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Monthly Income Report- July 2017

So this is our first monthly income report after we started selling tshirts on Merch By Amazon. Our Merch By Amazon account was approved on 13th July 2017 after a VEEEEERRRRYYYY LONG wait of almost 5 months….

As soon as our account was approved, we started designing tshirts because we wanted to test the whole process as quickly as we can. Before we get into those details, below are the numbers.

Monthly Income Report for July 2017 (13th July – 31st July)

Tshirts Live	17
Total Tshirts Sold	20
Total Value of Tshirts Sold	$257
Royalties	$22.44

Expenses

None

How did we get there?

When our account was approved, first thing we did was to setup the company tax and bank account information on “Merch By Amazon” portal.

This is an important step as you’re given 120 days after your account is approved to setup your tax and bank information and upload your first product. If this is not updated in 120 days, your account will expire due to inactivity.

We started at tier 10 which means we were allowed to sell 10 designs initially.

Then next big question was……

What Design to create?

We looked at the few Merch related blogs to look at the strategy to find out the designs that are selling well on Amazon which gave us some idea.

But at this point our main goal was to get out of Tier 10 as soon as possible and tier up quickly to higher tiers.

So instead of creating designs in niches already selling on Amazon and wait for those to show up in search results and expecting someone to buy our designs out of hundred others,

we decided to choose a different strategy.

We already had a community and email subscribers from one of blogs in a particular niche. We thought of quickly creating few designs for our community and see if anyone would buy those designs. This would be a quick validation for us.

BUT…….

How to create the designs?

Neither Apurva nor I had designer background so how do we get our designs created.

Because we’re just starting out, we didn’t want to spend too much money to pay a designer to get our designs created.

We needed to validate the idea first…… remember.?

With our minimal design skills, we decided to go ahead and create the designs ourselves.

Amazon provides tshirt templates for designer in 3 formats i.e Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and GIMP.

Tshirt should be 4500 x 5400 px with 300 dpi.

Out of 3 templates, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator were paid and GIMP was FREE….

Obviously we downloaded GIMP.. 🙂 .. At least for now.

We also decided to use Canva for our design creation. Limitation with Canva is that maximum design size is 5000 px so after we create the design in Canva, it needed to be exported and put in a template of 4500 x 5400 as accepted by Amazon.

We did that using GIMP.

( Though Canva is free to use, but you need to have Canva for Work to download designs with transparent designs. We signed up for free trial )

5 designs created 

We quickly created 5 text based designs only and ordered a sample.

First Sale & Idea Validation

We sent out an email to a subset of our email subscribers.

Our Goal was to sell 10 tshirts first, so we can move up to 25 tier.

We kept the tshirt price at the minimum with no royalty for us.  Within minutes after sending the email, we had our FIRST SALE…. 🙂

and in few hours we moved up to 25 tier.. quickly sold 10 t-shirts.

More Designs…. 

Upgrading to 25 tier provided more option to explore but again our target was to reach 100 tier quickly, so we designed more t-shirts for our community and 2-3 designs for an upcoming holiday event.

This time we sent out an email to another subset of our email list to get those +15 sales required for tier upgrade.

By July end, we were able to make 10 more sales but still had to sell 5 more to move to 100 tier.

For upcoming months, our target is to tier up quickly so we can create more designs.

Wishing you all the best in your Merch By Amazon endeavors, and thanks so much for your support.

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