The Short Answer for French Sellers

Merch on Demand, the program most people still call Merch by Amazon, is not limited to US residents. An invitation request form exists, and applicants from Europe use it. A French address, a French bank account and a French tax number do not disqualify you on their own.

What decides the outcome is the invitation. You submit a request, Amazon reviews it, and you either receive an invite or hear nothing for a long time. No acceptance rate and no approval-guaranteeing checklist has been published, so anyone quoting you a precise percentage is repeating a rumor.

The second gate is paperwork. Before you can be paid, you complete an online tax interview and add bank details. For US-source royalties, the standard US rate for foreign recipients who make no treaty claim is 30%, while the France-US treaty text points to 0% for royalties (details in the tax section below). Confirm every rule on merch.amazon.com before you invest time in a portfolio.

What Merch on Demand Actually Is

Merch on Demand lets approved creators upload artwork that Amazon prints on demand and sells on its own storefronts. You never touch inventory, shipping or customer service. Amazon takes its costs out of each sale and pays you the remainder as a royalty.

It is a different program from Amazon KDP, which publishes books. The two have separate applications, separate dashboards and separate royalty systems, so numbers you read about KDP paperbacks do not transfer.

It also differs from opening a French seller account on Seller Central to sell physical goods you make or import. That route means a VAT registration, a business identity check and fulfilment choices. Merch skips most of it because Amazon is the seller and you license the design.

Merch by Amazon France, in practice, is the French-market side of the program. Amazon's French-language Merch page and seller reports point to amazon.fr as the storefront, next to the US store where most of the program's volume has historically sat. Confirm the current list of European marketplaces and the product range per country in your dashboard after approval rather than trusting an older blog post.

Eligibility From France: What Is Documented and What Is Rumor

French-language communities often mix Amazon's real requirements with folklore. Sorting the two saves weeks spent on things that do not matter. The last column shows where each answer comes from.

The last row is the useful lesson. Some guides state precise approval rates, favoured banks and secret tricks. None of it appears in Amazon's own documentation, so none of it deserves your money or a paid course.

The Inscription Process, Step by Step

The registration route is short. The work is in the details you type, because mismatches between your name, address and tax form create delays. Screens change, so follow the on-screen prompts where they differ from the outline below.

File one request from one account. Check the Merch terms for account limits before you apply again, because opening several accounts is the kind of thing programs like this tend to penalise.

Tax Setup: The W-8BEN Interview

Once you are invited, the dashboard asks you to complete tax information in your account settings. It is an online interview that fills in the correct US form from your answers. For a French individual the result is normally a W-8BEN, while a company files a W-8BEN-E with more questions.

The interview collects your name, country of residence, permanent address, a foreign tax identifier and a treaty claim. The France-US income tax treaty, as amended by the 2009 protocol, has an article on royalties that leaves them taxable only in the country of the recipient's residence. In plain terms, a valid treaty claim can bring US withholding on qualifying royalties to 0%. Read the text yourself on the IRS treaty page (irs.gov/pub/irs-trty/france.pdf), last checked September 2026.

Whether Amazon classes your Merch payments as royalties under that article, and what the interview lets you select, is the point to confirm with Amazon's tax help and an accountant. This is not tax or legal advice. The numbers below show what is at stake if the claim is missing.

Take Amazon's published example of a standard US t-shirt in the base Creator group, as of September 2026. At $19.99 it returns a $2.44 royalty, so 100 shirts in a month produce $244.00. At 30% withholding, $73.20 is held back and $170.80 is paid.

Each row applies one formula: units x royalty per unit x withholding rate. The per-shirt royalties come from Amazon's example figures at merch.amazon.com/resource/201858580, which state that rates are subject to change. The 30% and 0% columns are the two ends of the range, and your actual rate depends on the interview and the income category.

The table covers US-store sales only. Seller reports suggest sales on amazon.fr are paid in euros (confirm in your dashboard), and the withholding treatment of those sales may differ, so treat the $170.80 figure as a US-store worst case rather than a forecast for a French catalogue.

Two French-side points sit outside the interview. Income from Merch has to be declared in France, whether through the micro-entrepreneur regime or another status, and US tax withheld may be creditable. VAT treatment of platform royalties and the choice of status are accountant questions.

How You Get Paid From Outside the US

Creator guides describe payment to creators outside the US as a bank transfer to an account in your name, with IBAN and BIC entered exactly as on your statement. You add those details in the Payment settings of your Merch dashboard after the tax interview. A euro account is the likely cleanest destination if your amazon.fr sales are paid in euros.

