupid as putting, you know, just some random phrase, not even not even a big business name on one of your shirts. So
this is awesome. Because, you know, sometimes there’s like a saying, and you’re trying to like look on USPTO. But you have to like break it up into like different phrases within the whole like line just to make sure that one part isn’t trademarked or whatever. And yeah, I remember one time I had a shirt taken down like that said life guard. And I’m like, Really, like that’s trademark. So it’s really important to definitely, like look into this. And I think your tools are very effective. Like the fact that you can like go into some of these shirts and see which part is violating trademarks or whatever you can, you can tell so
you can you can enter in like if you have a sense that you want to go through and enter that. But what you just described was a huge problem. So if you go over to our homepage here, I will show you how we fix that issue too. So if you go to Resources, and you click on merch research is going to bring you this page, this page, all it does is you enter in a keyword for a marketplace. So let’s just type in eat pasta run fossa and click on Search. It’s just going to open up an Amazon page with all the shirts that are indexed for that term. So right here, let’s just use this one because it’s it has it in the title. Okay, you see that is that’s a horrible design, but it’s it’s selling is got four views, and I can’t hate on too much. We built a plugin. So these four little boxes right here, if you’re inside a merchant former and you come up to your name, and you type in TM protection, a ton of people use this Okay, so install this on your computer, but what’s going to happen is it’ll show up right here. So you can either do a normal trademark check, which will check in zero to five in the clothing category. Or you can do pop sockets, like whatever you’re uploading coming in here, I have no idea. Let’s say I just found this shirt on Amazon, I just have to click this button and it’s going to highlight it’s gonna go through the brand, the title, the bullet points, and I don’t think it does a subscription or description because they don’t really look at that but I have to do is click on this and it’ll tell you like Okay, here is the trademark here is the serial number registration number and these are all clickable to bring you right back to the USPTO. So if I’m just on Amazon and I type in like, you know, life guard shirt. Alright, so let’s, let’s just pick one of these. How about this one officially licensed, okay, so this one might be acceptable But you know, we’ll run this boom lifeguard. Here are the trademarks. These are the tightest ones text type set. You know crew is apparently trademarks, I can come over here and be like, Okay, what on earth is this? This is a live trademark, it’s for typeset words, letters, numbers, blah, blah, blah, goods and services shirts in zero to five, right? So like, you can go deeper into it without having to go okay, let’s say this wasn’t on and you’re like, I want to go into this niche. What word? Or what combination of words do I possibly enter? On USPTO? I have no idea. You probably have no idea. It’s just It’s the worst. And you’re stuck guessing. And if you guess wrong, then Amazon sends you the email that you don’t want to see so. So this right here has saved me so many times. It’ll also not logged in right now. But if you log into your merch by Amazon account, you’re going through the upload process, like right before you hit submit, these buttons will be in the backend to to check the bullet points and stuff that you’re entering. That’s cool. This this right here will save you like a lot.
Yeah, so I also wanted to kind of rewind to so like for someone who’s kind of a new beginner who wants to just get into merch by Amazon and wants to figure out some shirt ideas like what’s the best way to go about it when you’re just going on to merch informer for the first time? Yeah, so
the best way probably just just starting off is one look at the merch. 100 just just to see what are people buying. Okay, so just broad broad niches. Second thing you want to do, which I think is really underutilized. If you come down here to keyword research, and you click on this niche Hunter over here, we built this tool to essentially show you keywords how many times it’s being searched on Amazon as a broad niche. And then the top ranked this is in the shirts category. There’s hoodies, sweaters popsockets for this week. So just to show you an example of this, if I’m scrolling down here, and let’s go to the second page, cuz I think there was Yeah, so I see a pharmacy tech niche K tons of people searching for pharmacy tech. And all of these are links, right? So I can open these up on Amazon and be like, okay, here is a pharmacy tech shirt. It’s got 13 reviews, we can scroll down selling pretty well. Anything within like 100,000 Does it even say 500,000? Especially since we’re in q4 right now is a good selling that trade. So you can just come in here and look at these and think to yourself, Okay, I definitely want to go into the pharmacy tech niche. Okay, they’re selling this one is selling so they’re all selling. So something you can do is you can come in here and you can say, all right, people are searching for this keyword. I know there’s they’re selling because there’s all these selling designs, I’ve just looked at them. So now you’re thinking yourself, okay, let’s go back to the merch Hunter. Alright, and let’s enter pharmacy tech, I will click on search. Now while that’s going on. Alright, so this should be relatively fast. So here we go. We just saw that those shirts were selling, right. But now we actually have