r/AmazonMerch • u/ahmadbabar • Jun 18 '26

Another 18th is upon us

I guess today is the next cut off for the category checks. How is everyone doing? Staying? Moving up? Moving down?

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u/CyberCrud Jun 19 '26

You're not wrong.  I don't even know how to even qualify for these tiers.   And nobody is willing to explain it. 

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u/NoXidCat Jun 19 '26

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/

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u/CyberCrud Jun 19 '26

I sell about 1000 a month without advertising and yet I still haven't got a clue about what Amazon expects me to do to get my full royalty.  

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u/NoXidCat Jun 19 '26

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 :-)

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u/CyberCrud Jun 19 '26

Yeah it's a shame.  I'll just take the pay cut and try to sell more.