Select Page
How To Use Rank Tracking To Optimize Merch by Amazon Listings

How To Use Rank Tracking To Optimize Merch by Amazon Listings

How To Use Rank Tracking To Optimize Merch by Amazon Listings

This post is also available in: German

The vast majority of Merchers use a spray and pray approach when it comes to uploading shirts. You upload your limit of shirts, and hope something sells.

This CAN work, but over the years it has gotten hard and harder, making research even that more important.

But…

Let’s say that you went through all the research steps, found a good subniche where there are buyers for your shirt designs, and you know what makes up a good design! All that is left is to list it right?

Yes and no!

The first step is listing it, using keywords in your title, bullet points and description to make a great listing for a customer. However, if you want to have a design catalog with thousands of designs that are selling monthly (and not just hoping someone buys it), then you NEED to keep an eye on your listings to optimize keywords in order to push your shirt up the rankings. The higher ranked your shirt is for specific keywords, the more sales you will make and the more royalties will flow into your account.

This works great for new listings, but also is important and something to keep in mind with sellers that you think you can grab some more volume from.

If you want to follow along in this guide and do NOT have Merch Informer, make sure to grab the 7 day free trial here: https://members.merchinformer.com/trial (no credit card required) so that we can start optimizing your shirts.

Optimizing a Merch T-Shirt Design

Keywords are what make this business go round! The better placed your keywords are, the more visibility they will have with the audience that will buy your shirts.

If you have a great design but do not take the time to optimize anything, you might be stuck at the back of 50,000 other designs with no way to get seen. The best thing for you to do if you are in this position is actually go watch the video in this post which lays out how to get started:

How to Keyword Merch Listings

Once you have a good understanding of how this all works, we can start actually optimizing the listings.

Step 1: Adding Designs

The first thing you want to do is make sure you have a Merch Informer account, so go ahead and log into that.

From the left hand corner menu, select the Merch Tracker. This handy little module will let you track your designs and keywords across Amazon. This will allow us to figure out where we are ranking so that we can make the appropriate changes in order to boost our position.

Go ahead and add the ASIN of one of your designs to the ASIN box. If you do not know where to find this, you can open up any Merch by Amazon t-shirt, scroll down to the product details, and then copy and paste the ASIN inside of Merch Informer:

I have selected a trump design to illustrate how this works for example purposes. We are using this design because the seller is missing out on a lot of opportunity here. Enter in the ASIN into Merch Informer:

Go ahead and click save and you will get a notice that it has successfully been added:

Step 2: Adding Keywords

The second step to this is adding some keywords. First though, lets break down all the functionality to get you used to using the tool.

When you first add a design to the tool you will see the design itself, a little clock, a trashcan, and the title, ASIN and keywords slot.

The little clock icon will track this design over time to show you sales rank and pricing. The trashcan will remove it from the list. The longer you keep tracking your designs, the more data you will have to actually optimize your listings!

What is really important here are the keywords.

Here is the listing of the design that we added:

You can tell it has some decent keywords in there, and it looks like the design in question has 10 customer reviews (ASIN screenshot above). However, this seller is leaving a LOT of money on the table by not actually optimizing this listing.

Head on over to the product search inside of Merch Informer and look up the keyword “Trump” and you will see what I mean.

You can get to this screenshot by clicking on the little “i” icon under the product.

You will see that this shirt not only is priced higher, but it is selling a LOT.

Take a look at their listing:

What you should be doing is figuring out WHAT keywords in these other listings are doing well for these designs, and we will try and incorporate them into our listing after we track them to figure out what is going on.

So now, let’s add some keywords to the original listing that we put into the tracker.

The first thing I like to do is actually look at any reviews and see if there are any keywords THERE that we could possibly add to the listing.

It looks like there is:

Right there in plain site we see the keyword “president trump”, yet somehow this is NOT included in the listing for the shirt we are going to track. I also notice in these other listings the following keywords:

  • donald trump shirt
  • president trump
  • trump 2020
  • trump is my president
  • trump supporter

So start by adding these to the keywords inside of Merch Informer.

