Beginner's Guide to Merch Informer

Hey everyone, welcome back to another video. In today's video, we are going to be doing a full Merch Informer tutorial for beginners. This video is going to go through all of the features of Merch Informer, and I'm even going to share with you my personal tips on how I use Merch Informer myself for my print-on-demand business. So without further ado, let's switch over to the computer and get straight into this tutorial. All right, so if you are new to Merch Informer, this is their homepage here. Essentially, what Merch Informer is, is a print-on-demand tool designed to help you discover things that other sellers won't be able to find. and save you a ton of time in the process. Now, that will make a lot more sense as we start to walk through these features, but that's essentially what the tool is. Now, with that being said, one of the most important things to talk about before we get into this tutorial is how much does it cost and do they have any discounts? So if you come up top here and you click on pricing, this is going to show you their two different pricing options. Now, Merch Informer is a paid tool. So in order to use it, you have to have one of their plans. They have a newbie plan and a professional plan. For most things that you are doing on Merch Informer, you can use their newbie plan. However, if you do get their professional plan, you're going to have a higher volume of searches that you're allowed to do every day. You're also going to get access to their monthly vector pack. These are all custom hand drawn graphics new every single month that you're allowed to use in your print on demand designs. They're not available anywhere outside of merchant former. So you get custom graphics this way. And then you're also going to get access to their single upload interface where you can basically upload one design to multiple different print on demand websites all at once. Now, in addition to that, we're mentioning, do they have any discount codes? And yes, they actually do. I have a personal coupon code from them. It's for 20% off. So you can use this on the newbie plan or you can use it on the professional plan. I'll put a link to that down in the description below. If you do want to manually type it in, you can just type in Greg 20 at checkout. That'll give you the 20% off. Now, the last couple of things about the pricing that are super important to know is that on the monthly, these are the prices here. If you do sign up for a whole year at once, the prices drop quite a bit. And then if you use that 20% off coupon, it brings it down to almost $6 per month. Now, the very last thing about the pricing before we move on is that they do have a free trial. So no matter what plan you want to do, you get three full days to use full access on a free trial. So for the sake of this tutorial, if you don't have a plan set up yet, you're welcome to use a free trial and you can follow along in this tutorial. All right. With all of that out of the way, let me get logged into my account and we'll get started in this tutorial. All right. So once you open up your merchant former account, this is what it's going to look like. All of their different features are here on the left side. So as you click on these, they open up into dropdowns of multiple different features. Now, instead of just going through these one by one, instead, I'm going to cover what I think are the most important and most valuable features to merchant former first. And then afterwards, we'll go through all the rest of the features one by one. So with that being said, let's start with my favorite tool within merchant former. This is called the competition checker. So if you click on that, it opens up this page right here. Now, what this tool does is you are able to type in any idea that you were thinking about creating print on demand designs about you click search and it's instantly going to tell you, yes, you should go into that niche or no, you should not. So to give you an example of this, let's type in fishing, give that a search. And here are the results right here. So if you look over on the right side, this is the most important thing you're looking for. First, this is going to give you a letter. great. So remember back in school, you got an A if you did really well and you got an F if you failed? Well, that's what this scoring system uses right here. So you get an A, B, C, D, E, or an F. So an F is telling us right off the bat that the fishing niche is not a good niche to go into. Now, the reason for this is because it's saying that it's already oversaturated. The reason I know that is because it says there are 57,000 products already listed on Amazon and 39,000 of them are selling. That tells you right off the bat that if you're going into fishing generally, there is already way too many people listed and way too many of them are good designs already. Now, there is more to this tool that we'll talk about in a second here. But the reason that this is so valuable right here is you just saved yourself all of the time spent thinking about and creating designs and listing them in fishing. Now, the way to actually use this tool is to type in more specific ideas. So, for example, if we typed in deep sea fishing, we gave that a search. Just like that, we can see that this is actually an A grade. So this is a great niche to go into for print on demand. The reason for that, there's only 882 products, only 102 of them are selling. So there are very little products listed and even fewer of them are actually making sales. So this is a wide open sub niche within fishing. The only way that I would know that this is a good niche to go into is by using this tool, the competition checker. Now, as mentioned, there are more features down here. So to show you what these are, the best selling designs within whatever niche you had just searched, these are the most popular keywords that they are using in their listing. So when you are creating your design in this sub niche because you just found a good one, These are the keywords that you want to be using throughout your title, your features and your description. It's all laid out very easy for us. We don't have to go over to Amazon, search through all of them to find the best sellers and then see what keywords they're using. Now, in addition to getting all the keywords laid out right here, you also get what the best sellers actually are in that sub niche. So you will get best sellers one all the way through ten. And these are going to give you good ideas. You can kind of browse through these and you can see what are people actually buying in the sub niche. And then you can use that as inspiration when creating your own designs. OK, so now that you know how to use the competition checker, let's now move into my second favorite part of Merchantformer. And this is called the keyword finder. So to get here, you go over to keyword research, you go down and it's the first one called keyword finder. So the purpose of the keyword finder is to help you come up with those ideas of sub niches within those overall niches. So, for example, we did fishing as the overall niche and we came up with deep sea fishing. Well, you may be wondering, how did I come up with deep sea fishing? Well, if you type in an overall niche in here like fishing, you give that a search. This is going to break down that overall niche into tons of different sub niches. So you've got Amazon sub niches and you've got Google sub niches broken down by how many people are searching for them. And by default, it's only going to put ten entries in this list. But as you can see, there are 500 here and 365 over here. So if you go back up to the top and you sort this by. 100 at a time. This will allow you to just keep scrolling and make this a lot more efficient. So as you can see, this is the specific keyword or the phrase that people are searching for. This is how many people are searching for that. So 25,000 people. We are going to scroll through here until we find sub niches within fishing. So right off the bat, we've got Alaska fishing, we've got alligator fishing, we've got American fishing. All of these get over a thousand people searching for them every month. So this is where this tool actually starts to get really cool. Now, instead of just coming up with ideas here and then having to go back to the competition checker and type that in and see if it's good or bad. you can click on this little details icon right here for each