Last month I finally got started with a Bullet Journal to try and get my life and side businesses in order. I’m finding it super helpful, and also has me putting organization to things I didn’t plan on getting set up.
One of the things I started organizing is monthly earnings report. After I did my May report, I figured it might be a good idea to start posting a more elaborate version on this blog for anyone interested in my earnings and anything I do to increase those numbers in the future.
So here we go with my first ever earnings report…
Amazon Merch Earnings for May 2020
Most people come to this blog for my Merch by Amazon information, so let’s get on with that first.
April was a serious kick in the ass for everyone in the Merch community since all Merch products were suspended in the US from March 25th until May 1st. This served as a big reminder not to put all of your eggs in one basket and to make sure you diversify your income streams as much as possible.
I was really hoping for a huge May to make up for zero sales in April, but I only have about 950 of my 3990 designs live.
Side by Side May 2019 vs May 2020 Merch Sales (USA)
As you can see I has almost a 50% cut in sales year over year. That sucks! Luckily I increased prices on my shirts to bring up the margin a bit.
The £19.84 ($25.13USD) I made from UK sales didn’t really help much, but it was nice to finally get some sales there, especially during such a down month for me.
Something else that really hurt, and will continue to hurt my income, is it seems like all BSRs on Amazon kind of reset since nothing was selling for anyone over the April Covid-19 shut down. That means that my best sellers, that usually account for hundreds of dollars each month, are now lower on Amazon searches and making way less money.
For example, my number 1 shirt sold 43 times in February, 26 in January, and 35 in December. In May…6!
Once I realized that the BSR was all messed up and my top shirts were ranking horribly, I started throwing money at advertising. Unfortunately an entire week passed before I realized this was happening. I think my best seller is just dead now since I could only get 4 purchases out of a month of advertising.
At the end of the day, I ended up losing money on advertising everything. That being said, I was able to revive two different designs that are now starting to sell again without advertising. I can justify the loss if the BSR gets boosted for designs to sell organically.
Even if I wanted to upload more designs right now, I can’t since I only have 10 slots left plus all USA products are on hold for new uploads. That also sucks because I have always made great money by capitalizing on trending things Trump says. And if anyone is on Twitter or catches the news the last month, you know he’s saying plenty of trend-worthy stuff!
2019 Amazon Merch Earnings – $637.93
- Royalties – $637.93
- Amazon Ad Spend – $0
2020 Amazon Merch Earnings – $288.90
- Royalties – $424.37
- Amazon Ad Spend – $135.47
That is a $349.03 loss compared to last year!!!!
My Shopify Store
This sucked bigtime, so I’m going to rip the Band-aid off right now.
I have 3 designs that sell like crazy in May, increasing every year, for a particular event. With everything shut down for Coronavirus, this event did not happen so I sold ZERO shirts.
My Shopify store does not do that well throughout the year, but May and Christmas time do so well that I keep paying my fees and occasionally updating the site. Last year I made over $2000 profit from just my Shopify store. Let’s look at 2020 🙁
I made 13 sales over the month. 6 of them canceled because Printful and Printify were estimating a whole month to fulfill t-shirt orders, so customers were canceling. I also ended up giving a customer a $40 refund on a 3 shirt order place at the end of April since Printful would not let me cancel the order as it sat in “picked” on fulfillment for weeks. Anyone familiar with Printful knows that once it goes to picked, the order cannot be stopped or refunded.
Here is the breakdown of the huge 4 sale month I had:
- Sales income – $168.89
- Shopify transaction fees – ($3.92)
- Paypal fees – ($3.09)
- Shopify monthly fee – ($29)
- Refund for late order – ($40)
- Printful costs – ($48.82)
- Printify costs – ($34.53)
- Printed Mint costs – ($ 18.71)
- Sales tax – ($6.89)
Combined that comes out to a $16.07 net loss for the entire month. I was really banking on another May of making a couple thousand dollars, but instead I just flat out lost money. Thanks Corona.
Etsy Stores
I currently have 3 Etsy stores. 1 is a general store and the other 2 are niches. The newest one was more of an experiment to try out a silly theme, and it hasn’t exactly taken off but it requires zero upkeep and makes a few bucks a month.
