Amazon Merch on Demand (passive T-shirt Design Uploads)
Originally published Aug 2, 2026 — Greg Gottfried
Greg Gottfried · How To Make Money On Amazon (For Beginners) ↗
One of 4 ideas covered in this video
Create t-shirt designs and upload them to Amazon's own built-in Merch on Demand program, which creates the product listing, handles printing, shipping, and customer service entirely on Amazon's side, so the seller's only ongoing task is producing and uploading new designs.
Gottfried, who's run this program for nearly 10 years, explains the real leverage isn't in the small per-sale profit (about $3.18 on a $21.99 shirt) but in Amazon's existing shopper traffic doing the selling, since he's seen individual designs sell 400-700-plus times a month without any of the seller's own marketing. His top tip is checking that a design's exact phrase isn't trademark-protected before uploading, using a free trademark search, since a protected phrase can get a seller in trouble.
Someone comfortable treating this as a volume game, producing many designs rather than perfecting a few, and who's fine with the program's real barrier: an application to join, which isn't automatic.
Gottfried discloses he sells zero physical products himself after 10 years of Amazon experience, everything he recommends is passive-income focused, which shapes which of Amazon's many programs he features. The per-shirt profit margin and per-design sales volume are specific, real figures from his own account, and the requirements (free to join, 18+, must live in an English-speaking country, no need to reside in the U.S.) are concrete and independently verifiable on Amazon's own signup page.