one of these in real time. It's quickly going to load it and it's going to open that up. And this is the competition score right here. So now you can type in any niche. You can see what are all these sub niche ideas within it, and you can quickly click around on them and see, should you go into this one? Should you not? Now you can start taking all these ideas that you got an A score for and copy pasting them into a list that you can go create designs on later. So that is a really cool tool in here. And it's so easy. You just go through here. You can just click on the details icon and just going to pull all of these up for you. So again, American fishing, you put American flag and fishing, tie those in together. That's a great niche to go into. OK, so let's close out of this. Those are the first two tools that have a ton of value within Merch Informer. But the third one is a super important tool as well. This one is over in trademarks and then go to trademark alerts. Now, what this tool is going to do is once you've found these good sub niches to go into, you can type in all of the phrases that you're thinking about using on your actual designs and check to make sure that nobody owns those trademark. Now, this is the only real area in print on demand that you have to pay attention to legally. Before you use a phrase on your own design, you have to make sure that nobody else owns the rights to that phrase on T-shirts. It is possible that any person or company could have formally trademarked that phrase that you want to use on a T-shirt so that nobody else can use it. So that is exactly what this tool does. So once you come up with your ideas that you want to put on your designs, just type them all in here on different lines. You can type in as many of them as you want here and search them all at once. So let me type in a couple examples. OK, so I just typed in five different design ideas right here. All we have to do now is click save and then click this blue button right here that says check trademarks. Now, when you scroll down, you are going to get either a green checkmark or a red X. This tells you instantly on as many designs as you want to search at once, if you are allowed to use them or if you cannot. So here's a perfect example. All of these are free to use on T-shirts. We can use them for our print on demand business. But this one specifically is already protected. So you don't want to be putting this on your own design and listing it, or you're going to get your design taken down and you're going to get a trademark strike on your account. If you get too many of these strikes on your account, your entire account gets taken down from that print on demand website. So that is why using a tool like this is so important. So just like that, we've gone through my three favorite features of Merch Informer. I would say even if the tool had no other features at this point, it would still be well worth the couple of dollars per month to access these. They are going to save you so much time and they will actually protect your print on demand business. So now let me show you a couple of the other features that I like, and then we'll go one by one through the rest. So if you go up to product research over here, you can go to movers and shakers. And what this tool will help you do is find trends that are just now starting to happen. So all you have to do is switch this top setting right here from daily, weekly or monthly. I like to use it on monthly the best and then click search. And as you start scrolling through here, you have 12 pages of results you can go through. But this is going to show you green is going to be the price that the shirt is set at, and then purple is going to be the sales rank. So just so this makes sense on Amazon, the lower sales rank you have closer to one means that you're getting closer to first place in sales. So although this looks like it's going down, that actually means that it's getting closer to one. So it's starting to sell a lot more. It went from three million down to 100,000. That means that starting on this date, June 24th, this shirt started to sell a lot. Now, the last part of this is the price is that as they change the price from 1899 to 1999, you can see, did it start to sell any worse? Did it go back up and slow down in sales? And you can see that they raise their price and the sales still continue to do extremely well. This just gives you a little bit of insider information on if you are creating a shirt similar to this that is just starting to trend, what you could price that at and people will still buy it. So with that being said, just look through these shirts Christmas in July. This is just starting to sell really well. That is a trend that is just happening. If you were scrolling through Amazon trying to identify these trends, you would have a lot harder of a time. This just sorts it all for you. OK, so building off of this tool, which is going to help you find those trends really early on, another really helpful tool to do kind of a similar process here is if you go to product research and you go to Merch Archive, this is going to take all of the historical data on Amazon for sales. What has been selling really well and allow you to sort that by a specific. date. So you can go back a couple of years time and you can say, OK, we're going into October. Let's look at October 5th of 2020. to give that a search. This is going to show you on October 5th what was selling the best. So all these shirts are obviously related to Halloween. This shirt sold about 900 times, this one 720 times. So as we're going into this year, you can start planning around October 5th. You want to have shirts like this. And also, by the way, these were the specific designs that sold really well a couple of years ago. This is just a super effective way of looking back one year, two years, five years at certain time frames to see what sold really well back then. and then building off of those to create something even better and then time that so that you can be positioned really well to get those sales. Now, before we get into kind of going one by one through here, there's one more tool that I really want to show you. This is one that not many people talk about. It's a quick one that is super helpful. If you go down over here to tools, you can go to merch calendar and this, although you could find something like this over on Google, having this built in just makes it super easy. It's going to show you all of the holidays in different countries and it's going to show you all the unofficial holidays. And then all of these are design ideas that you can create designs on and many other people aren't going to be competing with. So as you jump around here, you can find kind of the bigger ones or you can just create designs in all of them. And even if you just get a couple of sales from each of these, it's not any huge moneymaker as that comes around each year, you are going to be the one building up reviews, building up the sales, and you can start to own all of these unofficial small holidays. Okay. So that covers my favorite tools within Merch Informer. But as we go over to the left, there are a lot of tools within all of these dropdowns. So let's start going through them one by one. So you know how to use all the features within Merch Informer. So starting out at the very top here, once you open up your Merch Informer account, this is where you're going to be dropped into. It's the Learn tab, and this is going to give you all of their specific tutorials on each one of these features. So as you're going through here, if you forgot how to use one of these features, you can either come back to this video. or you can click in here and get a quick tutorial on how to use that specific feature. Now, I will say that these tutorials were a little bit ago, so some of these features have been updated or they've been improved. So these specific tutorials may look a little bit different than what the tools currently look like. So with that being said, you can jump around these and you can learn as much as you want through here. We're going to start in product research with the first tool, which is the product search. So the product search is made for you to type in a specific phrase for a shirt and see how much competition there is on that specific phrase. So if we typed in here, I'd rather be fishing and we gave that a search. This is going to give us pretty similar results throughout here, just laid out in a different