a little bit more information. Here’s another one, don’t talk to me, I’m counting. Here’s that one, we just looked at the prices here, see the sales rank, we can see the average over time, right. So these are a little higher, but they’re still selling through. So the best way to build like a long term merch business is not try to hit one home run that dies in the next month. And then you’re like, Okay, well, I made 100 bucks. But now it doesn’t stop now, right? Like you need to build a foundation that brings you in essentially passive income every single month, where you can then use those profits to keep building the foundation until it’s bigger and bigger and bigger. And eventually, you’re going to get to a point where you have you know, 100 reviews, you have 200 reviews, and the brand new person coming in trying to do this isn’t going to be able to compete with you. But it all starts with that like first little foundation so
so when you say like Foundation, you’re saying make multiple shirts within that niche that you found, like maybe this pharmacy tech niche you try to, you know, crank out more types of designs or
Yes, so I come in here I look at a few things. One, I’m just validating the niche. Yes, it sells Yes, it actually sells you know, over 30 days, it’s it’s selling Alright, so we have we have these unique designs and now I’m trying to think to myself, Okay, I know I want to enter this niche, but what do I come up with in order to sell so we know that pharmacy tech stuff for pharmacists, in general, really hot seller. So the next thing I’m thinking of is I don’t want to just throw up a shirt that says Don’t talk to me, I’m counting I’d be done. This one already sells really really well. It’s got a bunch of reviews, how can I come up with something so then you’re thinking yourself like okay, what you know, what would be what would be kind of funny about I mean, I’m just reading to this pharmacy technician you know, nobody knows what I do until I don’t do it. So let’s go over to this module right here the Etsy and Pinterest search. I’ll show you why. Like we’ll just type in you know, pharmacy tech, so far. I’ve already searched it apparently in the past. So this is Etsy and Pinterest. So what I’ll do what I’m going to do is I’m going to search through this so we’ll click on search this is going to bring back results from it looks like I’m searching Etsy we’re gonna find something that is funny, or that has some sort of emotion to it. And I’m going to cross check that to see if it’s on Amazon and I can come up with my own unique phrase. So just looking through this alright farm squad that probably has been done a million times, farm tech, student pharmacy, pharmacy technician, let’s see if there’s anything funny in here. Usually the stuff that like gets a rise out of people is what ends up selling really, really well. So something else you can do too is you can come in here and you can actually sort these by favorites or buy views. And that tells you that customers on another platform actually like either the design or the niche because people are looking at it. People are, you know, responding to it. So let’s just see how to be a majestic pharmacy technician. I don’t know, let’s go we know that people want to buy in the pharmacy tech niche. So let’s go back to merch research. And I’m just going to type in pharmacy T All right, we’ll see we’ll see what’s out there. So let’s see 199 results, but Amazon’s indexing really messed up. Okay, so they’re gonna show you like the pharmacy shirts, we’ve seen this low voltage technician, what Amazon’s trying to do is trying to match what you’re searching for to the shirt. So I typed in pharmacy team. Okay, so I was actually at the pharmacist the other day and this this one person was just screaming at the pharmacy tech because they wanted a refill earlier or something. So I’m thinking to myself, Okay, what if it just said like pharmacy team, and like a picture of some lady shouting like getting reamed or something right, like, so they can just double check that because we already know by looking at this right here, people like this niche. We already know by looking in the merch hunter that they’re not priced. The ones that are selling through are not priced at $13. So people are actually actively making money. It’s an evergreen niche. The last thing I’m going to do is I’m just gonna check that I’m gonna say pharmacy team. Hitting range. I think that’s how you spell it. Yeah, I’ll click search. And there we go. Okay, so unless I spelled Yeah, this is this is wrong. There’s not a single product on Amazon that says that boom, there’s a niche, a very large one. And here’s a unique phrase that you could put on a t shirt with some, you know, either cartoon, maybe it’s a really, I don’t know, maybe it’s guy I don’t know, put it on a shirt and put that up on Amazon now. Okay, now you upload your shirt. But what do you what keywords do you put in, I would just go back to the merch Hunter here. And I look at what keywords people are actively using in order to rank these shirts. Because this is the position that we want to be in, we want to we want 21 reviews, we want to be priced at almost $20 and actually making money. So I just come back to all the shirts and actually just start looking through this. So like love pharmacy, that’s keyword funny pharmacy technician, that’s keyword. I don’t know if I put in Mother’s Day for you know, someone getting reamed out at the pharmacy. But if it’s relevant to what so I take, I make a list of all the keywords, I’d look down here and say, Alright, gift for pharmacist, that’s a key word. Now technically, I guess we’re doing pharmacy tech, but in my little made up ID I said pharmacy