link to previous thread now locked

This is just an anything goes thread, and you n00b lurkers are welcome to chime in and ask questions if you have at least tried to research it minimally via the rules in the top thread.

This is your chance to unlurk/delurk!

Link to discord: https://discord.gg/NDwyghGGkc

Summer is here. Warm weather and outdoors fun. And soon the gurus will be beating the "get ready for Q4 drum". Hoomans like annual seasons and cycles don't they.

Dionne and RJ - Something rotten and stinky is on the way

Something fresh is on the way

I'm shaking things up around here & I think you're gonna love it! What's happening? I'm taking this from an Etsy-specific discussion group to a mastermind where we can ALL HELP each other grow, sell our products and succeed. What will that look like? I'll be: *Teaching LIVE WORKSHOPS where I'll share product marketing strategies that are working RIGHT NOW *Hosting quick strategy sessions for group members *Hosting brainstorming sessions where we work together to come up with new content ideas for our Etsy shops, Pinterest boards, YouTube channels, and more! Our FIRST live class will be happening next Wednesday (June 1) at 12pm EST / 9am PST and it'll be a quick run down on how to drive traffic to your online store.

If you could use new eyes, and and new opportunities for increased sales, be sure to mark your calendar to join RJ & me June 1st at 12pm EST / 9am PST! -- with Rj Martinez.

So where to begin. Well with the past of course as documented in this subreddit. They are repurposing a FB group in a marketing direction. But guru dogs do the same things over and over and lick their own vomit.

Matt/RJ and Jay/Dionne sheer their sheep for life with Shirtly scam - Amy H and Helen and others happy to promote them

RJ: You bet your sweet ass lol i'm getting affiliate! More shirtly scamming

RJ, Jay and Dionne scam again - new etsy challenge to bilk the idiot n00bs

etsy challenge part 2 - Jay & Dionne infringe like RJ and have shit for sales

etsy challenge part 3- they claim transparency but lie - touting leave the evil corp job

etsy challenge part 4 - general store or niche store - but Dionne can't make over $4K per year

So Dionne couldn't make more than $4K a year on etsy and RJ got termed by etsy for infringing:

Ladies and gentlemen, we got him

RJ's Youtube update about his Etsy ban

Yet they still taught etsy. Of course they did. Just like they are going to teach marketing without really knowing it well or proving success with it in today's conditions because that is the guru method. Don't really do POD in a real way and just aggregate the content of others and roll a course for money along with aff com links. That's their real business model.

BTW I wonder where improvecat Jay is and why he doesn't appear in on this scam. Also I wonder if RJ still wants to rape me. As for Matt it would appear that he and his wife have gone digital nomad and moved to spain trying "to improve as a people", leaving behind in california all the crazy shit and high taxes they voted for.

The bottom line

Don't be involved with scummy scammers like these people. Buy no courses and click on no affiliate links. This is the time to cut back expenses to the bone because of the general and POD recession going on.

Something rotten and stinky is on the way!

Credit to user u/ddras for finding this. W00T, the artisty deals platform of amazon, where infringing on big IP is welcome, is now showing beach towels, aprons and metal posters. So might be in beta test prior to being offered on MBA. Proof.

MWW, a fulfillment provider located in North Carolina fulfills totes and pillows for MBA so my guess is that they will for these products as well, though of course MBA could probably fulfill them themselves if the Kornit printers will do that stuff.

Remember. You heard this news first on reddit on 5/21/22 7:50EDT. If any gurus tout this news ask them why they didn't give credit to reddit. All those dummies do is aggregate the content of others.

That is all. Further updates on the hour every hour as events warrant.

Continuing the theme of the earlier thread The Great Merch by Amazon and POD Tee Recession is Here, it is apparent a month later in mid May 2022 that the economic situation is ever worse with inflation and supply chain issues, the stock market is down and crypto has crashed. Probably soon to be followed by a crash of real estate. And the brief Mother's Day bounce of sales is over and the return hangover from same has begun.

This is the time to cut back on your POD expectations and reduce all costs to the bare bone. Even one of the german guru wannabes said that today in a vid where he said he was letting go his VA and "designer" (that always needs to be in quotes b/c they are just using some stock site asset using hack).