way of what that competition checker was showing us before. So you have your competition score over here. You've got some related keywords you can use. And then you've got the top sellers in that specific phrase. So although I don't really use this tool very often, this tool is going to give you a good idea of is this specific phrase something that is super competitive or is there still room to go into it? And then what are the top selling designs that are using that specific phrase? This will give you a good idea of what people are actively buying and that you can use as good inspiration when you're creating your own designs. Now, one other feature that's nice in here is it tells you the lowest price, the highest price and the average price. This is helpful so that when you are creating your design to go into that similar niche, you know what to price your shirt at. So that is the product search. I would say this one's very similar to the competition checker. So I just use the competition checker, but that's how this one works. Now, moving on from here, you have the merchant search. So this is a very specific use case here. So when someone creates a design on Amazon Merch on Demand, they enter a brand or pretty much a storefront for those designs. So to show you what this looks like on Amazon, when you are looking at a design, you have brand and that's what this was right here. So it's called fishing apparel. Well, if you were to type in fishing apparel right here, it's going to show you all of the designs created under that same brand. So let's type that in real quick and we'll have a look. So these results are for anyone who used fishing apparel as their brand name on these shirts. Now, the idea here is that if you find someone who is a really good competitor in a space that you want to go into, you can type in their brand name here and you'll get all of the results and you'll get some data about them. And the reason that I don't use this also often is if you just come in here and you click on fishing apparel right here, it's going to bring you to those results just in one click. So like I said, it's a very specific use case, but if you do want to use it, that's how you use this feature. Okay, coming back over here, let's go on to Merch Hunter. So this is actually a really cool tool, and I'm going to show you the two ways that I use it. What this tool is going to do is give you an overview of the top 100 selling designs at any given time on Amazon Merch on Demand. So all you have to do is leave this as top 100 and then excluded brands. You just want to click select all. This is going to put in all of the protected brands that get a ton of sales. And the idea here is that those ones already get a ton of sales. So it's going to filter them out and just show us the brands of other people who are creating designs and uploading them. So once you've done that, just come down here and hit search. And now you've got yourself the top 100 selling designs as of right now when you are searching it. This shirt has an estimated 1100 sales, this one 540 sales. And you can really just scroll through here and see if you can come up with any ideas. Now, it's cool to see this because if you go to Amazon and try to find this information yourself, you can't sort the data yourself on Amazon. So you need a tool like this to do it. But this is really just going to give you some general ideas. I like very specific ideas that I can build off of. So it's very actionable. So this isn't something that I do very often. Rather, what I would do is come up here and type in an overall niche. So if you type in fishing and then you go down here and you hit search, it's going to show you the top 100 selling designs in any given niche. This is where this tool starts to get really helpful. So in the overall niche of fishing, these are the top selling designs. This is where whatever niche you are going into, you can see See what are people actually buying and use that as inspiration to create your own designs. So that is the Merch Hunter. That's how I would use it. The two ways you get the overview of Amazon Merch on Demand or type in a niche and you're going to get some really specific results. Okay. So moving on from here, we've got Etsy and Pinterest search. What this tool helps you do is instead of looking just on Amazon for inspiration, you can actually search for a specific niche like fishing over on Etsy, or you can do it on Pinterest. So let's first start with Etsy. And now you can scroll through here and see on Etsy for this keyword, what are people selling? What are people buying? And see if you can come up with any ideas that you didn't see over on Amazon and just kind of take that inspiration from Etsy and create something over on Amazon. Now, I would say the best thing to do here is to come over to sort by and do favorites. This is just going to put things that people have favorited the most on Etsy at the beginning of these results. Just so you're going to see what people are actually buying first. Okay. So that's how you do that on Etsy. If you just switch this to Pinterest type in fishing again. Now you're going to get all these results from Pinterest. Now, Pinterest is all photos. So you're just going to get kind of text ideas that you can use, but you can even get some cool design ideas like stuff like this. Or you can take some of these phrases, see if they're low competition, make sure nobody has trademarked them and go ahead and use them on your print on demand designs. So that's the Etsy and the Pinterest search feature. It's really just to give you some ideas and think outside of the box beyond just Amazon. OK, so coming back over to the left, we already went through the movers and shakers. That's for finding real time trends. The next feature is the trend tracker. This is almost identically the movers and shakers, but it's going to do it over a longer period of time. So you can go up to three months with this tool. If you click search, you're going to see a longer graph. So you can see all the way back on three months instead of just out to one month at a max. If you're going to use one of these tools, I would say just use the movers and shakers. You're going to get really good information that way. So the trend tracker is something that I don't find myself using all that often. OK, moving right along, we already went through the Merch Archive. That's for looking back in time and seeing what was selling at a specific time. We already went through the competition checker. Now let's open up keyword research. We already went through the keyword finder. Now let's go to the keyword cloud. OK, so the way that the keyword cloud works, and it's actually going to be pretty much the same as the trending phrases, which will be coming up next, is just like the Merch Archive. You can go back in time and you can click on a specific time. You can click search. And now instead of showing you the best selling designs at that time, you can see the best selling phrases. So this is going to give you one word, two word and three words. I would say really focus on the two words and three words. This is where you're going to get those best ideas. So by combining a couple of the different tools here, you can go back in time on something like the Merch Archive and you can see what was selling at this time. So November 14th, probably Thanksgiving designs. And then you can come down here and you can get ideas to create those designs. So using just a girl or girl who loves or this is my it could be something like this is my first Thanksgiving and that could be a kid's shirt. or just a girl who loves sweet potato and turkey. These are just brainstorming ideas, but they're giving you the phrases instead of the actual designs. So that's how the keyword cloud works. If you go to trending phrases, it's going to be kind of the same thing. This is going to be the phrases instead of the keywords. I would say you can use either of these and you're still going to get good brainstorming ideas. OK, coming down to the niche hunter. This is another cool tool. So this is going to tell you this week. These are the top ranked keywords and the top selling designs. in those keywords. So as you scroll down here, it's only going to show you 10 at once. So the first thing I would do is just show you 100 so you can keep scrolling and make this efficient. So you can look at what the keyword or the niche or sub niche is, and then you can get an idea of what people are actively