Amazon Cut Your Merch Royalties. Here's the Move.

If you sell on Amazon Merch, your paycheck probably got lighter this summer.

On June 1, 2026, Amazon threw out the flat royalty and replaced it with tiers. If your sales come mostly from Amazon's own traffic, shoppers who find your shirt on their own, your rate roughly got cut in half. Same designs, same effort, about half the money.

So it is fair to ask right now whether Amazon Merch is still worth it in 2026.

The short answer is yes, but not the way it used to be, and not on its own. The change did more than trim your pay. It quietly changed what Merch asks of you. And once you see what it is really asking, the smart move is not to quit. It is to stop letting your designs live in only one place.

What actually changed, and what it means

The old Merch was simple. You uploaded a design, and Amazon's traffic did the selling. Get seen, get paid.

The new Merch splits your royalty into three tiers, and where you land depends on how much traffic you bring in yourself from outside Amazon. Sit on Amazon's organic traffic alone and you are in the bottom tier. To reach the top rate, you have to prove that more than a third of your sales came from traffic you drove in through ads or social.

So look at what really happened. Amazon did not just lower the pay. It changed the job.

Merch used to reward uploading. Now it rewards traffic.

That one shift is the whole story, because the day you have to bring your own traffic is the day Merch stops being the obvious place to send it.

The part that stings if you think it through

Here is the uncomfortable bit. If you now have to drive your own customers to earn a good rate, you are doing the hardest part of the business, getting people to show up, on the platform that gives you the least room and keeps the biggest share.

Merch still caps how many designs you can have. Amazon still sets the retail price. Amazon still keeps the larger slice of every sale. You bring the traffic, they keep the leverage.

None of that means walk away. Merch has real traffic of its own, and a design that climbs the tiers can earn for years. It means stop treating Merch as the only shelf your work sits on.

The day you have to bring your own traffic is the day one shelf is not enough.

Give your designs a second home you own

Your designs are not married to Merch. The same artwork can sell on a store you fully control, at the same time, with none of the tier rules.

That store is Seller Central run as FBM, paired with a print supplier like Printify. You pay one flat fee, list as many products as you want, set your own price, and keep your margin. I compared the two setups side by side.

And this is where the two stop competing and start working together.

On FBM you can go wide. One flat fee means you can put a design on every product type it fits, test plenty of ideas cheaply, and let volume show you what sells. That breadth is the engine. I run this myself, with over 300,000 products live, and it is the size of the catalog that turns into income, not any single lucky hit.

Merch is the opposite. Slots are scarce and you climb by selling, so those few slots should hold designs that already work, not guesses.

Test wide on the store you own, then save your Merch slots for the proven winners.

So, is Amazon Merch worth it in 2026?

Yes if you are in and climbing. No if it is the only thing you are doing.

The flat-royalty era is over, and leaning on Amazon's traffic alone to pay you is the exact thing that just got cut. But your designs still hold their value, and Merch is still a real channel. Keep it earning. Just do not let it be the whole plan.

Put your effort where it compounds. Test wide on a store you own, feed your winners into Merch, and drive your traffic where you keep the most of what it brings back. That is not quitting Merch. It is making it one piece of something bigger.

If you want to follow how I keep building and sharpening this, I send each new piece out by email when it is ready.

Build it your way,
Nick T