How Much Do Amazon Merch Sellers Earn After the June 2026 Royalty Change?

On June 1, 2026, Amazon changed how Merch on Demand pays. The old flat royalty is gone, replaced by a performance-based system that ties your cut to how much traffic you bring in yourself. If you've seen older "Amazon Merch royalty" pages, their numbers are now wrong. Here's how it works today, and who the change helped or hurt.

What Amazon pays you per sale now

Merch on Demand is royalty-based: no upfront cost, and Amazon handles printing, shipping, and returns. Your royalty is your take-home — there's no base cost to subtract afterward, which makes this the cleanest "what you actually keep" math in print-on-demand.

A note on sourcing, because it matters here: Amazon doesn't publish its Merch royalty figures publicly — the royalty pages sit behind a seller login. The amounts below are reported consistently across multiple independent Merch-tracking sources, and you should confirm them against your own seller dashboard. What isn't in dispute is the structure.

The structure: three tiers, and your tier depends on how much of your sales come from traffic you drive yourself. On a $19.99 t-shirt, the widely reported royalties are roughly:

Creator tier: about $2.44
Plus tier — 15%+ of sales from external traffic: about $4.88
Premium tier — 35%+ from external traffic: about $5.27

What changed, and who it hits

The headline: a Premium-tier seller now earns roughly twice the royalty per shirt of a Creator-tier seller on the identical product. The only difference is where the sale came from. Amazon is paying you more for sending it your own customers and less for riding its built-in browse traffic.

That rewards sellers who already drive an audience — from a channel, an email list, social — and squeezes the "upload designs and wait" approach the platform was once known for. If your plan was passive income from Amazon's own search, the math just got harder.

How much do Amazon Merch sellers actually make?

Straight answer: there is no reliable, named survey of Amazon Merch seller income. The "$X a month average" figures you'll find are vendor-blog estimates citing each other, with no underlying study. I'm not going to hand you a number I can't stand behind.

What I can tell you is the per-sale economics above, and that earnings on Merch are driven by three things:

your royalty tier, which now hinges on external traffic;
catalog size, since most designs sell little and a few carry a shop;
design differentiation, in a marketplace flooded with lookalikes.

That's the honest shape: I can show you the per-sale economics; I can't promise a monthly total, and anyone who does is guessing.

A tool that helps (and one kind to avoid)

Most of the work on Merch is research — finding niches that sell, checking that a phrase isn't trademarked, seeing what's already saturated. Merch Titans is the established tool for that research and listing management; it's been around years and is widely used by Merch sellers.

What I won't point you toward: any tool whose pitch is "mass-generate hundreds of AI designs and upload them." That's exactly the low-effort flooding the new royalty tiers are built to push out — it hurts your account and the marketplace. Use research tools to find good niches, not spam tools to carpet-bomb them.

The risks worth knowing first

Merch is invite-only and can be shut off. Amazon can suspend or terminate accounts, and the June 2026 change shows it will rewrite the payout rules unilaterally.
Tier gating. New accounts start with limited upload slots and unlock more by making sales — so the early grind is real before volume is even possible.
Saturation. Generic designs disappear; this rewards distinct work and your own traffic, not volume.

My take (separate from the data above)

The June change quietly turned Amazon Merch from a passive-income play into a traffic-driven one. If you already have an audience to point at your designs, the Premium tier makes it genuinely worthwhile. If you were hoping Amazon's own shoppers would carry you, the new math is upfront with you: that's the tier that pays least.