buying is what kind of designs you should create. So all of these have over 200,000 searches per month and just really scroll through here and see if you can see any designs that you want to create as well. It's just another way to brainstorm ideas and find different niches that you can go into. Now, keeping this moving down on the left side in the trademarks, we use the trademark alerts before, but the trademark hunter is another feature. So if you already have a ton of listings uploaded on merch on demand and you want to make sure that there's no trademark infringements on any of them, you can copy all the ASINs. And if you don't know where the ASIN is, if you go over to your shirt, let's use this one, for example, scroll down here and it's going to be on the left side. Right here is your ASIN. you can copy all of these and you can paste them into a CSV file and then you can upload that here and you can search all of them for trademarks at once. Now, what's cool about doing it this way is it takes a little bit of work to create that CSV file. But instead of just checking the phrase that's going to go on the shirt, it's going to check the title, the features and the description, all of those to make sure that you have no trademark infringements. OK, so we're almost towards the bottom here. Let's go into the tools and let's start with the listing score checker. So this is kind of a cool feature if you're just starting out and print on demand. If you go over and you go to one of your listings and you copy this ASIN we were just talking about. So I'm just going to right click and copy it and you paste that up here and you type in what keyword or what niche you're trying to rank for. So this is a fishing shirt. We'll go to search. And this is going to tell you generally how optimized that listing is. So does it have fishing in the title, the brand, the features, the description and is the description over a thousand characters? Well, it doesn't actually have fishing in the title. So if you scroll up here and you look at this design, it says Fishermen, it doesn't say fishing. So that is an opportunity for this listing to switch that to fishing. And it's going to be more optimized for the fishing niche instead of fishermen. Now, it does say that it has fishing in the brand name, which is up top here. It's got fishing in the features and the description, which are over here. We've got the features right here, the descriptions right here. So we're doing good on that front. And the last thing is a description over 1000 characters. This description is not over 1000 characters. If your description is over 1000 characters, the idea is that it gives Google the most information to rank your listing on Google. So this listing specifically with these results is 65% optimized. The idea is that you want to get a green check mark in all of these, and then you're 100% optimized. Now, as a beginner in print on demand, this is a good way to just be checking your listings. But as you get rolling and you just subconsciously know that you want to have your keywords in your title, your brand, your features, your description, then you're not really going to be using this tool anymore. Now, the next tool over here is the synonym suggest. And the purpose of this tool is to help you come up with different ways to say the niche that you want to go into other things that other people might be searching. So if you type in something like fishing, give that a search. These are some other ideas that you can use throughout your title, your features and your description. You've got sport fishing, you've got outdoors, you've got sport, you've got field sport. It's just an additional tool that you can use in here. It's not something that I think you're going to be using all the time. Now, the next tool up on the left is Merch Analytics. If you go into your Merch on demand account and you export all of your analytics. you can upload them here and you can see them in a pretty easy to use graph. It's going to show you over time charts that Merch on Demand won't show you. Merch on Demand analytics are notoriously very basic. So by uploading that data in here, it's just going to give you a chart that's a lot easier to understand what's going on in your business. It'll show you how many sales you have. It'll show you how many canceled orders you have. It'll show you how many returns you have, and you can see how that fluctuates over time. OK, the next feature on the left is the notes. And basically this is just a notepad within Merch Informer. So if you're in here working in Merch Informer and you want to jot down some ideas, you can add a new note here and you can put a title, you can jot down notes and you can save that. It will show up in your notes section right here. And then continuing to move along, we've already gone through the merch calendar. That was for finding those unofficial holidays. If you go to favorites, this is just going to be for products and keywords. If you are going through the product search and you're finding the best sellers in a niche and you like some of those designs that you want to keep an eye on, you can favorite them. They will show up in your favorited products. If you're going through the keyword finder and you have all of those sub niches that you want to go into with an A rating, you can favorite those. They will show up in your keyword favorites. And then moving on from here, it doesn't actually end just there. You have a couple other tools. These are actually pretty interesting. So let's talk about these. The Merch Informer Lister is a free Chrome extension that you can add to your browser. And then when you are uploading designs to Amazon Merch on Demand, it allows you to pre fill out a lot of the boxes and make the upload process a lot faster. Now, something that's pretty interesting here is that Amazon Merch on Demand has now come out with this feature built into their uploading process. But something that says a lot about Merch Informer as a company is that they knew that this was a problem beforehand and they created this to solve that problem before Amazon even did. So you can kind of do all of this on Amazon by default. Now they have it built into their upload process. But moving on to the merch designer, the merch designer is a design tool that you can use built straight into merchant former. Now, to my knowledge, this designer is getting phased out, so I'm not even going to go through it and it's getting replaced with the merch studio. So let's go through this one instead. So this is the inside of the merch studio right here. It's just a design tool for print on demand. So you can come in here, you can see templates, you can click on any of these templates, and then you can start customizing these designs all within merchant former. Now, a couple of things here. One, this is included in your subscription, so you don't have to pay anything extra for it. That's pretty cool. The second thing is, to my knowledge, this is a work in progress. So they are continuing to add templates. They are continuing to upgrade this tool and it should just get better and better over time. There is a lot that we could go through on this tool. If you guys are interested, let me know and we can create a designated tutorial for this tool. But if we X out of this and go back to Merch Informer, the only thing we are left with is the TM protection, which is trademark protection. This is another really cool tool by Merch Informer. It is a free Chrome extension. So you can add it to your internet browser. And then as you are creating your listings on Amazon Merch on Demand, it is going to highlight in real time what is trademark protected. This will help you because even if you know that the phrase that's going on, your design is not trademark protected. The title you're putting together, the features, the description, you want to make sure that nothing in there is protected. So that's what this extension does. So, guys, hopefully this tutorial has been helpful. Again, the 20% off coupon code is down in the description below. If you want to just type it in manually, you can type in Greg 20 and that should give you the 20% off. If you have any questions at all about any of these features, just let me know down in the comments. I'd be happy to help you out. And if you guys enjoyed this video, please just give it a thumbs up. I really would appreciate that. All right, guys, that is it for this one. I will be seeing you all in the next video.