When you first add them, they will look like this:

If a keyword has not been tracked, you will want to click on the “not tracked yet” button which will give you a rank for the design on Amazon.

After adding all the keywords, we have this:

Only a single keyword out of the ones we are tracking is ranking (and not very good ranking at that). The rest are not even in the top 100 results! This means that this seller is leaving probably a good $1000+ a month on the table, because they are not taking the time to optimize the listing.

So, lets optimize!

Step 3: Optimizing the Merch by Amazon Listing

Here are the two bullet points in the design we are tracking:

  • Haters gonna hate! This funny trump tee is the perfect shirt for any conservative or republican who loves seeing liberals get up in arms about the president. Support Donald and the cause by rocking out this political gift tee today!
  • Funny Haters Gonna Hate Donald Trump T-Shirt President Tee makes a great gift for friends and family.

These are “okay” but the goal here is to actually get some of the keywords that we are tracking into these bullet points AND the title where it makes sense. If Amazon sees these keywords in the right spots (where it makes sense of course) then they will slowly move the shirt up the rankings.

Here is the title of the design:

  • Funny Haters Gonna Hate Donald Trump T-Shirt President Tee

First, let’s tackle the title.

The title by itself is good, but I want to put 1 keyword in there.

From our list of tracking, we see that we have the keyword “president trump” but that is actually not together in any of the listing.

So, if I was this seller, I would make this small change to the title:

  • Funny Haters Gonna Hate Donald Trump T-Shirt President Trump Tee

As you can see, all we did was add “trump” to the title, to make the full keyword president trump show up.

Now that the title is taken care of, lets move on to the bullet points. We have 4 more keywords to POSSIBLY use (there is no need to always use all of them. Using too many could make your listing look spammy).

  • donald trump shirt
  • trump 2020
  • trump is my president
  • trump supporter

Lets see if we can fit these into the bullet points. Look for the bolded text to see what was added:

  • Haters gonna hate! This funny trump tee is the perfect donald trump shirt for any conservative or republican who loves seeing liberals get up in arms about the president. Show that you are a trump supporter and the cause by rocking out this political gift tee today!
  • Funny Haters Gonna Hate Donald Trump T-Shirt President Tee makes a great gift for friends and family. Show your activism for trump 2020 by wearing this design so that you can proudly say trump is my president!

and there you have it! With just a single sentence and a few slight changes, we have optimized the bullet points to include some extra keywords that other designs are pulling in the sales with.

The next step would be to change these on Merch by Amazon and then watch your ranks inside of the Merch Tracker every day. I would personally give them about a month or so to see some movement. After 30 days, you may wish to revisit your design, or start looking at putting some ad spend behind your shirt!

Wrapping It Up

This method DOES require a little bit more effort – about 5 minutes more.

However, if merchers actually took the time to optimize their account and keep tabs on their designs, they would easily grow with the platform and see increased sales.

All it takes is a few minutes a day or one big day of optimizing to start seeing some returns. After all, it takes a while to get ranked, but even if you are ranked, you could STILL be missing out on some of that Merch Money.

Let me know if you have any questions or how we can help you to optimize your designs even easier in the comments below!

To your success!

Evergreen Versus Trending and Seasonal Merch by Amazon Designs – Understanding The Difference

Evergreen Versus Trending and Seasonal Merch by Amazon Designs – Understanding The Difference

Evergreen Versus Trending and Seasonal Merch by Amazon Designs – Understanding The Difference

This post is also available in: German

When it comes to any print on demand business out there, and especially Merch by Amazon, there are 3 core areas on how to build your business: Evergreen, Trending, and Seasonal designs.

While this seems pretty straight forward on the surface, there seems to be some confusion on each of these areas, where they overlap, and how Amazon works with each. Today we are going to go over each of these in detail, and why you might think you are going into a trending niche but really, you are no where to be found and finding it impossible to rank.

Lets jump into it!

