Merch by Amazon | Hacker News Reader

Merch by Amazon

merch.amazon.com

67 pointsjohnsocs31 comments

Great until they decide to offer their own line of merch and yours isn't allowed in the store any more...

They wouldn't want to confuse their customers with merch that's not compatible with their body types.

And in other news, Teespring is launching an ecommerce store.

Seriously though, the thing that Teespring really nailed for me is the experience. It's so unbelievably smooth, hats off to that team. Every inch of the product is very well thought out.

I just doubt that Amazon can do something as well when it's one of the million things they have on their plate.

Well, Amazon also has an army of middle managers, engineers, and others.

When has an army of middle managers ever been a competitive advantage?

See US Army.

US Army's huge bombs and its row and rows of cannon fodder are its main strength.

What good are bombs and cannons if you don't have fuel for the bombers or shells for the cannons?

So...they're going after Teespring?

Probably understood this business more after their acquisition of Twitch.

I don't follow...can you clarify please?

Many streamers/ esports teams / etc make good portion of their money from selling merch.

Ah, makes sense. Thanks for the context.

Strange that the artwork upload doesn't seem to support vector graphics. They want a rasterized JPEG?

This name will raise unfortunate associations for fans of the Penny Arcade comic: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/01/05

Interesting; in addition to competing directly with sites like Zazzle and Spreadshirt (with the Amazon name attached), they've targeted their marketing specifically at mobile app vendors making shirts to go with their games.

Maybe the revenue here is small for them, but the possibilities and relationships it opens to them with app developers are good, and could help their app store indirectly.

For example , they are currently working on paying developers through in-game ads.Another source of payment could be t-shirt discounts, or t-shirt marketing services.

EDIT:and let's not forget - if t-shirt game marketing becomes popular , and most such t-shirts would be for games in amazon's appstore , that would create a powerful marketing tool for amazon's appstore.

I love these weird unexpected Amazon projects. They're like the opposite of Google's moonshots.

"What bizarre project with small potential can we pour a bunch of time and money into today?"

Wonder what the pricing looks like... any clues?

I think it somewhat looks that way ,because Google is a technology driven company, while Amazon is more business driven.

So one creatively manipulates technology - you raise doubts about what weird technology will they be using( internet baloons ??? ) , while the other creatively manipulates business models - so you raise doubts about the business model .

I wonder why Amazon didn't get into this business 10 years ago...

Hindsight is always 20/20...

Introducing Amazon Hindsight

No details on whether you can sell only to US customers or worldwide. SDK Seems small enough for people to integrate into Games and make some easy money if supported worldwide.

Not a single thing about the type of t-shirt? This basically guarantees it is the crappiest possible t-shirt with printing, not something you'll actually want to wear, right? i.e. something like cafepress.

T-shirts only? You'd think Amazon would be able to offer more merch variety right off the bat. Mouse pads, coffee mugs, all the stuff, like Cafepress does. How many T-shirts does a person need anyway?

Interesting business model...Promoters design shirts then advertise to their customers to buy them? Amazon gets the $$ and the promoters get brand awareness and a few cents of royalty...

The cut seems substantially more than "a few cents".

https://merch.amazon.com/resource/201858580

Their example shows that a shirt selling for $19.99, the designer/promoter would get $8.89 royalty. More than a few cents and not a bad deal for not having to deal with the actual production.

And if you use anything but their lowest quality shirt and make it double sided then your cut is dropped to about $3.40..true it's more than a few cents but still a pretty small cut per shirt.

That depends on the volume you're moving.

With their volume discount (400 per week), and a nicer quality shirt, you can make ~$7.30.

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