So without further ado, let's switch over to the computer and get straight into this tutorial. All right, so if you are new to Merch Informer, this is their homepage here. Essentially, what Merch Informer is, is a print-on-demand tool designed to help you discover things that other sellers won't be able to find.

and save you a ton of time in the process. Now, that will make a lot more sense as we start to walk through these features, but that's essentially what the tool is. Now, with that being said, one of the most important things to talk about before we get into this tutorial is how much does it cost and do they have any discounts? So if you come up top here and you click on pricing, this is going to show you their two different pricing options.

Now, Merch Informer is a paid tool. So in order to use it, you have to have one of their plans. They have a newbie plan and a professional plan. For most things that you are doing on Merch Informer, you can use their newbie plan.

However, if you do get their professional plan, you're going to have a higher volume of searches that you're allowed to do every day. You're also going to get access to their monthly vector pack. These are all custom hand drawn graphics new every single month that you're allowed to use in your print on demand designs.

They're not available anywhere outside of merchant former. So you get custom graphics this way. And then you're also going to get access to their single upload interface where you can basically upload one design to multiple different print on demand websites all at once. Now, in addition to that, we're mentioning, do they have any discount codes? And yes, they actually do.

I have a personal coupon code from them. It's for 20% off. So you can use this on the newbie plan or you can use it on the professional plan.

I'll put a link to that down in the description below. If you do want to manually type it in, you can just type in Greg 20 at checkout. That'll give you the 20% off.

Now, the last couple of things about the pricing that are super important to know is that on the monthly, these are the prices here. If you do sign up for a whole year at once, the prices drop quite a bit. And then if you use that 20% off coupon, it brings it down to almost $6 per month.

Now, the very last thing about the pricing before we move on is that they do have a free trial. So no matter what plan you want to do, you get three full days to use full access on a free trial. So for the sake of this tutorial, if you don't have a plan set up yet, you're welcome to use a free trial and you can follow along in this tutorial. All right. With all of that out of the way, let me get logged into my account and we'll get started in this tutorial.

All right. So once you open up your merchant former account, this is what it's going to look like. All of their different features are here on the left side. So as you click on these, they open up into dropdowns of multiple different features. Now, instead of just going through these one by one, instead, I'm going to cover what I think are the most important and most valuable features to merchant former first.

And then afterwards, we'll go through all the rest of the features one by one. So with that being said, let's start with my favorite tool within merchant former. This is called the competition checker.

So if you click on that, it opens up this page right here. Now, what this tool does is you are able to type in any idea that you were thinking about creating print on demand designs about you click search and it's instantly going to tell you, yes, you should go into that niche or no, you should not. So to give you an example of this, let's type in fishing, give that a search. And here are the results right here.

So if you look over on the right side, this is the most important thing you're looking for. First, this is going to give you a letter. great.

So remember back in school, you got an A if you did really well and you got an F if you failed? Well, that's what this scoring system uses right here. So you get an A, B, C, D, E, or an F. So an F is telling us right off the bat that the fishing niche is not a good niche to go into.

Now, the reason for this is because it's saying that it's already oversaturated. The reason I know that is because it says there are 57,000 products already listed on Amazon and 39,000 of them are selling. That tells you right off the bat that if you're going into fishing generally, there is already way too many people listed and way too many of them are good designs already.

Now, there is more to this tool that we'll talk about in a second here. But the reason that this is so valuable right here is you just saved yourself all of the time spent thinking about and creating designs and listing them in fishing. Now, the way to actually use this tool is to type in more specific ideas.

So, for example, if we typed in deep sea fishing, we gave that a search. Just like that, we can see that this is actually an A grade. So this is a great niche to go into for print on demand.

The reason for that, there's only 882 products, only 102 of them are selling. So there are very little products listed and even fewer of them are actually making sales. So this is a wide open sub niche within fishing. The only way that I would know that this is a good niche to go into is by using this tool, the competition checker.

Now, as mentioned, there are more features down here. So to show you what these are, the best selling designs within whatever niche you had just searched, these are the most popular keywords that they are using in their listing. So when you are creating your design in this sub niche because you just found a good one, These are the keywords that you want to be using throughout your title, your features and your description.

It's all laid out very easy for us. We don't have to go over to Amazon, search through all of them to find the best sellers and then see what keywords they're using. Now, in addition to getting all the keywords laid out right here, you also get what the best sellers actually are in that sub niche. So you will get best sellers one all the way through ten. And these are going to give you good ideas.

You can kind of browse through these and you can see what are people actually buying in the sub niche. And then you can use that as inspiration when creating your own designs. OK, so now that you know how to use the competition checker, let's now move into my second favorite part of Merchantformer. And this is called the keyword finder. So to get here, you go over to keyword research, you go down and it's the first one called keyword finder.

So the purpose of the keyword finder is to help you come up with those ideas of sub niches within those overall niches. So, for example, we did fishing as the overall niche and we came up with deep sea fishing. Well, you may be wondering, how did I come up with deep sea fishing? Well, if you type in an overall niche in here like fishing, you give that a search.

This is going to break down that overall niche into tons of different sub niches. So you've got Amazon sub niches and you've got Google sub niches broken down by how many people are searching for them. And by default, it's only going to put ten entries in this list. But as you can see, there are 500 here and 365 over here. So if you go back up to the top and you sort this by.

100 at a time. This will allow you to just keep scrolling and make this a lot more efficient. So as you can see, this is the specific keyword or the phrase that people are searching for. This is how many people are searching for that.

So 25,000 people. We are going to scroll through here until we find sub niches within fishing. So right off the bat, we've got Alaska fishing, we've got alligator fishing, we've got American fishing.

All of these get over a thousand people searching for them every month. So this is where this tool actually starts to get really cool. Now, instead of just coming up with ideas here and then having to go back to the competition checker and type that in and see if it's good or bad.

you can click on this little details icon right here for each one of these in real time. It's quickly going to load it and it's going to open that up. And this is the competition score right here. So now you can type in any niche. You can see what are all these sub niche ideas within it, and you can quickly click around on them and see, should you go into this one?