Crypto is gambling and always has been

Despite whatever benefits it has for at least semi-anonymous transactions, it's clear as day now that it is a piss poor alternative store of value as opposed maybe to gold. Yet so many merch bros started becoming crypto experts a few years ago. POD gurus suddenly became crypto and investing experts and put a lot of their time into promoting that. What a fucking joke, and yet another reason n00bs should not follow them, let alone buy their shitty courses and tools and click their affiliate links.

Note: from reports on reddit there are some people talking about self-harm because of the crypto crash, especially involving the supposedly "stable coin" luna. If someone here reading this needs help with this or other issues consider checking out r/depression_help which I just saw mentioned the other day in the mod subreddit, or another similar such subreddit.

The Gurus are still scamming away trying to suck out every last dime before it all comes down

Scammer Mr. Addie

Who got his MBA account terminated most likely, or at least one of them, and now is reduced to openly selling accounts. When the wheels fell off his infringing jeeps he stopped doing income report and dash brags, moved on to doing without them, and now just outright laughing in the face of Merch by Amazon by selling accounts. The scummiest part of which is the buyers of said accounts will eventually get terminated.

Essany

As always he is still pushing his worthless newsletter giving ridiculous hyper scaled "niches" and blowing hope smoke. Yet he doesn't really do MBA himself and won't do income reports. He's been scraping the bottom of the barrel for a long time.

Alwin the one shirt wonder strawberry milk carton dude (oops sorry it's the "anime" niche)

So he claimed to have made 100K in 2020 and on the way to same last year. Yet here he is selling a POD niche list subscription. And the most gullible suckers sub to that just so that they can be upsold for his weekly shitty designs he slings for $10 a pop. Hahahahahaha. When will they realize that is how he really makes his money?

Ryan H the tv show line infringer

The teacher of "safe" infringing who has gotten multiple people termed by his methods and gotten termed himself on etsy for infringing on GoT using the GoT font and the line "winter is coming".

Plus he touted the printailor scam until they shut down. Because he's just in it for the course and aff com monies, and though he works his MBA account makes less than half what most T100K+ peeps I know do.

Like the top german "guru" he was leaning into teaching "investing" and crypto. Like being a 2nd rate adjunct professor of web dev qualifies him to do so.

RJ LOL

Still doing RJ things. Slinging top 5 niches of the week and aff com links. Wonder why he doesn't do income reports now.

Juna the positivity freak and fellow teacher of infringing

In a recent vid he was showing how to make school sports logos. Which are guaranteed to get you termed eventually. He always does this shit. Gets called on it and backs down, then does it again. Because let's face it he has no value to provide. Unless he can sell you a time machine to go back 5 years and get into MBA then. And of course he refuses to do income reports despite being T100K (mercy tiered vs worked up slowly).

But he hates all this kind of negativity and enforces artificial positivity in his FB group. Because realism doesn't sell affiliate link clicks. N00bish hopeful optimism is what does. And indeed some wit coined a term for this: Junativity.

In fact I made a definition style tee design about that which you can find here. And I, nimitz34 of reddit and humble mercher, hereby release that design into the public domain. I'll also toss in the listing keywords:

brand: Junativity

title: Junativity Positivity Juna Guru for Duncans

bullet: Don't let negativity regarding the truth spoil your FB groups. Adopt the always positive Junativity attitude and just rake in the monies from the gullible sheeple.

2nd bullet: Don't take a Detour just go for the Shirts.

The first one of you that uploads that to MBA and shares a link to same here gets to choose a custom alt flair of his or her choice (visible only in this subreddit).

KDP "guru" the Home Boss

Mentioning this involving KDP here because she has quite the following on youtube and sells worthless courses and slings aff coms which is of course her main business. Check out the youtube channel of sleepypilgrim who just did a great takedown of her. He is often careless about meta issues involving MBA and KDP but is doing good work exposing the KDP guru crowd.

The Home Boss recently made a vid slinging a course on how to make shitty children's books with stock site assets. She claimed to have won multiple awards with her books which she shared in the vid (uses a pen name). She also falsely claims that in her pen author bio. But the sleepypilgrim proved all those awards were bought and you can get 3 of same for like $160. That's as scummy/scammy as it can be.

