Merch on Demand: Amazon Merch vs the Rest, With Math

When people search merch on demand they almost always mean Amazon Merch on Demand, and the thing to know about it in September 2026 is that a $19.99 t-shirt pays $2.44 by default. It pays $4.88 if at least 15% of your sales come from traffic you sent to Amazon yourself. The same shirt, printed by Printful and sold on your own store with shipping charged separately, keeps about $6.72. Listed on Etsy at Amazon's delivered price, it keeps 44 cents.

So the decision isn't really which platform prints better. It's who brings the buyer, and what each platform charges you for that service.

One limitation before the numbers. Amazon's own Merch pages, including the royalty resource everybody links to, load as an empty JavaScript shell for my tooling, so I could not read a single figure from Amazon directly. Every Amazon Merch number below comes from three seller-tools companies whose posts agree on the headline figures, and I've said where they disagree. Everything about Printful, Etsy, Shopify and Redbubble comes off those companies' own fee pages, loaded 15 September 2026.

What Changed In June

Until the start of June, according to the sources I could read, Amazon Merch paid a flat royalty per product. On 1 June 2026 that became three tiers, and which one you sit in depends on where your buyers came from.

One of the three sources describes the Plus figure as the old flat rate and the Creator figure as half of it; the other two call Creator a drop without naming the old rate. Non-organic, as they describe it, means Amazon Sponsored Ads, off-Amazon advertising, social traffic and Amazon Attribution links. A buyer who found you through Amazon's search bar does not count, however good your listing is.

The tier is recalculated monthly on a trailing two-month average, per the two sources that state a window. A third says twelve months, which I think is wrong, but I can't settle it against Amazon's page because Amazon's page won't render. Ask in the seller forums before you plan around either.

The shape of this matters more than the exact figures. Amazon has taken the royalty that used to be the deal and made it the reward for sending Amazon your own customers. If you have no audience, you're on $2.44 a shirt and there's nothing in the listing you can change to fix that.

The Same Shirt, Four Ways

Nobody ranking for this term puts one shirt through more than one platform, so here's a $19.99 tee everywhere it could go. Printful's base for a Bella+Canvas 3001 is listed at $12.25, which is a "from" price that colour and extra placements can raise, and their flat US shipping on a t-shirt is $4.95.

The Etsy rows use their published fees, which are $0.20 to list, 6.5% of the order total including shipping, and 3% plus 25 cents to process a US payment. The Shopify rows use the Basic plan at $39 a month, or $29 if you pay yearly, and their 2.9% plus 30 cents online card rate. Redbubble's Classic tee to the US has a $20 base, so a 20% markup makes a $24 shirt with a $4 margin, and then the platform fee for your account tier comes off that.

Read the last column first. Amazon and Redbubble bring buyers and pay you a small, fixed-by-them amount for the design. Shopify brings nobody and pays you almost everything. Etsy sits in the middle and charges for the middle.

The Forty-Four Cent Row

That Etsy free-shipping row is the one I'd want every new merch seller to see, because it's the row people accidentally build.

Amazon's $19.99 is a delivered price. The buyer pays $19.99 and the shirt arrives. If you match that on Etsy, a Printful shirt costs you $12.25 to print and $4.95 to ship, and Etsy's fees on a $19.99 order come to $2.35. What's left is 44 cents, and that's before the Offsite Ads fee, which is 15% of the order total if the buyer arrived through one of Etsy's ads and you've made under $10,000 on Etsy in the last year. Etsy caps that fee at $100 an order, which is no comfort on a t-shirt.

Charge $4.95 shipping on top and the same sale keeps $4.92, or $1.18 if it came through an Offsite Ad. The buyer now pays $24.94 against Amazon's $19.99 for a comparable shirt, which is the real comparison, and it's the one nobody makes because it makes the Etsy route look worse than the fee percentages suggest.

I'd put it this way. On Etsy you're competing with Amazon's delivered price using a supplier whose shipping alone is a quarter of that price. It can work at $28 to $32 with shipping folded in, where the buyer is paying for a design they can't get on Amazon. It doesn't work as a cheaper Amazon. The fee stack itself, with the Offsite Ads rules and what gets charged when, is walked through in how to sell digital downloads on Etsy, and the shipping problem there is nil because there's nothing to ship.

What The Plus Tier Actually Asks

Here is the arithmetic I went looking for and didn't find.

To reach Plus you need at least 10 sales a month with 15% of them from traffic you drove. On the minimum, that's 2 external sales in every 10. Suppose over two months you sell 100 shirts at $19.99, and you managed to make 15 of them come from your own links.

Qualifying doubles the royalty on the 85 organic sales, which is worth $207.40, and it costs you the difference between $4.88 and $6.72 on the 15 buyers you sent to Amazon rather than to yourself, which is $27.60. On those numbers the tier is clearly worth chasing if you already sell on Amazon and have any external traffic at all.