Should you not? Now you can start taking all these ideas that you got an A score for and copy pasting them into a list that you can go create designs on later. So that is a really cool tool in here. And it's so easy.

You just go through here. You can just click on the details icon and just going to pull all of these up for you. So again, American fishing, you put American flag and fishing, tie those in together.

That's a great niche to go into. OK, so let's close out of this. Those are the first two tools that have a ton of value within Merch Informer. But the third one is a super important tool as well.

This one is over in trademarks and then go to trademark alerts. Now, what this tool is going to do is once you've found these good sub niches to go into, you can type in all of the phrases that you're thinking about using on your actual designs and check to make sure that nobody owns those trademark. Now, this is the only real area in print on demand that you have to pay attention to legally.

Before you use a phrase on your own design, you have to make sure that nobody else owns the rights to that phrase on T-shirts. It is possible that any person or company could have formally trademarked that phrase that you want to use on a T-shirt so that nobody else can use it. So that is exactly what this tool does.

So once you come up with your ideas that you want to put on your designs, just type them all in here on different lines. You can type in as many of them as you want here and search them all at once. So let me type in a couple examples.

OK, so I just typed in five different design ideas right here. All we have to do now is click save and then click this blue button right here that says check trademarks. Now, when you scroll down, you are going to get either a green checkmark or a red X.

This tells you instantly on as many designs as you want to search at once, if you are allowed to use them or if you cannot. So here's a perfect example. All of these are free to use on T-shirts. We can use them for our print on demand business.

But this one specifically is already protected. So you don't want to be putting this on your own design and listing it, or you're going to get your design taken down and you're going to get a trademark strike on your account. If you get too many of these strikes on your account, your entire account gets taken down from that print on demand website. So that is why using a tool like this is so important.

So just like that, we've gone through my three favorite features of Merch Informer. I would say even if the tool had no other features at this point, it would still be well worth the couple of dollars per month to access these. They are going to save you so much time and they will actually protect your print on demand business. So now let me show you a couple of the other features that I like, and then we'll go one by one through the rest. So if you go up to product research over here, you can go to movers and shakers.

And what this tool will help you do is find trends that are just now starting to happen. So all you have to do is switch this top setting right here from daily, weekly or monthly. I like to use it on monthly the best and then click search.

And as you start scrolling through here, you have 12 pages of results you can go through. But this is going to show you green is going to be the price that the shirt is set at, and then purple is going to be the sales rank. So just so this makes sense on Amazon, the lower sales rank you have closer to one means that you're getting closer to first place in sales. So although this looks like it's going down, that actually means that it's getting closer to one.

So it's starting to sell a lot more. It went from three million down to 100,000. That means that starting on this date, June 24th, this shirt started to sell a lot. Now, the last part of this is the price is that as they change the price from 1899 to 1999, you can see, did it start to sell any worse? Did it go back up and slow down in sales?

And you can see that they raise their price and the sales still continue to do extremely well. This just gives you a little bit of insider information on if you are creating a shirt similar to this that is just starting to trend, what you could price that at and people will still buy it. So with that being said, just look through these shirts Christmas in July. This is just starting to sell really well. That is a trend that is just happening.

If you were scrolling through Amazon trying to identify these trends, you would have a lot harder of a time. This just sorts it all for you. OK, so building off of this tool, which is going to help you find those trends really early on, another really helpful tool to do kind of a similar process here is if you go to product research and you go to Merch Archive, this is going to take all of the historical data on Amazon for sales. What has been selling really well and allow you to sort that by a specific.

date. So you can go back a couple of years time and you can say, OK, we're going into October. Let's look at October 5th of 2020. to give that a search. This is going to show you on October 5th what was selling the best.

So all these shirts are obviously related to Halloween. This shirt sold about 900 times, this one 720 times. So as we're going into this year, you can start planning around October 5th.

You want to have shirts like this. And also, by the way, these were the specific designs that sold really well a couple of years ago. This is just a super effective way of looking back one year, two years, five years at certain time frames to see what sold really well back then. and then building off of those to create something even better and then time that so that you can be positioned really well to get those sales.

Now, before we get into kind of going one by one through here, there's one more tool that I really want to show you. This is one that not many people talk about. It's a quick one that is super helpful.

If you go down over here to tools, you can go to merch calendar and this, although you could find something like this over on Google, having this built in just makes it super easy. It's going to show you all of the holidays in different countries and it's going to show you all the unofficial holidays. And then all of these are design ideas that you can create designs on and many other people aren't going to be competing with.

So as you jump around here, you can find kind of the bigger ones or you can just create designs in all of them. And even if you just get a couple of sales from each of these, it's not any huge moneymaker as that comes around each year, you are going to be the one building up reviews, building up the sales, and you can start to own all of these unofficial small holidays. Okay.

So that covers my favorite tools within Merch Informer. But as we go over to the left, there are a lot of tools within all of these dropdowns. So let's start going through them one by one. So you know how to use all the features within Merch Informer.

So starting out at the very top here, once you open up your Merch Informer account, this is where you're going to be dropped into. It's the Learn tab, and this is going to give you all of their specific tutorials on each one of these features. So as you're going through here, if you forgot how to use one of these features, you can either come back to this video.

or you can click in here and get a quick tutorial on how to use that specific feature. Now, I will say that these tutorials were a little bit ago, so some of these features have been updated or they've been improved. So these specific tutorials may look a little bit different than what the tools currently look like.

So with that being said, you can jump around these and you can learn as much as you want through here. We're going to start in product research with the first tool, which is the product search. So the product search is made for you to type in a specific phrase for a shirt and see how much competition there is on that specific phrase. So if we typed in here, I'd rather be fishing and we gave that a search. This is going to give us pretty similar results throughout here, just laid out in a different way of what that competition checker was showing us before.

So you have your competition score over here. You've got some related keywords you can use. And then you've got the top sellers in that specific phrase. So although I don't really use this tool very often, this tool is going to give you a good idea of is this specific phrase something that is super competitive or is there still room to go into it?