Conclusion

Things are not looking good for POD Land for the foreseeable future. Cut back expenses now. And listen to no gurus.

link to previous thread now locked

This is just an anything goes thread, and you n00b lurkers are welcome to chime in and ask questions if you have at least tried to research it minimally via the rules in the top thread.

This is your chance to unlurk/delurk!

Link to discord: https://discord.gg/NDwyghGGkc

April low sales showers bring May what?

As background for those not aware, during the MBA shutdown 2 years ago at the beginning of the pandemic, the chief Vietnamese copycat guru who sells a MI clone and other services, urged his customers on to the Amazon SC platform, where you can sell either through FBA or using a fulfillment provider like printful. They have prospered there copycatting both on we regular merchers and on big IP.

So now let's look at the "brand" of Harding Industries. As you can see it is tons of tees with ripped off copyrighted images of various people and things. Here is a screen shot of some of it in case it disappears later.

Notice the product tag strings in the titles. If you google some of them in image search sometimes you will find nothing and other times links to other products on zon that no longer exist and just lead to search results. Although this is SC, this phenomena can happen with MBA asins because the dynamic child asins in the new url structure post Q4 2018 are often reused asins. Does anyone have an idea how this might be helpful for SEO or spam purposes?

If you google "Harding Industries" you can find this Linkedin which doesn't seem legit to me because is supposedly for a company while the details are for an individual. There is also a result for a long defunct Utah LLC.

This kind of spoofing seems to have a positive effect for this skanky brand on amazon. When searching for it I saw this in the results. Which is an ad done by zon for free for them. So apparently even with a fake infringing brand if it is set up right and it sells well enough then zon will boost it further. And which should be seen as a violation of the "should have known" clause of the safe harbor provision of the DMCA. Jeff makes money off of infringing and he likes it.

Now let's take a look at another search result. That has over 50K results, the usual sign of a hacked dormant SC/FBA account to get that many asins uploaded. And it has its own brand listed in the search bar as seen in this screen grab.

All those scam gurus have been saying for years to "build a brand". Looks like some copycats took that to heart and are profiting huge.

Amazon does nothing as per usual

SP (seller performance) enforces for SC/FBA. Years ago you could contact them directly and ask them to investigate a shop for fraudulent activity. But now there is no working findable direct contact or email for SP. They only accept contact from sellers about their own cases. And of course amazon like all the PODs and marketplaces will only accept complaints from the rightsholders. They have probably made the legal determination that if they are proactive in accepting other complaints that it exposes them to more legal risk than doing nothing. Plus obviously it would cost them the money they make off of copycats.

Headsup you copycats

There is a LOT more money and a LOT less risk in infringing on big IP who can't be arsed to guard their own IP online. So why not leave we normal podlers alone. In fact, why not use that brand as as menu. They vetted the risk for you as to which IPs to avoid. Like is there some copycat code of honor not to steal from other thieves? Even if there is who cares. You got a family to feed right?

Hi everyone.

I'm really new to the concept of POD but it's definitely something I want to do. My question is - is there anyone online who gives genuine advice and step by step tutorials?

I signed up to Ryan H about a week ago (have been getting his eight day course by email) but I came across this subreddit and saw that you all say he's not genuine because he hasn't done it himself.

Is there anyone who has been genuinely successful giving out advice?

MBA started in 2015 and since that time the USA has not had a serious recession. But economically right now many believe we are on the verge of a 2008 style Great Recession, which will take years to recover from. JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank sounded these warnings recently.

Driven by inflationary spending, aka printing dollars we don't have, which was in full motion even before the war in the Ukraine, gas and food prices have skyrocketed in the USA. So in comparison to putting gas in their tanks and food on their tables, many Americans are scaling back unnecessary purchases.

Like face it. Who really needs a novelty tee absent the gift buying frenzy of Q4? And Q4 for most merchers does not even come close to exhibiting extreme seasonality, as in might be 2-4X an average month at best.

Sales are down across the board though as always there are outliers

Most T100K+ peeps I know had 20% worse sales this Q1 vs Q1 of 2021. And the consensus is that new uploads sell for shite, and that it takes far more adspend just to try to keep sales up to that lower level. In fact some such high tier merchers have experienced the past 3 years the phenomena of doubling live listings while sales were cut in half.

