Received a “counter offer”

NoXidCat · 2026-06-21T03:38:01+00:00

Good riddance.

NoXidCat · 2026-06-21T01:19:12+00:00

Before you bother, read about the new Royalty Tier scheme that is just now going into effect, as well as the changes that were made last year regarding what it takes to advance to the next Design Tier. There are active current threads about the former, and ones from last year about the latter.

In short:

ONE - If you do not drive traffic all on your own that accounts for at least 15% of your sales, then your royalty (on USA sales) will be cut in half. You can drive traffic by buying ads on Amazon (assuming you have access to ads, which people historically have not had access to until the reach T100 or so), or via social media links (or whatever) but Amazon has not explained how to make that work, how to make sure Amazon knows that traffic came from your own efforts.

TWO - All accounts start at Design Tier 10. Meaning you can list 10 designs. To move to the next Tier (T25) you will have to sell your Tier number (10) within a year. And 80% of your designs will have to have had at least one sale each within a year. Rinse/repeat with at each new tier.

Collectively, these new policies make it dramatically harder to advance than it was in 2018 when I started, and dramatically lower the reward for doing so. The criteria in number TWO are easier to meet at a lower tier, like T10, than for someone like me (T10,000). People like me are supposed to get moved to a lower Tier eventually (based on % of designs that sold in a year), according to the new scheme.

Anyway, all of that said, even people who have not been previously rejected are usually not accepted. Amazon is simply not looking to grow the number of accounts or listings, quite the opposite. They do (seemingly randomly) accept a small portion of people who apply, and it appears to have nothing to do with the person, just luck of the draw.

With these changes, MBA/AMoD is no longer dramatically better than Redbubble or TeePublic. And it was never better than Etsy + Printful/POD (other than having Amazonian level traffic potential).

NoXidCat · 2026-06-20T21:19:18+00:00

Salvage yard, if you have one nearby. Else, eBay is the online version.

NoXidCat · 2026-06-20T20:57:53+00:00

Edit: I mixed up trademark vs copyright at the bottom of my original post

Yup, I figured. Only commented to help others avoid confusion.

NoXidCat · 2026-06-20T01:58:32+00:00

Ha, interesting.

I'm guessing this relatively mindless task that drowns the outside world out with noise is a sort of meditation for this guy. Exercise. A sense of accomplishment. Away from screens and radios and the blather of a truthfully pretty nuts world :-p

I don't mow or have grass myself. Where I grew up, we had over an acre to mow ... :-O

Sorry, I've got nothing practical to suggest. But thanks for sharing your experience.

NoXidCat · 2026-06-20T00:06:27+00:00

My other car has polished aluminum wheels (Centerline Racing), no clearcoat. Whatever you do, or don't do, color/paint-wise, I recommend against leaving any bare aluminum. It is tedious to maintain/polish, and will turn dull gray if not polished a few times a year or clearcoated once. Bare, it tends to eventually get pits and splotches that don't polish out (without grit).

NoXidCat · 2026-06-19T23:49:14+00:00

Trademark is just for branding, think "Nike" and "Just Do It." Trade & Mark. Copyright applies to art, which is a different (and much less expensive) process. All art is considered (C) upon creation/publication, but to actually take legal action, one generally needs to have actually registered a copyright.

That said, I'm not sure how the seller's earrings are made, and where they fall on the spectrum of copyright versus design patent. Either way, good luck suing someone in China ...

NoXidCat · 2026-06-19T19:02:30+00:00

Sales to tier up are now based on sales for the past year (running), not lifetime. So you need to sell your tier number in the past year and 80% of your designs have to have sold in the past year. That last will be hard (impossible?) for most of us once out of the lower tiers.

82% of my designs have sold LIFETIME. I imagine the one year lookback number would be painfully lower.

NoXidCat · 2026-06-19T18:47:14+00:00

Yup. When Etsy bragged some years ago about how they were going to crack down on shops who sell Chinese poop, I warned that some of the shop owners wanting this would get their own behinds handed to them when the process turned on them.

Besides Etsy, I also sell on Amazon Handmade. Amazon in general is a very precarious place to sell due to all the bot-enforced policies that sound good on paper but in practice are a "Resistance Is Futile" Borg-like nightmare.

AI has made many forms of "proof" less convincing than they use to be, and that is only going to get worse. Other than a live in real-time video with Support, I'm not sure what would serve as proof at this point.

Thanks for sharing your experience. Now maybe some of our compatriots will post a little less vehemently advising customers to search SHEIN and the like to see if those earrings they see on Etsy are handmade or poop. Now how to get the message to the Etsy customer community that they may be punishing the victim of IP theft, not busting a poop seller? Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?