team, so that could work, no essential worker that could work health care worker, so on and so forth. What you don’t want to do though, is is this part, okay? Just men, women, mom, dad, boy, girl, when you upload to merch by Amazon, you literally have to check a box that says this is for men, this is for women. And this is for use. Amazon knows that information. Already. This is a waste of space. And this isn’t helping the shirt rank at all. So just keep that in mind. That is probably what I would do there we first you have to find a niche. And the way you find a niche is just by looking around. I mean, there’s a million half tools in here, each one will give you an idea. So for example, we can look at this trend tracker here we’re talking about making a foundation of evergreen design. So evergreen simply means you know they’re going to be selling today, they’re gonna be selling a month from now a year from now all year round. They’re not like Halloween or Christmas, which only has that spike during that time of year. So you can come in here you can say like, Okay, over two months, an average sales rank of 200 to 300,000 in merch by Amazon shirts, that’s going to show us that over two month time stayed in that range, like what are people actively buying this is exactly what people are actually buying. So this one says, you know, Jesus, his religious shirt religion does incredibly well on Amazon. And you’ll see here, alright, the two month average sales rank is right around 200,000. So this shirt is a very, very good seller for the last two months. So that’s a pretty good chunk of time, you’ll see the price here haven’t changed their price, but you’ll be able to see the sales rank graph and every time the graph dips so the sales rank goes down that might be 10 sales might be one but it’s at least one and over time. You know going back in time very good sellers staying within that range. You can come down here fully vaccinated, Black Lives Matter best cat that ever what you’re looking for is something that is kind of can get a rise out of people is intriguing and that you think that you can actually make something better so if I came in I’m not a graphic artist this to me, I could not create a better image than that. I just can’t I could hire someone to do it, which I highly suggest everyone do once they start making some money because I mean you can get these designs created for like four To $10, if you do all your research, like what I like to do is do all the research and then have someone else create the majority of the designs and then I just have to upload them with the keywords. And that’s pretty much the entire business. But should we also be able to see like that selling strategy we talked about with pricing, this person is started off a little bit low. So Daddy of the birthday Princess, I don’t know what it is about dabbing unicorns, but they’ve been a thing for like four years now.
Yeah, I’ve seen? I don’t know. Yeah, no, no.
But you know, 5099, they raise the price up, you’ll see right here, they’re still making the sales. So then this seller decided, hey, I’m gonna try to lower my price and see if I can get even more sales. And that’s this range right here. Clearly, that didn’t happen. So they just raised it back up. They’re like, well, it didn’t really change at all. And then they’re making the same amount of money. So you can come in here and actually look at like, okay, if I’m going to build a foundation on merch by Amazon, what is it that people actually want to buy? Because I’ve been doing this a long time. It’s so many people come to me. And they’re like, I made this really cool design. And I look at it, and it’s not great. And number two, pay this really cool design. Why isn’t it selling? Because it’s so unique? They’re the only person on the internet? Who would ever want that specific thing. You have to cater to a broad audience? Like, would I ever wear this? I mean, what is this thing? A women’s go bandana farm lover T shirts? No, no, I wouldn’t. But look at all these other people who would write so you have to create for the audience that buys a lot of the time, that’s not going to be you
know, I feel like you brought up so many good points, like I when I teach other people about this evergreen shirts, for sure. Just because you know, you might be banking on one shirt design. But I think overall, if you have a bunch of evergreen ones like that cash flow you for a long period of time, like that’s way more powerful. And you know, I haven’t touched my like merch account too much. And I’m still cash flowing to this day. And you know, it can be so powerful if you do that correct keyword research, and also what you mentioned about your tool with Etsy and Pinterest, that’s actually really awesome that you can sort and do all that because, you know, I tell people, if you want to think of ideas, you got to, you know, continuously look at, you know, ranking shirts on different platforms and stuff like that. So if those two places are great ones to look for, and it’s really cool that, you know, you have a place for that. And all these different tools that you have, allow you to do niche research and think of different ideas. And it’s not just about you have to create your own spin, and you have to think of new ideas, and it just helps you so much when you’re like sifting through all of this. I think a lot of people ask about like shirt ideas. And this is like the way to go, you can see all these different examples. What’s selling, how can you make things better? How can you make a new, totally new design? You know, you mentioned that example with the pharmacy tech one. It’s like, how do you make ones that aren’t thought of already? So that’s awesome.