Evergreen Merch Designs

Evergreen at its core just means that something has enduring popularity. Put in simple terms, evergreen merch designs are going to be those designs who appeal to an audience that buys YEAR round! They will buy these shirts in January. They will buy them in August, and they will purchase the shirts for Christmas.

Just because they buy a shirt during Christmas season does NOT mean that it is not an evergreen design (more on that further down).

Most of the largest Merch by Amazon sellers build the base of their account on evergreen designs. This acts as a hedge for slower months. If you have shirts that sell year in and year out, you guarantee yourself a base level of income even when it seems that the majority of the buyer pool is drying up in the dog days of summer.

Think of evergreen designs as those BIG niches you hear about every day in life and in Facebook groups: dogs, unicorns, jobs… these are all evergreen broad niches.

Looking at this design, one might automatically think about the 4th of July and think it is seasonal or trending, but in reality, this is simply an American flag patriotic shirt, which will sell YEAR round. This is an evergreen shirt.

The sales data backs it up!

As you can see, the sales are consistent over longer periods of time making this design evergreen.

So many people think that seasonal niches are trending designs when they see something like this.

In reality, these are evergreen shirts with seasonal sales.

Let me say that again….evergreen designs with seasonal sales! This is why when you find something you think is trending and put up a bunch of shirts thinking you will easily rank and make money, you are left wondering why no one can find your designs!

Evergreen niches with seasonal sales are very hard to rank for. The reason is that people have been uploading in these niches for years and Amazon gives priority to shirts with reviews, sales rank (the shirts have sales velocity and click through rate data) and have been optimized to be sellers. When you come along in a sea of 10,000 other shirts in an evergreen niche that just has some seasonal sales, you stand very little chance.

This is where keyword research comes into play. If you find a niche like this, you CAN break through with the proper research and optimization. That being said, if you make a mediocre design in the “dog” niche, and do not dive down on new phrases and long tail keywords, you will still be stuck.

The idea is that even though these niches are getting crowded, find a way to stick out. Find a way to use keywords that are still being searched for on Amazon but not by thousands of people. This gives you a chance to start ranking for the main keywords if you can squeeze out some sales on lesser used keywords.

The video below is a long one, but this goes over exactly how you can easily come up with phrases that people will buy that are not saturated on Amazon:

[embedded content]

Seasonal Merch Designs

Seasonal merch designs are NOT trending designs. Just because you see a shirt taking off does not mean it is a trend. In fact, almost all seasonal merch designs are part of an evergreen base that just has seasonal sales. For example, Christmas designs. Christmas occurs every single year and because of that, people have been uploading Christmas related shirts since the beginning of the internet.

There are all types of “seasons” that can be considered seasonal. There are holidays every year that are part of a season: Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, Halloween. There are seasons for specific hobbies such as mushrooms, and then there are seasonal niches that occur at a specific time but are not necessarily a holiday or a hobby: 100 days of school, groundhog day, pi day.

Seasonal niches are something that occur every single year meaning that every year they will see a spike in buyers. This does not mean that they are trending designs, but that certain designs can trend DURING that season (I hope that makes sense).

An example I always like to go back to is Mushrooms. There is a specific time window where people go out and harvest mushrooms.

Here you can see the keywords in the Merch Informer keyword tool. If you click on the far right information icon, you will see exactly what I was describing above.

See that graph at the very bottom of the screenshot? That is a Google Trends graph and shows you when the keyword gets popular and starts spiking in the amount of searches people are making.

This graph CLEARLY shows when the season occurs for morel mushroom hunting. Every single year it happens at the same time (just like all the niches mentioned above).

The key to sticking out in seasonal niches is three fold:

  • Be Unique
  • Get designs up early
  • Niche Down

When you find a seasonal niche you want to go into, you first want to do your research. You can use the video above to figure out how to be unique by coming up with your own phrases (that people still want to buy!), but you also want to get your designs up early to make sure you have a chance to rank. Your chance to rank will have a lot to do with optimization as well as niching down within the overarching seasonal niche that you are going into.