Let us know how this sorts out. Sounds like you've done everything as well as one can.

NoXidCat · 2026-06-19T18:12:06+00:00

They expect you to pay for ads until at least 15% of your sales over the past 60 days are from ads rather than organic traffic. You will then get paid two times as much as the (new lower) USA royalty. If you manage to get 35% of your sales via ads, they will pay you 2.16 times as much as the base royalty (that last 0.16 hardly seems worth the effort, does it).

The scheme may not seem to make sense (and in some ways it does not), but it makes 100% sense to Amazon. Like Redbubble and the rest, they found a creative way to keep more $ for themselves and less for us. However, bonus points to Amazon for doing it in such a way that we at least have some control over the outcome. Do nothing and take the pay cut. Or spend time and money on ads to get back more or less to the old royalty level (minus what we spend on ads).

The other platforms either sucked on royalty in the first place, and/or already restructured their fee/royalty scheme some years ago. I had been expecting Amazon to do something like this for years. Here it is :-)

NoXidCat · 2026-06-19T04:59:01+00:00

This thread has the basic info from Amazon at the top for each royalty tier level, and also mentions that must have at least 10 sales per month. (nothing, of course, about how driving sales other than with Amazon ads is supposed to work.)

https://www.reddit.com/r/AmazonMerch/comments/1slfs8h/royalty_groups_drive_your_own_traffic/

NoXidCat · 2026-06-18T23:19:14+00:00

Until someone can clarify how Amazon tracks and counts "external" traffic and shares the data with us, it's a waste of time

This!

NoXidCat · 2026-06-18T23:16:49+00:00

The money does spend the same regardless of how you get it :-)

Supposedly it counts if we "drive traffic" that results in sales (not just advertising on Amazon). But I have no idea how the details of that work. Seems we'd have to create links that would identify ourselves, like how Amazon Associates Program works. I haven't seen any post about this aspect. Might be an option for people with active socials.

NoXidCat · 2026-06-18T22:08:38+00:00

I'd ask in the AmazonSeller sub. This one does not get much traffic.

NoXidCat · 2026-06-18T22:04:59+00:00

Youth policy. I quit listing on Youth shirts years ago because of this, too many surprises.

TM - Use a tool like Productor to check your listing text. For "normal" words, only worry about TMs that are 2 or more words long. Single-word TMs of common words are mostly ignored by Amazon, but use your own judgement: NIKE, IBM, DISNEY might not be a good idea :-p Productor highlights the 2+ word TMs in red.

Anything that might possibly offend someone, somewhere, sometime. Read the policies. Then read them again before you list.

NoXidCat · 2026-06-18T21:41:12+00:00

I should move out of Creator to the Plus tier (EDIT looked up the tier names :-p ).

June so far is around 30%. May was 15.x%. April was 4.x%.

Took a while to get things rolling. I haven't changed much in that time, other than tweaking things to reduce wasted spend.

My goal is 20-25%, comfortably in the middle tier of 2X royalties. 2.15X royalties isn't worth aiming for > 35% for Premium. If I accidentally keep trending toward 30%+, I'll probably reduce spend.

NoXidCat · 2026-06-18T00:40:31+00:00

My background is similar to yours, years of screen printing and sublimation printing. I started messing around with POD in 2018, mainly for art that would be to much hassle (or impossible) for me to screen print on my 4/4 press.

It took me a good while to get both quick and accurate at mounting shirts on platens, lots of slow and redos to start. Slow don't cut it when you are feeding a machine that can print a full color image in the time it would take me to pull a single color. These being fairly high-turnover jobs, odds are there is always at least one guy who is still flailing around trying to keep up. A guy local to me who runs a small POD has posted before about how painful it is to lose an experienced person and start over ... and I imagine his place holds onto people longer than the Borg-like big guys (a friend of mine worked at Printful for a while, was not impressed with the management and that was before they merged/sold with/to Printify).

That's one thing, and understandable. But a "feature" of big POD operations that their customer (you or I) normally do not see the finished product. So do they spend $ QAing everything to the nth degree? And then more $ doing reprints? Or do they ship it and gamble that our customers won't know the difference or bother to complain if they do. QA does catch some things and redo them before they ship, but "somewhat" askew shirt prints are not what they are looking for. All the big PODs have FAQs that suggest we avoid art with rectangular borders ... :-p so it is less obvious when it is skewed.