Well, two things. One, don’t be afraid to put up things that are just like completely and utterly ridiculous. Because that is what I’ll even show you example, I think one of these I have open let me close a few of these. I have this shirt and I will just show you. So I was gonna make a Facebook post like years ago, I want to get a rise out of people I wanted people to actually like respond to it. I don’t even remember what it was. This is I put up this shirt. Can you see that? As a joke? It’s it has 120 reviews, this thing sells almost every single day. When did I put this up? 2018 That’s amazing. And it’s just the dumbest thing I put it up because it was a joke. And I’m like, Hey, I have plenty of you no space to put up shirts. And there are at least 120 people walking around with that on their body would I ever wear no, no but but other people would. So just going back to like the Jesus example because this one’s selling really well. So we also have the product search in here I’m going to click on that what this is, is normally you’ll just see this box when you come over here, you can enter in a keyword a marketplace in the category and click on search and what it’s going to do is going to bring back results from our database and from like live Amazon it’s going to look at that information in the background and fill all this in so it’ll show you kind of that same information to the title the brand if it’s known again if you see unknown Amazon’s product is having some indexing issues the sales rank as it currently sits and the estimated sales so I just looked up tie dye right again you want to do thing you want to take big ideas that are selling in mash them together. So we just looked at a Jesus shirt I’m just gonna go with religion selling really well. Now I’m just randomly looking at what is out there for tie dye. Okay, so you know you love and peace you got a Mickey Mouse cannot do Mickey Mouse. You got a pumpkin MTV big brand can’t do it. Avengers celebrating 11 years. So I’m looking at the sales ranks. I’m going to okay, they’re selling, they’re actively selling. People want to buy tie dye stuff. The easiest way to come up with unique things is just take two big niches Bring them together. So I will actually do that right now. Now, I’m not a designer, so don’t laugh at me too much. But I will open up, if you go up here, click on the merch designer, I will log in this is a very simple drag and drop designer, because I want to be able, we built this while I was watching the election, like not the previous election, the one before that whatever year that was, and people would just say the stupidest things, I’m like this, this would do well on the shirt, right. So I just wanted something I could fiddle around on my phone. But you can come in here and you know, pick whatever product you want, just going to do t shirt, but you can do phone cases, you know, tote bags for pillows, blah, blah, blah, blah. So this is what’s gonna look like and we’ll make it white. So you can see it. Now this is just a mock up. And you can actually come over here and upload different images. Okay, so I already uploaded a little, a little Jesus guy here. Now, it’s really important that if you aren’t making the designs yourself that you use stuff that has commercial licenses to them, okay? The easiest way to do that is if you head over to this site called Open Clip, art.org, they have a lot. So there’s like 167,000 pieces in here a million things. But if you scroll to the bottom, and you look at their license, can I use it for commercial use, and they basically say you can literally do whatever you want with anything on this website. So dig into that. But what I did was I found a little Jesus guy. Okay, so we’ll come back here, I think I’ve opened this up like multiple times. So come in here, we’ll add this little Jesus guy, okay.
