I was blown away when I saw the numbers and profit that ordinary people are making from this.
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It’s the same program I would use if I had to start over today from scratch.
Now, back to T-shirts:
Over 2 billion t-shirts were sold worldwide last year.
Even though t-shirts may seem cheap and unfashionable, 63 are sold every single second of every day.
I thought I would look into it and see what the talk was about and I’m excited to share what I found.
What’s the biggest problem with selling low cost merchandise that you design?
First of all, what if my design doesn’t sell?
How do I regain the money back from all the merchandise I bought that didn’t sell?
Where do I keep the merchandise?
How do I ship it out at scale, Deal with refunds, keep inventory reasonable, or even come up with the money to buy the merchandise in the first place?
Now, if you have been paying attention, you may know about Merch by Amazon, Shopify, Teespring, and other companies that take care of most of the headache for you.
We will let the fears and problems that were previously obstacles with young starting business owners get handled by companies with deeper pockets who are happy to sell your product and collect a fee for each sale.
If you want to sell t-shirts or just want to create passive income online using your own creative genius, then I have seen a few ways this can be done.
I’m going to explain 2 ways here that will work and they are similar but not identical (I think these are the easiest).
These are ways that savvy sellers are making over six figures with t-shirt sales.
The first is to create a Shopify store where you can have your own brand and products.
The monthly cost for a starter type package at Shopify is $29/month.
Then, Integrate that store with Amazon (the largest marketplace in the world).
This gives you reach on Amazon and also everywhere else on the web.
The Amazon Professional account will cost $39.99 each month.
On top of that, Amazon will charge a 15% referral fee for each item sold.
This is the more expensive way to do this upfront.
The beauty is that it’s your store and products, and you can have it attached to a manufacturer that prints the shirt when it gets ordered.
Everything is automated once you get it set up.
This is a great option if you want to build your own online store, but still have the Amazon customer base.
The second option is to apply for a Merch by Amazon account.
This costs less to do because there is no monthly membership.
You can upload the designs directly to Amazon and they will create the t-shirt and ship it to the customer when it is ordered.
You don’t have a separate store.
You are just uploading a design to Amazon for its customers and Amazon sends them a shirt.
They charge about $13.00 per shirt for manufacturing and shipping.
You decide the sales price and profit for each shirt.
The initial downside is that a Merch by Amazon account takes a few minutes to apply for but could take weeks or months to get approved.
Also, they have rules and guidelines for what you can sell on there that you will have to adhere to.
For example, shirts for kids can’t have sexual images on them, trademarks and copyrights cannot be infringed upon, etc.
It sounds too simple right?
I have to agree with you and in some ways, it is.
Here’s the part where you will have to make all the difference.
Any good idea that is not already copyrighted will be seen and copied quickly.
You will have to be creative and able to continue to come up with new ideas.
Something that is popular today, is probably going to die down in a few weeks or months.
Right now, as I’m writing this, the baby Yoda character is the most popular selling t-shirt on Amazon.
That image is copyrighted and will probably be much lower on the list in 3-6 months.
Political statements on both sides seem to do well during election seasons.
Something else I found is that the right type of niche can definitely be a great place to specialize on a certain t-shirt design.
For example, there is a company selling biker t-shirts and they are making over $100,000 on a couple of their designs.
That niche is typically middle-aged and in many cases has similar other interests
That same t-shirt company is selling shirts about being conservative, eating meat, and owning firearms.
They have sold thousands of shirts and have created designs that work really well for that market.
Another style of shirt that is killing it is targeting occupations like teachers or nurses.
These are people who are typically passionate about their jobs and enjoy showing it off by wearing a t-shirt that says as much.
These demographics can be targeted on facebook’s ad platform, thereby getting the shirt in front of the actual people in those careers or interests and linking them to a purchase page.
Facebook advertising is another layer of complexity in the t-shirt business, but laser targeting your ideal customer with the product they want is a surefire way to boost sales.
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This kind of business will not make you rich overnight and you may never get rich doing this.
However, uploading some designs and finding something that sells could provide a great passive income and possibly become an amazing income source over time.
It could literally just be timing and little creative thought.
You never know if a few simple words on a t-shirt could become the next million dollar idea.
Thank you for reading.
Phillip Adams