Can't Get Into Amazon Merch? Start Here Too

There are two ways to do print on demand on Amazon, and almost nobody explains how differently they treat you until after you have picked one.

One of them you can start this afternoon. The other you might wait months to even get into. Both can work. The mistake is thinking you have to choose, and letting the harder one hold up your whole plan.

So here is the short version. If you want to sell print on demand (POD) on Amazon, look at both Merch and Seller Central. Apply to Merch, because it is a real opportunity. But do not sit and wait on it, because you can start on Seller Central today.

Both live under the Amazon name, and people lump them together as "Amazon print on demand." They are not the same thing.

Two kinds of POD you can run on Amazon

When you do print on demand on Amazon, you are really choosing between two very different setups. They share the Amazon name, and that is about all they share.

The first is Amazon Merch on Demand. This one is Amazon's. You upload a design, Amazon lists it, and when someone buys, Amazon prints it, ships it, and pays you a royalty. You never touch a product or a customer. You are a designer handing art to Amazon and taking a cut when it sells.

The second is Seller Central, run as FBM. This one is not Amazon's. It is yours. FBM stands for Fulfilled By Merchant, which just means you handle the printing and shipping, or a supplier does it for you. You open your own selling account, connect a print supplier like Printify, and run your own store. It happens to sit on Amazon's platform, but you are the one running it. You set the price, you run the listing, you keep the margin.

The same design could go on either one. The difference is who is running the show.

On Merch you work for Amazon. On Seller Central, Amazon is just where your store lives.

Neither one is wrong. But right now they are not equally easy to start, and that is worth understanding before you pour your time into one.

Path A: Merch is a good opportunity that got harder

Merch on Demand is a genuinely good place to sell. Amazon handles everything, the traffic is huge, and a design that catches on can earn for a long time. If you can get in and climb, it is worth having.

The catch is what stands between you and that.

First, you have to be let in. Merch is invite-only. You apply, you land on a waitlist, and you wait for Amazon to approve you. Some people get in quickly. Plenty wait a long time.

I am one of the ones still waiting. I applied, then I waited, and no reply came for a long stretch. I have gone back and tried again more times than I can count, and to this day I still cannot get in. My account just sits there at the door.

Second, getting in is only the start. New Merch accounts are capped at around ten designs live at a time. To unlock more, you have to sell, and Amazon moves you up a tier so you can list more, then you climb from there. With only ten slots, you do not get much room to test ideas and find out what works. You are trying to prove yourself before you have really had the chance to practice.

That is two walls to climb before Merch pays off. Neither one makes Merch bad. They just make it a slow place to start.

You can spend months waiting to be let in, or you can start selling this afternoon.

Path B: Seller Central, where you just start

Seller Central undoes almost every one of those problems.

There is no invite to wait for. You open a Professional selling account, pay one flat fee of $39.99 a month, and you are in. That fee stays the same whether you list ten products or ten thousand. One price, no cap.

You set your own retail price, so you choose your margin instead of accepting whatever royalty you are handed. You run your own listings and your own ads. Pair the account with a supplier and they print and ship every order for you, the same hands-off fulfillment Merch gives you, except now you are the one running the store.

No gate, no cap, and all the room you want to try things from day one. That is what makes it a place you can start right now, while your Merch application sits in the queue.

Amazon just made Merch harder for someone starting out

There is one more recent change worth knowing, because it lands right where a new seller feels it. In June 2026 Amazon changed how Merch pays.

Amazon scrapped the old flat royalty and split it into three tiers. Which tier you land in depends on how many of your sales you bring in yourself, from outside Amazon.

If your sales come from Amazon's own traffic, shoppers who just stumble onto your shirt, you sit in the bottom tier. On a $19.99 shirt that is about $2.44. To reach the top rate, roughly $5.27 on that same shirt, you have to prove at least a third of your sales come from traffic you drove in yourself through ads or social media.

Read that again. To earn the good rate on Amazon, you now have to bring your own customers to Amazon.

For someone new, with no audience and no ad budget yet, that means the bottom tier by default. About half of what the old flat rate used to pay. It is not the end of Merch. It just raises the bar again for the exact people still trying to get a foothold.

So what should you actually do?

Apply to Merch. It is a real opportunity, and if you get in and climb, great. But treat the application as something you send and then move past, not something you wait behind.

Because here is what that new royalty rule quietly tells you. If Amazon now wants you driving your own traffic to earn a real payout, you can do that on a store you fully control, starting today. That store is Seller Central FBM. One flat fee, no invite, no cap, your price, your ads, and room to try things and learn while your Merch invite is still pending. I broke down why that one flat fee makes FBM the route where someone still learning can barely lose, step by step here.

So apply to Merch, and start on Seller Central right now. You do not have to pick.

If the invite comes through later, wonderful, run both. If it never comes, you have not lost a thing, because you were already building something that is yours.

I am still locked out of that Merch door. It has not held me back, because I never stopped at it.

If you want to follow along as I keep sharpening this system, I send each new piece out by email when it is ready.

Talk soon,
Nick T