This one is it’s one you brought from that clipart site, right. So it’s not something that’s already populated and in,
correct. So all you have to do is you just you just download whatever clip or you want your computer, and you just drag it and drop it into this box on the Images tab. And then you just click on it and put it over here. Now, I’ve already downloaded this pattern here. But something you can do is like I just Googled trippy patterns. And again, you want to make sure that it’s free for commercial use. So something you can do is you just click on Tools, and you type in usage rights. And then you just click Creative Commons license. So all this stuff, once you click through, you’ll be able to actually read the license, but it is tagged by Google as something you can use for commercial use. So it’s just something to keep in mind for everyone watching. Make sure you read it. Because if someone actually comes after you, or it says, hey, that’s actually my artwork, you can be like, now here’s, here’s the license, you know, blah, blah, blah, just make sure. So let’s go back to that designer here. Here’s a little Jesus. Remember, we’re doing a tie dye Jesus. So we’re going to put in, I’m going to click on this, I’m going to make it a little bit bigger. Okay, I’m going to come up here, I’m going to click on Mask, and I’m going to make Jesus Thai dude. And then maybe I’ll come down and I’ll add some text. And there’s a bunch of so there’s a lot of fonts in here, these are all Google fonts. And if you click this, there’s like page after page of these things, but already have some up here, you can upload your own fonts, we will pick this one. And we’ll just type in hippie Jesus. All right, so this looks horrible on a white shirt. So I’m going to do is I’m going to make this text up here, you can actually change this to whatever color you want. I’m just gonna make it white for now. Okay, it’s white. And I’m going to come back up here to the product, and I’m going to make it black. And there you know, I mean, that’s not anything special. But I guarantee you, if I put that up on Amazon, I keyword it correctly, someone would buy that because it’s ridiculous. So you just come up here, you click on download, it’s going to download the file, I’ll open it up here. And since it’s on a, since the text is white, you really won’t be able to see the text down here. But if you upload this on Amazon, and you pick dark colors, it’s going to look exactly like that. And that is the kind of stuff, all we did was we found two different niches and we combined them. And now what you want to do afterwards is actually come in here, look at the keywords people are using for tie dye shirts, look at the keywords people are using for religious or Jesus shirts, and then just come up with something ridiculous and use those keywords together in your title to make sure that it can be found. And I mean, this kind of stuff just flies off the shelf, especially during q4 People buy anything under the sun.
That’s so cool, though, that you guys have the creation tool. I didn’t even know you guys had that. And I think a lot of people ask how do you create the shirts, they don’t want to buy photoshop? Like this isn’t an easy way it
is definitely not on like a Photoshop level. It is so difficult to learn. I mean, learning curve there is so huge. I mean I can do. That’s how I got started in merch by Amazon. I have Photoshop, I’m like, you know, I can drag and drop and I can type things. So I created the first like, you know, 1520 30 designs, and they were horrible, but someone ended up buying and I was like, wait a minute, I didn’t I didn’t do anything for that money. I literally spent seconds typing something into Photoshop. I mean, I hire someone almost immediately to start cranking things out because I mean, that’s really the only way to scale. Now. If you haven’t proven that this works to yourself. I think that’s really important. Then absolutely like start with stuff like this stuff. Did I create in this like like this? For example, I’ll probably throw this on Amazon and I know that it will sell at some point. Yeah. So getting started, like this great idea really focused on the keywords. I’m not going to spend all night talking about that. But if you go up here and you click on to get a three day free three day trial, this video in this video, they’re both like an hour, two hours long. But I go through on how to keyword listings, how to do all the mundane stuff, no one finds that fun. That’s that’s really how you make sure that you get the visibility that you want.
Yeah, it seems like this has like all the tools you need. I do have a question. So if you want to check how saturated niches and is there a way to see like the competition and be like this might be too difficult to enter?