I feel like whatever money I did make in May on my Etsy shops should have an asterisk next to it for how much therapy I’m going to need to pay for after all of the stress caused by Printful.
In the middle of the month I just had to shut down my store. I wrote up a whole rant about Printful’s poor customer service during Coronavirus if you care to read about it. Just know for now that I had no faith in them so I shut down my stores for fear of having to pay for orders that customers would cancel.
After a week of being shut down, I got an email from Printed Mint with their updated fulfillment time. They were apologizing because it would be delayed and take a whole 7-10 days fulfillment. Are you kidding me? Printify and Printful were on 25 day fulfillment times!! I opened my shop back up and just crossed my fingers that most of my orders could be fulfilled by them.
I didn’t do horrible for the entire month considering I was shut down for an entire week and had to cancel many orders.
Etsy Earnings (Gross by Sales):
- General Designs Store: $1,005.37
- Niche Store 1: $761.55
- Niche Store 2: $50.82
GROSS INCOME: $1,817.74
Costs
- Etsy fees (transaction fees, listing fees, advertising, off-page ads):
- General Designs Store: ($193.96)
- Niche Store 1: ($157.84)
- Niche Store 2: ($3.25)
- *Merch Fulfillment (across all Etsy Shops):
- Printful: ($319.26)
- Printify: ($377.31)
- Printed Mint: ($418.17)
TOTAL COSTS: $1,469.19
NET INCOME: $348.55
I didn’t do as good a job tracking all of the comings and goings fo my money in 2019, but for a reference my sales for my 2 Etsy Shops in May 2019 were $1,868.40 with Etsy fees of $353.24. I used Printful only last year so my costs were definitely higher, which means I made more money this year than last year despite being shut down for an entire week. Finally a bit of somewhat good news.
Print on Demand Sites
With Amazon shut down for so long, I was really hoping a lot of the traffic would have moved to the Merch alternative sites. It really ended up just about equaling last year.
I also haven’t uploaded to any of these sites or added a journal to KDP since Q4 2019, so it is officially passive income at this point.
Redbubble:
- May 2019: $105.85
- May 2020: $121.20
Cafepress:
- May 2019: $13.41
- May 2020: $2.41
Spreadshirt:
- May 2019: $62.00
- May 2020: $31.50
Spreadshirt UK:
- May 2019: $14.57
- May 2020: $18.72
Fine Art America/Pixels:
- May 2019: $5
- May 2020: $0
Zazzle:
- May 2019: $14.69
- May 2020: $15.70
Society6:
- May 2019: $1.30
- May 2020: $10.20
Tee Public:
- May 2019: $0
- May 2020: $12.00
Amazon KDP:
- May 2019: $112.11
- May 2020: $22.75
2019 POD TOTAL: $328.93
2020 POD TOTAL: $234.48
So, we were in the middle of a worldwide pandemic, there were record unemployment numbers in the US, and I haven’t uploaded since November. I’ll take that $234 passive income with a smile on my face.
Blog Affiliates and Advertising Income
I’m a bit of a website hoarder. I started making Adsense farms in 2009 then moved onto making some affiliate websites (this site kind of being a combination of the two actually).
I have some blogs that I haven’t updated in over 5 years, but they still make enough money from Adsense and occasional affiliate orders that they are worth the $10 annual renewal fees.
This ended up being a bit of a slow month, I never expect much from these. But writing about it now kind of lights up a bit of a fire to try and revamp them to get more traffic or possibly start a new niche blog.
*Some of the links below are affiliate links where I could earn money upon you signing up or making a purchase.
Affiliate Income:
- May 2019: $0
- May 2020: $17.16
- May 2019: $3.43
- May 2020: $6.67
- May 2019: $0
- May 2020: $0
- May 2019: $0
- May 2020: $0
- May 2019: $0
- May 2020: $15
- May 2019: ?? – Stats don’t go back that far
- May 2020: $20
- May 2019: $0
- May 2020: $16.60
I usually only get affiliate earnings with Rakuten Advertising (LinkShare) by advertising Raise.com.
