Merch By Amazon - Design In A Large Niche Or Small Niche?
When selecting a niche should you go after a large one or small one? Each one has their pros and cons so let’s look at that now.
Large Niche
Pros:
Lots of Volume - You have the possibility of selling multiple shirts a day.
Lots of Designs - This may seem like a con but it will give you more ideas that you can put onto your own shirts.
Cons:
Lots of Competition - The vast majority of time there is a lot of shirts already in these niches.
Lots of Copycats - Not only is there more competition but there will also be more copycats. Now these might not be the pixel for pixel copycats but you can bet there will be dozens of the same shirt sayings.
Small Niche
Pros:
Less Competition - A small niche won’t has as many people making designs in it because either people haven’t found it yet or they don’t see it as worth their time. This means you can compete and even dominate the niche is some instances.
Cons:
Not Much Volume - You aren’t going to have those multiple sales day per design in these niches usually. These niches are more 1-2 sales a month type rather.
So which one do I prefer? Small niches. It isn’t sexy and I don’t have huge volume days but I have much less competition. I’m also not looking over my shoulder constantly to see who is copying my designs. Most people won’t see it as worth it.
But for me, if I can sell 1-2 shirts a month per design then I’m making anywhere from $4 - $10 a month. Let’s just call it $6. Say I have 500 of these unsexy designs selling for a total of $3000 a month. Not too shabby.
I’m also more likely to rank on page 1 for my designs and I can completely saturate the niche myself if I want making it less likely for any competitors to want to come into the niche.
So that's why I tend to go after small niches rather than large ones. But I'm curious to hear what you do. Please reply in the comments below on which way you would go?
Good luck in your Merch By Amazon business as well.
When To Take Down A Design
Tiering Up
A Beginner's 1st Three Months
A Beginner's Intro
Im a noob in merch as well as steemit . Only two weeks in on both, so im trying to be patient. Decided to stay small in my merch nitch but havent sold a shirt yet. I might go large nitch to get out of the 10 tier block.. any advice would be appreciated
I pretty much bought my way out of the 10 & 25 tier. I bought 17 or 18 of the first 25. I haven't bought one since. Those first few tiers are tough just because it's a numbers game. On those tiers, you are right in that you might go with a larger niche or something trending. Price them cheap as possible just to get the sales and don't worry about making too much until you get tiered to 100 or 500.
Think of what's coming up and make some shirts on that. Going back to school, vacation shirts could still do good, fall sports like football & volleyball, Halloween in a month or so, etc.
Do you notice your shirts sell in spurts. It always surprised me. I'll have a shirt sell like 5 or 8 designs in a week and I'll start to think it's getting traction and BSR will improve and they will continue to sell more and then I could go weeks without any sales of those and then a month or two later I may get another little rush on them. I'm not talking seasonal shirts either, just shirts that should sell pretty consistantly I would think
Yes, I have. It comes and goes. Some days I will sell 8 shirts total and then the next day 1. I'm not sure what causes that. I don't buy into the Amazon throttling you but I have heard that Amazon doesn't always show all of your shirts. They don't want customer seeing like 4000 "pug" shirts when they log in so they limit the number they see. That's just a theory though and I haven't tested that myself.
Yeah I could totally see Amazon doing that