The catch is in the denominator. The 15% is a share of your sales, not a count, so a listing that starts ranking well in Amazon's search pushes your organic units up and your external share down. Success in the thing you can't control can demote you out of the tier. The sources I read frame this as a monthly recalculation, which means it's a treadmill rather than a milestone, and the monthly minimum of 10 units means a quiet month drops you regardless of share.

My concern isn't the maths, which favours qualifying. It's that the program now pays you most when you do the one thing that makes the program unnecessary, which is having buyers of your own.

Redbubble Decides Your Tier, Not Your Sales

Redbubble's version of this is stranger and worth understanding before you upload anything there.

Their help pages say the Premium and Standard tiers are "not based on the amount of sales an account generates". Premium goes to accounts judged on the origin of the artworks, file quality and consumer appeal. Standard goes to accounts that upload "high volumes of low-effort or repetitive designs", use "unmodified vector packs, clip art, or royalty-free images", or spam tags. Pro is invite-only, described as the top 1%, reviewed once a year.

Then the fee. Standard accounts pay a 50% platform fee on their earnings, Premium pay 20%, Pro pay nothing, capped at $150 a payment period for the first two. On the $4 margin from that $24 Classic tee, Standard keeps $2.00 and Premium keeps $3.20. Push the markup above 20% and an excess markup fee applies to the earnings over that line, the rate for which isn't on the page I read.

So on Redbubble a human or a classifier reads your portfolio and decides whether you keep half your margin or four fifths of it. At the default 10% markup the margin on that tee is $2 before the fee, so a Standard account keeps a dollar. I've got a milder version of this with my own KDP books, where Amazon publishes a royalty rate and I accept it, and the rate doesn't move because I wrote a better book. Redbubble's rate does move, in either direction, on a judgment about your uploads that you don't get to argue with.

Which Route For Which Seller

The four routes aren't rivals so much as answers to four different situations, and most guides skip the situation.

If I had to compress that further, the first question is whether you'd rather be paid $2.44 by someone who brings the buyer or $6.72 for a buyer you had to find. The second is whether your work is distinctive enough that a stranger on Etsy would pay $29 for it when a similar shirt is $19.99 on Amazon, delivered.

There's a longer look at what the print on demand model means in general, books and shirts both, in what a print pod is. And if you're choosing a supplier rather than a marketplace, the vetting checklist in the Shirtee print on demand review applies to any of them.

Questions

Is Amazon Merch on Demand worth it? As a free test of whether anyone wants your designs, yes, and $0 upfront with Amazon's traffic is still the cheapest experiment in physical products. As an income at the Creator rate, $2.44 a shirt means 400 shirts a month for under a thousand dollars, and most accounts never see that volume.

How much does Amazon Merch on Demand pay? On a $19.99 standard tee, $2.44 at Creator, $4.88 at Plus, $5.27 at Premium, per three sources that agree. One of those sources shows the same tee paying $0.96 at $15.99 and $4.66 at $25.99 on the Creator tier, so the price you pick matters more than it used to.

Is print on demand still profitable in 2026? Per unit, yes, at anywhere between 44 cents and $6.72 on the $19.99 shirt above depending on the route. As a business, only at volume or at prices well above $19.99, and both of those need buyers you can reach. The margin on a physical product with a $17 landed cost will never look like a digital file, which is the whole argument in digital products to sell.

What is the best platform to sell merch? There isn't one, and the table by situation is my honest answer. Amazon for a free test with no audience, your own store once you have one, Etsy only at prices where the design rather than the shirt is what's being bought.

Which is better, Printify or Amazon Merch on Demand? They're different jobs. Printify is a supplier that prints and ships when your store gets an order, free to use or from $39 a month for up to 20% off products, and it needs a storefront in front of it. Amazon Merch is the supplier, the storefront and the traffic in one, and it pays a royalty instead of letting you keep the margin.

What is the number one most sold item on Amazon? I don't know, and neither does anyone ranking for this term, since Amazon doesn't publish it. It wouldn't help you anyway. The useful version of that question is what sells in the niche you're designing for, and Amazon's own search suggestions answer that for free.

How long before Amazon removes a listing that doesn't sell? One source says listings with no sales in their first 18 months are deleted automatically, and that moving from ten upload slots to twenty-five takes ten sales. I couldn't confirm either against Amazon's page, so treat both as reported.

What I'd Do

Upload to Amazon Merch and Redbubble at the same time, at zero cost, and watch which designs sell for two months. That's the test, and it costs nothing but the design time.

Then take whatever sold and put it on your own store through Printful at a price with shipping already inside it, and start sending the people who liked it there instead. At $6.72 a shirt you clear Shopify's plan on six sales, and every buyer after that is yours. Keep the Amazon listings up, because the same sends count towards Plus and double the royalty on the sales you weren't driving anyway.

What I wouldn't do is list a $19.99 shirt on Etsy with free shipping to compete with Amazon. That row is 44 cents and it's the most common mistake in this whole category.