Pricing, Colors, Sizing

Pricing Your T-Shirt Designs

Regardless of what I say in the following paragraphs, it is vital to keep your prices nearly identical to those of your best competitors. If you are in earlier tiers, you will want to scale quickly and thus sell more shirts. Therefore, if you are in tier 1 or 2, I would highly recommend setting the prices of your shirts as low as possible, with the maximum price of $14.99. This way, customers will be more inclined to purchase your shirt over your competitors, which will allow you to scale tiers rather quickly where you can upload more t-shirt designs. At the tier 3 level and onwards, you can begin to price your shirts at a higher, more profitable price.

I would not recommend creating any premium designs in tier 1 or tier 2 as they, from my experience, do not sell as well, are required to be priced higher to see decent returns, and should only be created as an alternative for a shirt that is selling well. In general, I only create premium shirts to meet the daily shirt design upload criteria which you should be fulfilling or to offer customers a higher quality shirt of a popular design at a slightly higher price. If you happen to notice a shirt selling at least once daily, then I would upload the same design onto a premium t-shirt and keep it under the same brand, and you may see a few sales. If you do this, I would include the word “Premium” in the title if there is space.

I also recommend pricing your shirts at a higher price in higher tiers where you don’t care much about tiering up quickly (tier 3+). Obviously, you will sell fewer t-shirts and will tier-up less quickly if you sell higher priced shirts. This should not be a problem, however, as after tier 2, your focus should switch to making the most profit from your designs. If you are not in tier 1 or 2 and if you are creating lots of image and text-based designs or high-quality image centered designs, then stick to pricing your shirts at $19.99. Remember to price competitively according to what other shirts in that niche or trend price their shirts.

You can price all your shirts at $19.99 like a lot of people do and will still see sales, although not as often. However, after factoring in how much in return you receive from each shirt that sells at $19.99, pricing your shirts at $19.99 is the quickest way to reach $1000 or more within four months after you achieve tier 3.
Personally, I base my prices to be either the same or $1-2 lower than the best-selling shirt for the given quote or phrase you are basing your shirt design on. I always start slightly lower than what I believe the selling price of the shirt should be to test whether the shirt will sell. If it sells, this will lead to a slight increase in Amazon’s ranking, which will increase the customers chance of seeing the shirt. Afterward, I would increase the price of the t-shirt by one dollar for every time it sells and would stop increasing the price of the shirt after it hits $19.99 for a normal shirt or $21.99-23.99 for premium. Always price slightly ($2-3) higher for premium designs as they cost more for Amazon to produce.

Choosing Your Colors

Most of your designs should contrast with a dark background color. Darker colors, I have found, are statistically the ones to have brought me the most sales. However, your results may vary depending on what you upload. Black and the “Heather” color options are amongst the highest selling for most Merch members.

Different niches prefer different t-shirt background colors. For example, baby or children centered designs usually have light blue or lighter design colors and on the other hand, almost every other niche has dark colored backgrounds. I would recommend creating most designs with white font and contrasting imagery which does not blend in with the background colors you will select when uploading to Merch. This gives the shirt a clean and higher quality look.

You will have the option to select between five different colors. Some people teach to only select three colors, as the buyer may feel conflicted because of the many color options and may not choose to buy the shirt because of it. I have tested for several weeks with having only three colors available versus having all five color options. In the end, I had found little weekly changes in the two. Therefore, I would suggest selecting all five color options, because Amazon runs out of color options every so often (usually heather) and makes them temporarily unavailable. This, in turn, can greatly hurt your sales.

Fit Type

There are three options for “Fit Type.” Men, Women, and Youth. This goes without saying, but you should always select all three. Even if the t-shirt is directed towards children or old grandpas, you should select all options as you may surprisingly still get one or two sales from the opposite demographic.

For “printing your artwork” as Amazon states, I would only stick to printing on the front side. Printing on the backside of the t-shirt rarely has its benefits and should only be done with a fitting phrase or at a later tier where you don’t have to worry about tiering up.

You may eventually have the option to start uploading your designs onto hoodies, sweatshirts, and long sleeve shirts, instead of just t-shirts. Note that these alternatives are costlier and thus, slightly harder to sell. Throughout this tutorial, I have only been discussing the Merch process I have used to reach $1000+ per month with t-shirts, as I do not have much experience with the other clothing options. However, the entire process of Merch is relatively straightforward once learned and can easily be brought into other forms of POD clothing.