- May 2019: $0
- May 2020: $0
- May 2019: $0
- May 2020: $0
- May 2019: $13.02
- May 2020: $26.42
Affiliates/etc. May 2019: $16.45
Affiliates/etc. May 2020: $82.29
Amazon Seller Account
I used to do a lot of retail arbitrage when I lived in Los Angeles, but after moving back east to Long Island, I haven’t been able to find a lot of stores with enough good stuff to flip on Amazon. I got rid of my paid account and have a basic one that really just sells a couple mugs every month with some decent earnings in Q4.
With only 5 different mugs listed on Amazon, I’m now realizing it might be worth adding some more. I originally stopped because I wasn’t making much money selling with Printful fulfillment, but if I’m using Printify, It is about $6 profit per mug.
May 2019 Amazon – I made somewhere around $300, but that was from my last retail arbitrage flip before moving away from Los Angeles. I did not list any of my own merch on there at that time.
May 2020 Amazon:
- Sales: $75.44
- Amazon Fees: ($14.28)
- Late shipment refund: ($3.00)
- Printing Mugs:
- Printful: ($14.94)
- Printify: ($11.46)
- Printed Mint: ($14.45)
TOTAL AMAZON INCOME: $17.31
Total Earnings and Thoughts
Thanks for bearing with me on my first earnings report. Please comment below and let me know what you think about it. Is it helpful at all? Should I add anything? Take anything out or do less of something?
Net Earnings by Category:
- Amazon Merch: $288.90
- Etsy Shops: $348.55
- Shopify: ($16.07) loss
- POD Sites: $234.48
- Affiliates and Advertising: $82.29
- Amazon Seller Account: $17.31
GRAND TOTAL: $955.46
Thoughts & Comments on May
Well I wasn’t really expecting anything big in May after the Coronavirus pandemic shut so much down. People weren’t working and didn’t need my silly slogan t-shirts. Some of my bigger niches rely on people at certain events, which were shut down.
I learned a lot about the importance about diversifying. And it is not just diversifying where you are earning money. I learned you really should be diversifying , or at least giving yourself options, with how your business is run. If Printful was my only print provider, I would have been screwed bigtime with that crazy turnaround time.
I’m already using Printful and Printify, but Printed Mint ended up saving the day by giving me a chance to open back up my shop and get some orders out. Then, I was able to immediately start sending orders to Printify when MyLocker and Dream Junction reopened and had under 1 day turnaround times.
I also realized I’ve been wasting a lot of time not doing anything. Its really an amazing thing that I could get away with not uploading a single design to any of these sites, barely writing blog posts, and still net almost $1,000 in a month. There are still so many hours in the day that I can find to put more content out there to try and make money on.
Speaking of “trying” to make money. I’ll just mention that a lot of my day-time spent on weekdays has been obsessing with the stock market. I’ve been tinkering with Robinhood and trying to swing trade. I lost $1,000 pretty fast, but now I’m making close to $100 per day trading options. There is a lot of learning to do there!
If you want to help feed my stock obsession, use my Robinhood affiliate link or my WeBull affiliate link to sign up and get free stock with your own deposit.
Plans
I guess I should close with some sort of plan for next month to do better.
I’m still trying to start up an ecommerce business selling products I’m importing from China. This is turning out to be difficult with trade wars and Coronavirus, but I think I’ll be making an order by the end of June! I’m just waiting for 2 new samples from a couple factories after I had them work on the last versions I got. If either of them work, I’m about to write a big scary check.
I keep using the “starting an ecommerce business” excuse for not doing much else. But, it’s really a lot of sending an email and waiting. I have plenty of time to fix up my old blogs or start uploading new designs on Etsy and other POD sites until Merch is accepting new uploads.
Biden officially got all of the votes needed to be the Democrat nominee today, so the election season is officially underway. I only saw a taste of the last election on Merch, so I know it is worth putting in some time now to get political merch ready to go.
Did I Help You?
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
- Sign up for Merch Informer – probably the best print on demand/Amazon Merch research tool available (Use coupon code 2NDSCREENS to save 20%)
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