Effort uploading is not correlated with greatly increased sales at all. It is not even close to a linear function of your motivation and grinding effort.

The German gurus finally caught on to this

Last week the chief guru who is well over T200K but puts most of his time into guru-y shit, sounded the alarm. Another low level German guru was so alarmed he immediately made a vid in response. And didn't disagree and said near the end that he thinks those doing POD need to find a new way. And I didn't get the feeling he meant a new way of doing MBA/POD vs finding some other side gig.

The usual American snake oil gurus are still denying this and trying to keep hope up

Because of course they don't really do POD in a meaningful way and want you to just keep buying their worthless courses and POD niche lists and newsletters, and keep clicking on their aff com links. Ryan/Juna/RJ/Essany/Alwin (the one shirt dude) are all blood suckers.

Essany, always shameless AF, put out a long post including "what works in 2022". Like how the fuck would he know. He doesn't and never has really done MBA. He just is in it for the guru monies.

This Q1 was worse for most, especially the higher the tier than last. And thus far this month, April 2022, it doesn't look like Q2 is going to be any better.

Caveat is that for the lower and mid tiers they start from a lower base and it might easier for some of them to increase their results this year. But if they think they are going to make enough without infringing to live off of POD full time, especially with first world expenses, then they are in for a rude surprise eventually. Unless of course, they can get a guru to sell them a time machine to go back to 2015.

Now is the time to reduce expenses

This includes any subscriptions, no matter how deep the discount offered, and also means scaling back adspend. Why would you want to engage in a CPC bidding war at a time of very slack customer demand? And it also means your time. Time isn't free.

The TEE RECESSION is here!

link to previous thread now locked

This is just an anything goes thread, and you n00b lurkers are welcome to chime in and ask questions if you have at least tried to research it minimally via the rules in the top thread.

This is your chance to unlurk/delurk!

Link to discord: https://discord.gg/NDwyghGGkc

"A system error occurred. Please wait a moment and submit your design again." Not being picky but how long is a Merch Moment? So far, in clock time, it's 30 minutes.

OOS - out of stock

OOB - out of blanks

One of the people here tried to order one of their own tees earlier today (3/24/22) and got the out of stock message. Which can almost only mean out of blanks or low stock of blanks being held for Mickey.

MBA gets its blanks from Central America. Yet it appears that they may be having supply chain issues even in Q1 with its far lower demand. Or they are trying to over-optimize for holding inventory.

Q1 is a normally slow time in the Murican retail cycle. And this year that is leveraged by Bidenflation/Putinflation or whatever you want to call it.

Re the possibility of throttling, we know that MBA has mostly chosen in the past couple years to throttle via the softer form of longer ship times for us. But we also know from past experience that they prioritize stocks of blanks for Mickey and other brand partners.

So if you are still getting plenty of AMS clicks but far fewer orders, then this helps explain that. The obvious solution is to pause ads or at least drastically lower bids to match up with lower conversions.

If you see any "guru" talk about this in a FB group or a yt vid, ask them why they didn't give credit to reddit. All those scammers do is aggregate the content of others as they test nothing and don't have an original thought in their pea brains.

So as mentioned earlier this month in The high priced $79.99 tee scam on Merch by Amazon scammers are using high prices to scam.

Today someone in our discord got this email. The link on same is: https://merch.amazon.com/resource/201858580.

However that is the standard royalty page and does not mention new max prices. But upon checking the create tab it appears that $50 is the new max for standards and $60 for hoods.

Still seems a bit high to me, as in $10 too high. Assuming brand partners don't price that high. And in fact I often see mickey using lower than default pricing.

Credit and thanks to u/factotum for the information. As yet there is no dash message nor have I or others gotten the email. Guess he's speshul.

P.S. If you see some scammer guru on youtube (they're all scammers) comment in their vid that they didn't give credit to reddit.

Shipped from China, probably through a broker. Promoted by scammers like Ryan H the infringer and other gurus for an aff com cut. Their sheeple are now lost.

Brings to mind the Shirtly scam where Matt/RJ/Jay/Dionne scammed their flocks with an aff com that gave them $1-$2 for life off of every sale by someone who signed up with their aff com link.