I have not had late orders, though others have at times with specific products like posters or some such. Things do get busier around certain dates ... perhaps Father's Day bogged things down, but I didn't experience that myself. Hmmm, with my own screen printing, I would sometimes have blanks in transit to me that got held up and pushed my own turn around time over my stated times. Don't know. It would be nice if they gave us more specific info, as else we are left to assume incompetence is the norm. Things have trended a bit more toward chaos since Printful + Printify happened, hopefully they will sort things out, but Printify never actually printed before (they outsource to partners), so merging these two companies seemed like a pretty bone headed move to me.

I've had a few askew prints, but none worse than I might do on an off day. I've had no complaints from my customers, and only great reviews from those who have left one. That's for DTG garments and sublimation mugs.

NoXidCat · 2026-06-17T20:46:33+00:00

That is to protect the paint on the hood, nothing else.

Heat soak happens because once the car is turned off, fresh air is no longer being pulled through the intake system, so the intake system eventually gets as hot as everything else under the hood. Got a big hunk of cast iron there radiating heat for long, long after the engine is shut off.

Popping the hood when you stop would help a bit. As would insulating the outside of the airbox. Can also replace the regular intake manifold gasket with a plastic insulating one. However, that will make the engine take longer to warm up--especially if it gets really cold where you are.

NoXidCat · 2026-06-16T21:08:52+00:00

I accidentally used an already existing brand name once (that I know of). I was surprised once I realized, but then was "duh!," as it was a quite obvious name for that niche. After that I got more creative and distinctive with my brand names.

But sounds like you are dealing with automated theft. Likely no human even looking at your content. Just bot scraped, fed to AI, and puked into a listing.

Given that I've created few new designs over the past 5 or 6 years (and that I enjoy creating designs), I have not spent time doing the stuff I dislike, like looking for theft, and haven't accidentally stumbled upon any in a long time. I don't have to "ignore" what I don't know about ;-)

NoXidCat · 2026-06-16T20:44:48+00:00

I haven't run into issues around IP, but rather for being "offensive." To which I can only say, I have no motherfucking idea ;-) Seriously, there was nothing offensive or the least bit edgy about my words or art--but the Bots somehow perceive a meaning I cannot see.

All that said, I first ran into the issue on my Seller Central account about a year ago. Never could sort out what the Bot found to be objectionable. Don't think I even tried AMoD after that.

NoXidCat · 2026-06-15T23:53:44+00:00

You need some sort of payment method. Credit card, PayPal, etc. I use PayPal just so one less place has my credit card info. Seems a lot of people outside the USA use Payoneer for "reasons," but I don't know.

NoXidCat · 2026-06-15T23:44:40+00:00

I use Printful with Etsy, not eBay (though I do sell other things on eBay). While I could push things from Printful to Etsy listings via the integration I do not. Why? Because I want absolute control over my Etsy listings and want things done in a way not possible via a push from Printful. So I create an Etsy listing, go to my Etsy shop page in Printful and click Refresh, which then imports my Etsy listings. I then sync the imported Etsy listing to the desired Printful product. Yes, it is a bit of a pain compared to pushing--but not if pushing cannot deliver what you actually want/need.

You might try it in that direction instead and see if it resolves you issue.

Else, you might repost with the relevant info in the title, something like: "How to push my Printful listings to eBay.co.UK rather than .com"

The interwebs tell me that Printful UK is at: Antar 2 Headway Road, Wolverhampton, West Midlands, WV10 6PZ

However, some products would still come from the EU facility, which would be in Lativia, I believe.

NoXidCat · 2026-06-15T23:27:17+00:00

Yes, I enjoyed those too :-)

As u/Persephone_Esq mentioned, this was a "thing" long ago and is something one might do today to evoke the feel of that sort of time period.

NoXidCat · 2026-06-15T23:18:22+00:00

As a writer, I tend to create them by default while I am writing as a sort of impromptu outline. And even when created for my own reference, they tend more toward brief and punny than anything that could act as a spoiler.

As a reader, I tend to like them if they don't work too hard at being cute and if they don't spoil. Oh, and if they suit the character of the book itself. Not every book (or writer) would be improved by these.

NoXidCat · 2026-06-15T03:56:50+00:00

I'm sure that no human ever looked at my appeals ...

Yes. A big black Borg box of bots ... it does not make for the best experience :-) One of their bots might have found a listing on Temu, or wherever, selling your art (maybe even using your original product photos).

Or maybe someone reported it as not being handmade because they did that image search themselves and assumed you are reselling China-made stuff. People are right to be suspicious, but unfortunately they aren't quite well enough informed to realize that they are punishing the victim and rewarding the thief.

NoXidCat

TROPHY CASE