Amazon Merch on Demand · Free · No signup
Score a niche against Merch's own constraints: royalty after the 15% referral fee and product base cost, saturation, upload-tier throughput, and the 60 / 256-character listing limits that get uploads rejected.
List price minus Amazon's 15% referral fee minus the product base cost. Estimates for the US marketplace.
Base cost $9.80 · minimum list $13.99
Royalty per sale
$7.19
Margin
36%
Referral fee
-$3.00
Base cost
-$9.80
Estimated monthly royalty
$647
3 sales/day × 30 days at this price
Merch rations upload slots by tier. Plan the shortlist around the slots you actually have.
Starting tier. Every upload has to count.
Uploads/day
2
Days to publish
6
Slots in tier
10
Merch enforces hard character caps and rejects uploads that exceed them. Counters go red on overflow. Pick a niche above to pre-fill.
Most Merch account terminations are trademark-related. Run these three searches on the literal words you plan to print — no tool can clear a mark for you.
Search and select a niche above to get the exact search links for its phrase.
General guidance, not legal advice. When a phrase looks contested, change the wording rather than risking the account.
On Redbubble or Society6 a niche can work on stickers and prints at a $4 profit, so demand alone is close to enough. Amazon Merch on Demand only sells apparel and a short list of accessories, and every unit carries a fixed base cost — $9.80 for a standard US t-shirt — before Amazon takes its 15% referral fee. That single number rewrites niche selection: a niche whose buyers refuse to pass $17 leaves you roughly $4.65 a shirt, while the same design effort in a niche that lists comfortably at $22.99 returns about $9.74. Price tolerance, not raw search volume, is the first filter this tool applies.
The second filter is throughput. Merch rations upload slots by tier, so at Tier 10 you publish about two designs a day and every slot you spend on a crowded niche is a slot you cannot spend testing a promising one. That is why the score weighs saturation at thirty points and why the planner converts a shortlist into days of work at your current tier rather than showing an abstract opportunity number.
The third is discoverability inside Amazon rather than inside a POD marketplace. Merch listings rank on brand, title and two bullet points, all hard-capped, with no tag field to absorb keyword overflow. A niche with a long-tail phrase buyers actually type — "night shift nurse coffee" rather than "nurse" — is worth more on Merch than anywhere else, because you can fit the full phrase into a 60-character title and own it outright.
Shortlist three niches that clear a 60 fit score, then check that each one supports a list price of at least $19.99 in the calculator above. Run the trademark pre-check on the literal phrase you plan to print — this is the step that ends most Merch accounts when it is skipped, and it takes ninety seconds per phrase.
Design two angles per niche: one typographic that leans entirely on the phrase, one illustrative that carries the same joke visually. Merch buyers search text, so the typographic version usually earns the first impressions while the illustrative one earns the higher review rate. Write the title so the buyer's exact phrase appears in the first forty characters, then use both bullets — one for who the shirt is for, one for the occasion it gets bought for.
Publish, wait fourteen days, and judge on impressions rather than sales. A design with impressions and no sales is a design problem; a design with neither is a keyword problem, and the fix is a retitle rather than a new upload. Once ten sales land and Tier 25 unlocks, widen to the adjacent niches in the same category hub instead of starting somewhere unrelated — the audience overlap carries your existing ranking signals across.