Good news finally came this week with Merch by Amazon! They announced that they started letting us upload new designs for all products sold in America That’s obviously great news for the Merch community as a whole, but I only had 2 slots left when they sent the alert.
I’m currently in the 4,000 tier with 4,000 products live. To date, I’ve sold 3,683 products between USA, UK, and Germany. Instead of deleting design to make room, I’ll just wait for some older ones to fall off or wait for a tier up.
I do have a small arsenal of political season merch ready to upload once I have the slots available. I recommend you start uploading to that niche ASAP though!
Amazon Merch Earnings for June 2020
Let me just start off by telling you how stupid I am. If you read last month’s income report, you’d know that I realized that most of my old sellers lost their BSR while Merch was shut down because of the Coronavirus. When MBA came back, other sellers took over my rank and their designs started selling instead of mine. So I set up some ads to bump my shirts back to the top.
Usually I check on the ads every morning, but I got really busy the last week and a half and neglected to look at the numbers. 3 of my ads that never get clicks started getting a ton of traffic, and zero conversions. So that accounts for almost $100 of my ad spend that returned zero dollars. UGHHH AHHH GRRRR
I did, however, get 3 of my old bestsellers back to making 10+ sales each per month 🙂
June 2019 Amazon Merch Earnings Breakdown
- USA Royalties – $514.98
- UK Royalties – £20.18
- GERMANY Royalties – €20.73
TOTAL ROYALTIES = $536.43
Amazon Ad Spend – $0
JUNE 2019 NET INCOME: $536.43
June 2020 Amazon Merch Earnings Breakdown
- USA Royalties – $657.94
- UK Royalties – £24.50
- GERMANY Royalties – €13.99
TOTAL ROYALTIES = $704.17
Amazon Ad Spend: ($192.48)
JUNE 2020 NET INCOME: $511.69
If it weren’t for that stupid Amazon sponsored ads mess up, I would have beaten last year’s number. Instead I made $24.74 less than last year. Given, I’m still excited about the numbers with Merch only having less than 25% of all of my designs live and the longer fulfillment time from all of the COVID stuff going on.
I also beat last month’s numbers by $222.79 which is obviously great, especially without uploading anything new.
My Shopify Store
My Shopify site is still taking a big hit from COVID-19. It’s a niche store that doesn’t do so well when people aren’t at work, so I don’t expect this one to make any money for a few months. If it doesn’t have an impressive fourth quarter, I’m shutting it down or moving it to WordPress to just collect advertising money from. It gets traffic to the blog, but isn’t converting on the storefront now.
Here is the breakdown of the huge 1 sale month I had:
- Sales income – $24
- Shopify transaction fees – ($1.00)
- Paypal fees – ($0)
- Shopify monthly fee – ($29)
- Refund for late order – ($0)
- Printful costs – ($0)
- Printify costs – ($0)
- Printed Mint costs – ($ 18.71)
- Sales tax – ($0)
SHOPIFY NET LOSS: $24.71
WAH WAH WAHHHH
Etsy Shops Income
Write about how thankful I was that Printify came back and using Printed Mint for heather midnight navy and gift messages. Increased ad spend, didn’t do so hot.
Etsy Earnings (Gross by Sales):
- General Designs Store: $1,420.43
- Niche Store 1: $803.87
- Niche Store 2: $80.63
GROSS INCOME: $2,304.93
Costs
- Etsy fees (transaction fees, listing fees, advertising, off-page ads):
- General Designs Store: ($338.88)
- Niche Store 1: ($261.49)
- Niche Store 2: ($21.73)
- *Merch Fulfillment (across all Etsy Shops):
- Printful: ($51.27)
- Printify: ($1067.14)
- Printed Mint: ($236.80)
TOTAL COSTS: $1,977.31
NET INCOME: $327.61
Despite more sales and revenue, June made $20.94 less in my Etsy shops than in May. My printing fees were way lower since I got back on Printify and could take advantage of the Printify Premium pricing, but I definitely overspent on Etsy Ads this month.
Print on Demand Sites
If you haven’t started using Orbitkit yet, what are you waiting for? I haven’t uploaded anything to any of these platforms below since 2019, yet I’m still making some nice passive income. I owe that 100% to being able to bulk upload them across all of these sites like Amazon Merch with Orbitkit.
If you sign up with my link (https://www.orbitkit.com?offer=ORG204292) you’ll get a special discount. And if you don’t like it during the first 30 days, they’ll refund you. The discount is $5 for the starter or $20 for pro. The site days $35 and $90, but you’ll get the discounted rate if it’s your first month. It just doesn’t show up until you create a free account.
Redbubble: $121.93 (beat last month by 73 cents haha!)