For more info about seasonal niches, make sure to check out this article we did:

A Definitive Guide On Seasonal Niches – How To Find, Rank, And Manage Your Listings

Trending Merch Designs

Trending designs are a great thing to get into when you are first jumping into Merch by Amazon as these have the possibility to rank quickly and get you tiered up in record time if you land on something that hits!

Trending designs are something that is trending because of a specific event that does not always happen every year. Since these are one off events, there are almost always no other long standing shirts on Amazon. This means that there is no competition that has been selling for years previous, there are not thousands of designs before you, and there are no shirts with reviews if you catch it early enough!

The perfect example of this that is current as of this article is: Storm Area 51.

If you are not familiar with this, there was a Facebook group set up about storming area 51 and figuring out what was really there. This movement has become HUGE!

Now, there have been lots of “Area 51” shirts up on Merch. These would be considered evergreen shirts. However, the phrases and sayings being used to promote this “storm area 51” are trending because it is a one off event that has seemingly come out of nowhere and exploded. If you were to catch this trend early, there was ZERO shirts for a while on Merch. The ones that got in early are seeing massive success and sales by getting in early.

As you can see from this example, they even included some different terms in their shirt (such as 5k fun run), but also used the saying that is being spread everywhere “They can’t stop all of us”.

Getting in early had its advantages for this seller!

They managed to make hundreds of dollars from one simple design because they decided to put in the work and do the research.

Not only that, but if this was a new seller at a lower tier, this would ensure that they tiered up and got more slots to increase their earnings potential going forward in their Merch by Amazon Journey!

Wrapping It Up

No matter if you are a long time Merch by Amazon seller or someone just starting, it is important to understand the difference between these three areas. This alone could save you a bunch of headache as you fill out your account.

When you are starting off, focusing on just evergreen could be a slow journey to get out of those initial tiers. The most important thing early on is sales volume so that you can open up more slots for evergreen designs. You should be looking into niching down, seasonal and trending designs. Once you have the space, build the foundation for your business on evergreen designs but never completely ignore one of these 3 categories.

And most of all, don’t get fooled into thinking you have found the perfect trend when really you found an evergreen niches with seasonal sales!

Good luck building your Merch business!

How To Scale Your Merch Account Through Amazon Advertising (AMS) Automation

How To Scale Your Merch Account Through Amazon Advertising (AMS) Automation

How To Scale Your Merch Account Through Amazon Advertising (AMS) Automation

This post is also available in: German

It has been a while since we posted anything on the Merch Informer blog, and for good reason!

The last few weeks we have been extensively testing one of the coolest tools that has JUST hit the market that anyone serious about Merch by Amazon will easily find the value in. This tool takes one of the only guaranteed ways to scale any business (advertising), and takes it to an entirely new level!

I should have titled this blog post “how to scale your merch account through amazon advertising without losing your mind”. Lets face it, competition is increasing on Merch by Amazon. Using the proper keywords to get in front of the right audience is only a single piece of the puzzle. Once you have a successful design, if you really want to grow your numbers, you have to act like a business and put some ad spend behind your assets (your designs). When you have a design catalog of 100+ or even 10,000+ designs, this entire process becomes near impossible. You have to set up ads one at a time, change bids, add campaign names…the list goes on and on…for each and EVERY shirt.

There are people in the Merch Community that have spent over 1,000 hours creating ads for all of their shirts, and their royalty numbers reflect this.

But what if there was a way to create all of these ads for ALL of your designs in just a few button clicks?

^^That sounds like absolutely click bait, but ever since we have started testing this tool, it has really blown us away.

Introducing Merch Amigo – Merch Ad Automation

Merch Amigo is the brain child of someone this community knows very well: Ken Reil.

Ken has not only become a great friend over the years, but has his hand on the pulse of Merch by Amazon.

He is leading the fight against frivolous trademarks (through the Trademark Watch Dawgs), knows more about licensing art for his Merch account than anyone I know…and knows a thing or two about selling a LOT of clothing through the platform.