And then what are the top selling designs that are using that specific phrase? This will give you a good idea of what people are actively buying and that you can use as good inspiration when you're creating your own designs. Now, one other feature that's nice in here is it tells you the lowest price, the highest price and the average price. This is helpful so that when you are creating your design to go into that similar niche, you know what to price your shirt at. So that is the product search.

I would say this one's very similar to the competition checker. So I just use the competition checker, but that's how this one works. Now, moving on from here, you have the merchant search. So this is a very specific use case here. So when someone creates a design on Amazon Merch on Demand, they enter a brand or pretty much a storefront for those designs.

So to show you what this looks like on Amazon, when you are looking at a design, you have brand and that's what this was right here. So it's called fishing apparel. Well, if you were to type in fishing apparel right here, it's going to show you all of the designs created under that same brand.

So let's type that in real quick and we'll have a look. So these results are for anyone who used fishing apparel as their brand name on these shirts. Now, the idea here is that if you find someone who is a really good competitor in a space that you want to go into, you can type in their brand name here and you'll get all of the results and you'll get some data about them.

And the reason that I don't use this also often is if you just come in here and you click on fishing apparel right here, it's going to bring you to those results just in one click. So like I said, it's a very specific use case, but if you do want to use it, that's how you use this feature. Okay, coming back over here, let's go on to Merch Hunter. So this is actually a really cool tool, and I'm going to show you the two ways that I use it. What this tool is going to do is give you an overview of the top 100 selling designs at any given time on Amazon Merch on Demand.

So all you have to do is leave this as top 100 and then excluded brands. You just want to click select all. This is going to put in all of the protected brands that get a ton of sales.

And the idea here is that those ones already get a ton of sales. So it's going to filter them out and just show us the brands of other people who are creating designs and uploading them. So once you've done that, just come down here and hit search. And now you've got yourself the top 100 selling designs as of right now when you are searching it. This shirt has an estimated 1100 sales, this one 540 sales.

And you can really just scroll through here and see if you can come up with any ideas. Now, it's cool to see this because if you go to Amazon and try to find this information yourself, you can't sort the data yourself on Amazon. So you need a tool like this to do it. But this is really just going to give you some general ideas.

I like very specific ideas that I can build off of. So it's very actionable. So this isn't something that I do very often.

Rather, what I would do is come up here and type in an overall niche. So if you type in fishing and then you go down here and you hit search, it's going to show you the top 100 selling designs in any given niche. This is where this tool starts to get really helpful.

So in the overall niche of fishing, these are the top selling designs. This is where whatever niche you are going into, you can see See what are people actually buying and use that as inspiration to create your own designs. So that is the Merch Hunter. That's how I would use it. The two ways you get the overview of Amazon Merch on Demand or type in a niche and you're going to get some really specific results.

Okay. So moving on from here, we've got Etsy and Pinterest search. What this tool helps you do is instead of looking just on Amazon for inspiration, you can actually search for a specific niche like fishing over on Etsy, or you can do it on Pinterest. So let's first start with Etsy. And now you can scroll through here and see on Etsy for this keyword, what are people selling?

What are people buying? And see if you can come up with any ideas that you didn't see over on Amazon and just kind of take that inspiration from Etsy and create something over on Amazon. Now, I would say the best thing to do here is to come over to sort by and do favorites.

This is just going to put things that people have favorited the most on Etsy at the beginning of these results. Just so you're going to see what people are actually buying first. Okay.

So that's how you do that on Etsy. If you just switch this to Pinterest type in fishing again. Now you're going to get all these results from Pinterest. Now, Pinterest is all photos.

So you're just going to get kind of text ideas that you can use, but you can even get some cool design ideas like stuff like this. Or you can take some of these phrases, see if they're low competition, make sure nobody has trademarked them and go ahead and use them on your print on demand designs. So that's the Etsy and the Pinterest search feature.

It's really just to give you some ideas and think outside of the box beyond just Amazon. OK, so coming back over to the left, we already went through the movers and shakers. That's for finding real time trends.

The next feature is the trend tracker. This is almost identically the movers and shakers, but it's going to do it over a longer period of time. So you can go up to three months with this tool.

If you click search, you're going to see a longer graph. So you can see all the way back on three months instead of just out to one month at a max. If you're going to use one of these tools, I would say just use the movers and shakers. You're going to get really good information that way. So the trend tracker is something that I don't find myself using all that often.

OK, moving right along, we already went through the Merch Archive. That's for looking back in time and seeing what was selling at a specific time. We already went through the competition checker. Now let's open up keyword research.

We already went through the keyword finder. Now let's go to the keyword cloud. OK, so the way that the keyword cloud works, and it's actually going to be pretty much the same as the trending phrases, which will be coming up next, is just like the Merch Archive.

You can go back in time and you can click on a specific time. You can click search. And now instead of showing you the best selling designs at that time, you can see the best selling phrases.

So this is going to give you one word, two word and three words. I would say really focus on the two words and three words. This is where you're going to get those best ideas.

So by combining a couple of the different tools here, you can go back in time on something like the Merch Archive and you can see what was selling at this time. So November 14th, probably Thanksgiving designs. And then you can come down here and you can get ideas to create those designs. So using just a girl or girl who loves or this is my it could be something like this is my first Thanksgiving and that could be a kid's shirt. or just a girl who loves sweet potato and turkey.

These are just brainstorming ideas, but they're giving you the phrases instead of the actual designs. So that's how the keyword cloud works. If you go to trending phrases, it's going to be kind of the same thing. This is going to be the phrases instead of the keywords.

I would say you can use either of these and you're still going to get good brainstorming ideas. OK, coming down to the niche hunter. This is another cool tool.

So this is going to tell you this week. These are the top ranked keywords and the top selling designs. in those keywords. So as you scroll down here, it's only going to show you 10 at once.

So the first thing I would do is just show you 100 so you can keep scrolling and make this efficient. So you can look at what the keyword or the niche or sub niche is, and then you can get an idea of what people are actively buying is what kind of designs you should create. So all of these have over 200,000 searches per month and just really scroll through here and see if you can see any designs that you want to create as well. It's just another way to brainstorm ideas and find different niches that you can go into. Now, keeping this moving down on the left side in the trademarks, we use the trademark alerts before, but the trademark hunter is another feature.