Yeah, so two ways, you can come over here to the competition checker. And you can just enter in a keyword like I don’t know, let’s just type in dog and hit search. Now this might take a little bit of time, because it’s basically going it’s looking at all the information. Now while that’s working, I’m going to go over here. The second thing I do is I just come over here, and let’s say looking at the same thing, dog, click on Search, go to Amazon. Now this says 20,000 results, right? That is almost always a lie, especially if it’s a very, very large image. The reason for that is because of how Amazon indexes things. So if you scroll the bottom, and you click on like the third page, all of a sudden that number changes, now it’s over 50,000. Right. So just looking at those different keywords, if you will, inside of merch research.com which will take you to this page. And if you see a bigger number here, just click to like the second or third page. Now if you see a number here that says like, you know, 48, they’re probably all one page or there might be two pages, then you can probably believe it a little bit more, this is probably going to take forever, because this was a dumb keyword enter. But that’s definitely what I would do is come over here. Just to quickly check like okay, is this does this niche have a ton of products. And now just because it has a ton of products in it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t enter it means that if you do enter it, and what I like to do is when I’m looking at an edge, make sure that at least one of the niches if I’m doing to kind of combined, it has at least like three shirts that are actively selling Okay, so if it doesn’t have three shirts, I’m like, is it really worth my time to make a design or pay for design, so on and so forth. But this is what it’ll look like when it does come back, it’ll say, here’s the keyword, here’s all the products that are currently on merch by Amazon and look at how many of them actually have a sales rank a lot of them so like dog as a big niche is selling extremely well. And it will give you a total score. And this total score is how easy it is to rank a product for that keyword if you want to rank for dog pretty much impossible. Right? But if you want to rank for some like longtail phrase that you came up with, it’s funny in the dog niche, that’s completely different story because I mean, that’s, that’s where you’re starting to niche down. And if you have something really niche, you have a unique phrase, you’ll start making sales, not very many, but each sale you make, it’s going to help you like ensure product up the algorithm until you start you know, ranking on the second page, the third page, the second page, and hopefully the first page for bigger and bigger keywords. But I mean, you can come down here you can see the bestseller keywords used in the ones that are selling. And then we give you some examples of like look at this weekend’s beer and dogs. This is a horrible shirt, but it’s not hot, like people are actively buying it. So we can just come over here and look at like, what’s bad to me, doesn’t mean it’s a bad design because if there’s an audience that actually wants to purchase something like this, that it’s really a great design that we can look at and see if anything’s trademark not really so you’re good to go and it doesn’t need to be complicated that took three seconds for someone to make like seriously three seconds and you know it’s sold at least one so three seconds for a few bucks repeat that process over and over again like you’re making really good money
it’s actually surprising how many people buy like tech shirts like they don’t You don’t even need a bunch of design experience a lot of mine that you know cash flow for me right now they are just text so like it’s actually surprising what people will buy so yeah, search
is also the easiest way to get started too though, like I would guess the majority of people myself included have no artistic ability but we can all type I mean we’re all using the computer so that’s definitely the first place I’d start if I were you know just getting going
man this has been awesome I feel like a lot of these tools are so useful for everyone out there who’s trying to build a merch my Amazon business you guys have like everything that people need right here. So if you guys want to check out merchant form or make sure to check down the link below they have a three day free trial so make sure to check it out. So if you guys are trying to build your merch by Amazon business this is a great way to go to start thinking of sure ideas to start you know looking at the trademarks looking at competition checker niche research all these different tools can really help you build your merch my Amazon business thank you so much, Neil for joining today. This has been super helpful for my audience
appreciate it and one last thing before I go is if you have applied for merch by Amazon account, it doesn’t mean you can’t get started. There are so many other different types of print on demand platforms out there, you know, read bubble, you can do this on Etsy Spreadshirt. So if this is something that you guys want to look into, I would definitely start now getting your products on there while you’re waiting for Amazon to approve your application.
Yeah, and if you guys have any questions about merchant former or whatever, go ahead and type it in the comments. And I might have you back on another episode if people have a bunch of questions about the product and how to scale their merch by Amazon business or RedBubble or Printful, or whatever you guys end up using. There’s so many different platforms to grow a shirt business. So yeah, again, thank you so much, Neil. This has been awesome.
Awesome, appreciate it. Thanks.
I hope you guys enjoyed this really informative breakdown of merch informer which is going to dramatically help your merch my Amazon business Neil covered a lot of different features on this platform. So make sure to try it out and see if it’s for you. And if you guys do want to try out the tool make sure to use the link in the description below and use the code sharing 20 to get 20% off merchant former if you guys liked this episode, leave a comment below let me know if you guys have any more questions for the founder and maybe I can get him to come back on here and talk about it smash the like button subscribe and hit the bell button to be notified of my latest videos. And I’ll see you guys in the next one.Transcribed by https://otter.ai