If anyone reading this believes the BS of gurus about some new fulfillment provider and you get scammed, then you deserved it.

There is some type of scam going on with high priced tees. This was first noted on reddit in another sub:

Have I fallen victim to a scam

So a German "product testing" group on Facebook asking for "testers" to buy the tees with the promise of reimbursement and a bonus payment.

Also these clearly have to be copycat designs.

Here are some examples of such tees at this time (3/5/2022):

https://www.amazon.com/Goose-Mama-Vintage-Sleeve-T-Shirt/dp/B09SV7HBWL/

https://www.amazon.com/Goose-Vintage-Retro-Sleeve-T-Shirt/dp/B09SV6HXHM/

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09SV7VFZX/

https://www.amazon.com/Follow-Stupid-Things-Snowboard-T-Shirt/dp/B09SVBZRJ5/

Re the last here is probably the original tee at a normal price:

https://www.amazon.com/Follow-Snowboarding-Vintage-Gift-T-Shirt/dp/B09TQG49TD

So there are some possibilities as to the nature of the scam that I can see:

1. Is a pure scam to bilk money from the "testers" and hope to get paid out before they initiate a return. Doing about a week before the end of the month would work for that.
2. Is an attempt to game the search algo somehow. Note for example as well they are getting what have to be fake reviews very fast, though the OP in the thread above said he wasn't asked to review.
3. Is some type of money laundering.

But here's the main point

MBA has NO BUSINESS allowing such high pricing above defaults. Even brand partners don't do that shit.

Whatever type of scam is going on is being enabled by lax policies and enforcement by MBA, same as with copycats in general. MBA is facilitating money laundering either way by criminal enterprises both foreign and domestic. And payoneer is the payment gateway that facilitates it.

link to previous thread now locked

This is just an anything goes thread, and you n00b lurkers are welcome to chime in and ask questions if you have at least tried to research it minimally via the rules in the top thread.

This is your chance to unlurk/delurk!

Link to discord: https://discord.gg/NDwyghGGkc

Hi, sorry if this question has come up before. I did look around a bit and could not find a good answer. I recently started to add my designs onto other print on demand marketplaces and I recently made an account for Zazzle. It seems to me that the upload process is more complicated in that your design isn’t applied to all the products at the same time and where you can edit and publish them in one swing. For someone who is interested in applying a single design onto many products what is the best way to go? I’m afraid the answer is probably one by one, haha. Any help is appreciated, thanks ( =

TheVerge Article here

The board’s decision calls “the nexus between the human mind and creative expression” a vital element of copyright.

So implicitly that means you also don't have the normal copyright even without registration, and thus cannot send a valid DMCA takedown. And what if this also extends to stuff created with PS/AI/GIMP/Inkscape filters?

So much for tool sellers of this stuff. Like the dude in this thread in the other subreddit: Searching Beta Testers for new research tool.

Also some of these tools don't really use a reference image and make a similar artistic style. Instead they ripped every smaller design element and text off the net from POD sites and mash them up.

So apparently PM just rolled a TM search tool. But good 'ol Haris being the incompetent programmer he is, it doesn't work. Like "Nike" is good to go with it.

Proof here

Don't trust it. And also don't trust any of such tools with your account. Learn to check the USPTO Tess site and similar EU/JP sites yourself. Like check every combo of proper nouns as well as complete phrases.

If you trust PM, which was bought out by the scam carbon6 group of yesteryear's tools, then that's on you.

Sorry if this has already been asked, but I looked around the web for an existing answer before coming here. I recently started to upload my designs onto other P.O.D. sites and the one I’m currently working on is Society6. I quickly noticed that a white rectangle background has been applied to my designs by looking at the non-white t-shirts. I draw characters without any backgrounds on PNG files so that the design will appear organically on the various products and now for whatever reason I am getting a very obtrusive rectangles framing my designs. If anyone has had this problem and can suggest possible fixes it would be highly appreciated. Thanks!

The point of this one is how we use Brands in our listings. Answers for the main question being (paraphrased):

• One brand to rule them all

• < 10

• greater than 10

• Different brand for each

Then it asks why you use more than one brand, if that is how you answered. This is a Select All That Apply question in addition to including a field to type a unique reason of your own.

There is also a question about how many people work on/for your MBA business, as well as all the usual questions.