One of the driving factors behind getting the initial boost in search and getting great selling designs to the first page has been to put ad spend behind his business. There is absolutely no quicker way to get your designs in front of the right audience.

Doing the ads one by one is something that most of us do NOT want to do, so Ken came up with the automated solution and let us tag along for the ride in making sure everything was working properly in just a few clicks of a button. Merch Amigo is truly the Amazon Advertising solution that you need if you run a real merch business.

Let’s get into how it works!

How To Set Up Merch Amigo In 3 Easy Steps

Step 1: Get The extension

The first step is to actually go get the Merch Amigo chrome extension here: https://merchamigo.com/.

Sign up (which is 100% FREE), and get the extension by clicking on the link!

Step 2: Log Into Merch by Amazon

The next step after you have the extension installed is to log into your Merch by Amazon account.

Go to your “manage” tab and you will see that now you have the extension enabled, the manage tab has a navigation bar.

Step 3: Click Settings

From the manage tab, click on the settings button.

This will bring up the settings window. In order to get the plugin to “talk” to Amazon advertising and your Merch account, we need to enter in some settings.

The first is your US Account ID:

To get your US Account ID, log in to advertising.amazon.com (you can click this link), and your ID will be the LAST string in the URL. What you need to copy and paste will be right after “entityld=”.

Copy and paste that into the account ID into the settings and the plugin is now ready to work!

Before you save and reload the page, make sure you enter:

  • Daily Budget – This is the TOTAL amount you will spend per day PER ad that you set up with Merch Amigo.
  • Default Bid – This is how much you will spend “per click” on your ads.
  • Campaign Bidding Strategy – This is how the ads will function. If you want to spend the same amount per click every time, start this at “fixed bids”. If you want them to change depending on the competition to get more clicks, you can switch to dynamic bids.

Once you have selected these settings, click on save and reload and you are now ready to set up your automated ads!

Automating Your Merch by Amazon Ads

Let’s go through the functionality of how this is going to make your life a LOT easier to set up and start running ads immediately.

Note: This is phase 1 of the plugin which has everything you need to get started. There is a LOT more in development that we will let you know about in time.

When you go to your manage tab, you will now have the Merch Amigo bar at the very top:

You can set up GLOBAL bids by clicking on the settings button like we did above, but the way it starts, is that you can create individual ads by clicking “create ad” under each shirt.

This will use your global settings (for budget and bid), but if you have a shirt you want to change budget and bids on the fly, you can change that in the top menu bar!

Clicking on “create ad” will automatically open up an Amazon Advertising tab and prefill everything for you, including the name of your campaign (the clothing title) so that you can easily track later.

Here is an example shirt. This shows what settings were selected and everything is pre filled:

That’s pretty great and all, but the reason we got excited about this tool is when you switch the selector at the very top under “ad type”

Once you have this flipped on, it allows you to create ALL the ads with the click of a single button:

You can go through and select what shirts you want to run ads for individually, or you can set the selected (right below the live dropdown menu) to on, which will select ALL your shirts on that page.

Then all you have to do is click on “create” and it will open up all the AMS tabs for you with ALL of the information in the campaign prefilled. The only thing you have to do from there is click on “launch campaign”.

There is also an option as you can see from the top menu to run group ads, but I would recommend running 1 campaign with a single shirt in that campaign for the best results!

Wrapping It Up

Head over to Merch Amigo and grab a free account to try it out here: https://merchamigo.com/.

That about wraps up what this tool can do right now (and Ken has some amazing updates planned in the next couple of weeks).

What used to take hours and hours of “pull your hair out” time, can now be done in 3 button clicks. Click the “ad type” selector to on, Click the “select all” slider to select all the shirts on the page, and then finally click create to launch all the pre-filled tabs. Everything done for you so that you can spend time on what REALLY matters, creating and uploading so that more customers can buy your products on Merch by Amazon!

After you have clicked the link above and given it a spin, let us know what you think in the comments below.

Until next time, keep creating!