Cafepress: $19.31
Spreadshirt: $37.02
Spreadshirt UK:21.95 (GBP) AKA $27.37 USD
Fine Art America/Pixels: $18
Zazzle: $26.31
Society6: $6.30
Tee Public: $26
Amazon KDP: $14.58
JUNE 2020 POD TOTAL: $296.82
Beat my May numbers by $62.34. Without uploading anything to these shops in the last half a year, I’m willing to call these print on demand companies passive income.
If you’re looking for something completely passive, I think the regular merch POD sites like Redbubble, Tee Public, and Zazzle are your best bets. I am seeing a consistent drop month to month for Amazon KDP journals ever since I stopped publishing. I’m assuming there is a freshness factor to moving up the ranks on Amazon to sell your stuff with that, while the other traditional merch sites seem to be gaining by sitting back.
Blog Affiliates and Advertising Income
I haven’t really added much to any of my blogs over the last couple of months. I’ve just been playing around with some SEO tactics on each site to see if they cause any movement, so I don’t want to also add posts that can change the experiment around. This site is the only one I’ve actually been updating since April.
Advertising/Affiliate Income:
- Bovada: $46.62
- Amazon Associates: $4.04
- Merch Informer: $0
- OrbitKit: $0
- PlaceIt: $4.44
- AirBnB^: $20
- Rakuten LinkShare: $12.51
- Printful: $9.77
- Printify: $0
- Google AdSense: $31.07
- Medium*: $0.45
ADVERTISING/AFFILIATE INCOME JUNE 2020: $128.90
Woo! Another category I increased over the last month. I increased my earnings by $46.41 with advertising and affiliate income from my blogs.
^AirBnB is not exactly money in the bank. I’m earning credits to my account for referrals, but I still count that since travel is important to me and I’ve been able to go on some great trips for free with all of the Airbnb credit I’ve built up. See all that available and pending credit I have! I’ve already used around $2,500 over the last 3 years.
I didn’t even include Medium last month because I’m literally making pennies there. But it’s in my Paypal deposit history, so I might as well throw it on here for the laugh.
Amazon Seller Account
Zero dollars. Not much to report here this month. I got a warning from Amazon about my late fulfillment and deliveries in May, so I shut it down. I usually sell a few mugs every month on Amazon, but I’m going to wait until Printful and Printify can become reliable with quicker turnaround times post-COVID.
Total Earnings and Thoughts
We did it! We made it to the end of this article. I appreciate you taking the journey with me here.
Net Earnings by Category:
- Amazon Merch: $511.69
- Etsy Shops: $327.61
- Shopify: ($24.71) loss
- POD Sites: $296.82
- Affiliates and Advertising: $128.90
- Amazon Seller Account: $0
GRAND TOTAL: $1,240.31
Thoughts & Comments on June
Another month of passive income increasing! Last month all of my projects brought in a net income of $955.46 so that means I’ve increased my monthly income in June by $284.85 by doing a whole lot of nothing.
Actually, I have been doing something. I started a new day job and have been spending my free time writing blog posts here and looking into starting my own Amazon FBA business. Which leads me to…
…technically I made less than what I just reported. Earlier this year I found a couple of products that I wanted to start selling on Amazon and also create my own website and brand. You know…a real business. I’m sure you may have heard whisperings of this, but the world shut down because of Coronavirus for a few months. I thought it would be a good idea to put it all on hold until we knew what’s going on in the world.
A couple of weeks ago I was listening to a business podcast where the host said “Launch and adjust. Execute or don’t.” That lit a little fire under my ass, so I picked the product business back up and ordered custom samples from two of the vendors I liked on Alibaba.
Those samples, plus the insane shipping, cost a total of $405. So if we’re going to count that towards my monthly income, I only made $835.31
Are any of you readers interested in me writing about my Amazon FBA journey? Or should I just stick to the merch and POD stuff? I’m here to serve you!
Were you moved by this article?
I just spent most of a Saturday writing this article hoping to help some people in the print on demand or online side business game try to figure out how to maximize their profits.
I’ll never ask my readers for money, but if you haven’t signed up for any of the services below and plan to, please do so through my links where I’ll get either an affiliate commission or some other form of payment (ie free Etsy listings) from you signing up.
- Sign up for Printify
- Sign up for Printful
- Sign up for Etsy Sellers – Get your first 20 listings up for free
- Sign up for Orbitkit – Upload all of your merch designs to multiple POD sites all at once. Or just sign up for free to manage and track all of your designs in one place.
- Sign up for Merch Informer – probably the best print on demand/Amazon Merch research tool available (Use coupon code 2NDSCREENS to save 20%)
- Get free stocks from Robinhood and/or WeBull!
Leave a Reply