So if you already have a ton of listings uploaded on merch on demand and you want to make sure that there's no trademark infringements on any of them, you can copy all the ASINs. And if you don't know where the ASIN is, if you go over to your shirt, let's use this one, for example, scroll down here and it's going to be on the left side. Right here is your ASIN. you can copy all of these and you can paste them into a CSV file and then you can upload that here and you can search all of them for trademarks at once.

Now, what's cool about doing it this way is it takes a little bit of work to create that CSV file. But instead of just checking the phrase that's going to go on the shirt, it's going to check the title, the features and the description, all of those to make sure that you have no trademark infringements. OK, so we're almost towards the bottom here.

Let's go into the tools and let's start with the listing score checker. So this is kind of a cool feature if you're just starting out and print on demand. If you go over and you go to one of your listings and you copy this ASIN we were just talking about.

So I'm just going to right click and copy it and you paste that up here and you type in what keyword or what niche you're trying to rank for. So this is a fishing shirt. We'll go to search. And this is going to tell you generally how optimized that listing is.

So does it have fishing in the title, the brand, the features, the description and is the description over a thousand characters? Well, it doesn't actually have fishing in the title. So if you scroll up here and you look at this design, it says Fishermen, it doesn't say fishing. So that is an opportunity for this listing to switch that to fishing. And it's going to be more optimized for the fishing niche instead of fishermen.

Now, it does say that it has fishing in the brand name, which is up top here. It's got fishing in the features and the description, which are over here. We've got the features right here, the descriptions right here. So we're doing good on that front.

And the last thing is a description over 1000 characters. This description is not over 1000 characters. If your description is over 1000 characters, the idea is that it gives Google the most information to rank your listing on Google.

So this listing specifically with these results is 65% optimized. The idea is that you want to get a green check mark in all of these, and then you're 100% optimized. Now, as a beginner in print on demand, this is a good way to just be checking your listings.

But as you get rolling and you just subconsciously know that you want to have your keywords in your title, your brand, your features, your description, then you're not really going to be using this tool anymore. Now, the next tool over here is the synonym suggest. And the purpose of this tool is to help you come up with different ways to say the niche that you want to go into other things that other people might be searching. So if you type in something like fishing, give that a search.

These are some other ideas that you can use throughout your title, your features and your description. You've got sport fishing, you've got outdoors, you've got sport, you've got field sport. It's just an additional tool that you can use in here. It's not something that I think you're going to be using all the time. Now, the next tool up on the left is Merch Analytics.

If you go into your Merch on demand account and you export all of your analytics. you can upload them here and you can see them in a pretty easy to use graph. It's going to show you over time charts that Merch on Demand won't show you.

Merch on Demand analytics are notoriously very basic. So by uploading that data in here, it's just going to give you a chart that's a lot easier to understand what's going on in your business. It'll show you how many sales you have. It'll show you how many canceled orders you have. It'll show you how many returns you have, and you can see how that fluctuates over time.

OK, the next feature on the left is the notes. And basically this is just a notepad within Merch Informer. So if you're in here working in Merch Informer and you want to jot down some ideas, you can add a new note here and you can put a title, you can jot down notes and you can save that. It will show up in your notes section right here.

And then continuing to move along, we've already gone through the merch calendar. That was for finding those unofficial holidays. If you go to favorites, this is just going to be for products and keywords. If you are going through the product search and you're finding the best sellers in a niche and you like some of those designs that you want to keep an eye on, you can favorite them.

They will show up in your favorited products. If you're going through the keyword finder and you have all of those sub niches that you want to go into with an A rating, you can favorite those. They will show up in your keyword favorites.

And then moving on from here, it doesn't actually end just there. You have a couple other tools. These are actually pretty interesting. So let's talk about these.

The Merch Informer Lister is a free Chrome extension that you can add to your browser. And then when you are uploading designs to Amazon Merch on Demand, it allows you to pre fill out a lot of the boxes and make the upload process a lot faster. Now, something that's pretty interesting here is that Amazon Merch on Demand has now come out with this feature built into their uploading process.

But something that says a lot about Merch Informer as a company is that they knew that this was a problem beforehand and they created this to solve that problem before Amazon even did. So you can kind of do all of this on Amazon by default. Now they have it built into their upload process. But moving on to the merch designer, the merch designer is a design tool that you can use built straight into merchant former. Now, to my knowledge, this designer is getting phased out, so I'm not even going to go through it and it's getting replaced with the merch studio.

So let's go through this one instead. So this is the inside of the merch studio right here. It's just a design tool for print on demand. So you can come in here, you can see templates, you can click on any of these templates, and then you can start customizing these designs all within merchant former. Now, a couple of things here.

One, this is included in your subscription, so you don't have to pay anything extra for it. That's pretty cool. The second thing is, to my knowledge, this is a work in progress. So they are continuing to add templates. They are continuing to upgrade this tool and it should just get better and better over time.

There is a lot that we could go through on this tool. If you guys are interested, let me know and we can create a designated tutorial for this tool. But if we X out of this and go back to Merch Informer, the only thing we are left with is the TM protection, which is trademark protection. This is another really cool tool by Merch Informer.

It is a free Chrome extension. So you can add it to your internet browser. And then as you are creating your listings on Amazon Merch on Demand, it is going to highlight in real time what is trademark protected.

This will help you because even if you know that the phrase that's going on, your design is not trademark protected. The title you're putting together, the features, the description, you want to make sure that nothing in there is protected. So that's what this extension does. So, guys, hopefully this tutorial has been helpful.

Again, the 20% off coupon code is down in the description below. If you want to just type it in manually, you can type in Greg 20 and that should give you the 20% off. If you have any questions at all about any of these features, just let me know down in the comments.

I'd be happy to help you out. And if you guys enjoyed this video, please just give it a thumbs up. I really would appreciate that. All right, guys, that is it for this one.

I will be seeing you all in the next video.

Transcript for:Beginner's Guide to Merch Informer

Transcript for:
Beginner's Guide to Merch Informer