The first thing you need to do is register for an account with Merch by Amazon, which starts with requesting an invitation. You may have to wait up to a few weeks for your invitation, because the program is quite popular now, and you do need to show that you can make interesting designs before they will accept you.
Additionally, there are some countries that are ineligible for the program, as you must have a bank account in an “eligible country” to accept payment. However, they don’t seem to list these countries publicly.
Before you can submit your application and get approved, you’ll need to provide some information such as tax and banking information. Then you just need to wait for approval. Sometimes approval is very quick, and sometimes it can take weeks. Just keep trying to log in regularly, as some people have reported not receiving any notification of approval and only finding out they were approved by attempting to log in.
Request an invitation and find out more here:
If you are rejected, they say you can’t apply again, however some people have successfully been approved by requesting an account with a different email address. But since they ask for your tax documentation and bank information during the application process, you may need not be able to directly apply.
When you’re first approved, you will only be able to submit one design per day, up to a maximum of ten total products. I know this is a bummer, but it keeps people from flooding the site with thousands of low quality designs and hurting sales for everyone.
Once you have 10 products submitted, you must get 10 total sales before you will “tier up”, which means they will move up to the next tier. Some people have reported being moved up with fewer than 10 sales, or even with none, but there’s no way to know why that happens to some people and not others.
The next tier allows you to submit up to 3 per day for a total of 25 products. Once again, you’ll likely have to have 25 products approved and 25 sales before you can reach the next level. Again, this isn’t always set in stone.
Additional tiers are reached at 100, 500, 1,000, 2,000, 4,000 and 8,000. There are reports that there may be a tier higher than 8,000, but if so there aren’t many people who have reached that level. The number of designs you can submit per day continues to scale, as well.
There are a few different schools of thought regarding tiering up:
You can just throw up anything for your first 10 designs and then buy them yourself.
You can research niches and hot trends carefully and attempt to upload designs that will sell at least 10 quickly via organic traffic.
You can promote your designs with various methods, such as creating designs for businesses and having them purchase them, or using social media or paid marketing.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter which way you choose. You can either wait patiently until you tier up naturally, which may mean removing designs that aren’t selling and replacing them with new ones.