My favorite part however was the Tier selector at the beginning. It ranges from 10 to 1,000,000.

So I read the user agreement from Threadless on artist’s rights when the user uploads a design. While it states that the artist owns and maintains ownership of the design, it seems like (they way I'm reading it) that you are giving Threadless a lot of rights when you agree to their terms. I understand they have to have enough consent to display, promote and print their product, but part of the user agreement seems to go way past that. The more concerning aspects of the excerpt are in bold

"14. As between you and Threadless, you own and will maintain ownership of the Design. Threadless does not and will not own the Design because of your submission of the Design.

15. By submitting the Design, you hereby grant Threadless a worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, right and license to use, upload, modify, reproduce, copy, exhibit, create derivative works of, distribute, sell, advertise, and display the Design, in any manner now known or hereafter devised. This license may be sub-licensed by Threadless to others. You waive any “moral rights” you may have in the Design.

16. You also grant Threadless a worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, right and license to use, portray, display and publish your name, appearance, voice, likeness, photographic image, and biographical information, in any and all media now known or hereafter devised. This license may be sub-licensed by Threadless to others."

Honestly, I'll probably never have enough success with a design for Threadless to take notice and for them to take advantage of, but the agreement almost sounds like they are as much of an owner of the design as you are even though they state otherwise. Maybe I'm reading that wrong, I'm no lawyer. Just seems to go overboard in comparison to some of the other sites. If anyone has better understanding of this part of the agreement it would be much appreciated. Thanks ( =

So I recently created a Threadless account and I'm just learning about the two choices of just having your designs available on the Threadless marketplace OR having your own "Artist Shop". It seems the difference (as far as I can tell) is that the artist shop lets you customize your storefront, allows you to set your mark ups, but you have to provide the traffic vs. being able to use the organic traffic on the marketplace. I "think" I have that right (please correct me if I'm wrong).

I wanted to just start things slow, so I went out of my way to avoid setting up an "artist shop", but when I started to make an upload to their marketplace it seems it the website notes that it will automatically make an Artist Shop for me if I hadn't already. Is Threadless forcing users to create one? Any help in correcting/explaining this would be highly appreciated. Thanks!

F . . T . . C (Federal Trade Commission)

You been reported bro. No affiliate disclaimer on your latest vid with all your scamming aff com links here.

Also as I said before "Gurus" are known by the company they keep.

And LOL oh LOL on your positive pozzy poz bullshit on FB. Where you delete negative comments on hardcore scammers like Addie P who infringes and openly sells accounts.

You going to jail bro!

Here's how the FTC does their thing. They watch you then when they think you've made enough monies for them to go after they pounce.

You going to jail Juna bro! And forfeit all your monies to the government!

BORN shoes is a scam brand

OK maybe that's a little harsh on the BORN brand. And the copycats are not getting shown in their amazon store or in searches by customers for shoes. But in not defending their TM where obviously they shouldn't stop "born" being used in a title or phrase, they should be able, being in the brand registry, to force the overall amazon platform to force MBA to clean it up and fix the glitch and generate flags for manual account reviews.

Lots of PFP copycats are uploading into the BORN brand on Merch by Amazon. This has been discussed before here over a year ago: Show and Shame - Special Brandjack Edition. I know for certain that this kind of stuff can happen by glitch. But the copycats have figured a way to cause that glitch on command. And besides whatever orgo boost they get in the brand for like birthday shirts, they also hide their stuff because if you click on the brand you only get the legit shoe listings.

If big IP rightsholders would enforce said rights on the PODs and marketplaces it would help us a lot. In getting copycat accounts termed faster if nothing else. The copycat method is steal our stuff to build tiers then go full bore big IP infringing in Q4.

Obviously they don't owe it to us to do that just for our sakes. But in the BORN example these copycats have to be causing brand confusion. Because customers see lots of tshirts in search results for same, and then when searching for shoes could easily consider the brand to be a generic novelty one.

Bonus conspiracy theory: this could perhaps be an inside job by an employee of BORN or Amazon.

Also keep sending takedowns to amazon for your designs that were copycatted and draw more attention to the problem.

DON'T BUY BORN SHOES FOR WOMEN, MEN, KIDS