Seller reports suggest royalties are reported in each marketplace's currency, so a US-store shirt would earn dollars and an amazon.fr shirt euros; confirm this in your dashboard before you build a budget on it. Dollar royalties converted by your bank lose something to the exchange spread. Compare your bank's rate with a currency-transfer service before you assume a net figure.

Do not copy US royalty examples into a euro spreadsheet, because the same headline price can produce a different cut on a different marketplace.

What Amazon Does Not Publish and You Should Check

Several details that matter to French creators are not documented anywhere a search engine can read, and they change. Read them in your own dashboard or from Amazon's Merch help pages as of the day you apply.

• Payout minimums, payment dates and any charges for each payout method.
• The current list of European marketplaces and which products they carry.
• The currency each marketplace reports royalties in, and the payment schedule.
• How withholding applies to euro sales on amazon.fr and what the interview offers for the treaty claim.
• VAT treatment of your royalties and whether you must register as a business in France.
• The account limits in the Merch terms.

Royalties: What Changed and What Still Applies

The current royalty model works in three groups: Creator, Plus and Premium. Creator is the default. Plus and Premium reward creators who bring their own buyers, meaning traffic from their own ads, social posts and off-Amazon promotion.

As of September 2026, Plus pays twice the Creator rate and needs at least 15% of unit sales from non-organic traffic plus 10 units a month in the US store; Premium pays 2.16 times and needs 35%. Amazon says these are subject to change, so check merch.amazon.com/resource/201858580. Groups are recalculated monthly from a trailing two-month average.

Published US examples for a standard t-shirt in the Creator group, as of September 2026, look like this. The Plus column is the Creator figure doubled, as an illustration.

These figures apply to that one product in the US store. A hoodie, a PopSocket or a shirt sold on amazon.fr has different Amazon costs, so do not stretch the table into a flat percentage. A new French creator starts at Creator level, where volume has to come from the catalogue.

Separately, a tier system limits how many designs you can keep live. Amazon has never published the exact sales thresholds for moving up a tier, and any figure you see is seller-reported and can shift without notice. Plan for a small starting slot count and a sales-based path upward.

Artwork and Content Rules That Trip Up Applicants

An invitation is only the beginning, because rejected uploads and removed listings hurt young accounts. As of September 2026, per merch.amazon.com/resource/201849250 (check the page before you export), the artwork specifications call for RGB colour, 300 DPI at 100% of print size, a file under 25 MB, and true black as #000000. Print areas start roughly 1.5 inches below the collar on the front of standard apparel, and minimum type sizes are larger on heavy fabrics such as hoodies.

Trademark trouble is the larger risk. A phrase you think is generic may be registered for clothing. Search it in the USPTO database for the US store (tmsearch.uspto.gov, last checked September 2026), and consider the EUIPO register too, since amazon.fr shoppers are covered by European rights.

Our guide to avoiding trademark violations in print on demand covers the workflow. This is not legal advice.

Language matters as well. A design with English-only text sells to English speakers even on amazon.fr, and French phrases deserve a native reader, because a mistranslated pun is obvious on a shirt.

If You Are Declined or Still Waiting: Other Routes

Waiting for an invitation is not a plan. While the request sits, build a body of work that helps on any platform, and open a shop on one that does not gate entry. Redbubble and TeePublic both let you sign up and upload straight away, with caps that depend on the account.

For a side-by-side of fees and traffic, read our comparison of Redbubble and Merch by Amazon. The setup guides for selling on Redbubble and selling on TeePublic show what a first week looks like.

Octozia does not automate Merch on Demand. Its extensions handle Redbubble and TeePublic uploads, tag generation and trademark pre-checks, which helps if you build a catalogue while you wait. Bulk tools save time only when the designs are good, so pick a niche first. Our list of print-on-demand niches is a decent starting point.

Go/No-Go Checklist Before You Apply

1. You can produce at least a dozen original designs at print resolution, with rights you own outright (a practical benchmark, not an Amazon requirement).
2. You have one Amazon account in your real name and no earlier Merch account tied to you.
3. You have an IBAN account in your own name and know whether you declare as an individual or a micro-entrepreneur.
4. You have your French tax identifier ready for the W-8BEN.
5. You accept that acceptance is unpredictable and have a backup shop on an open platform.
6. You have checked your phrases against trademark databases, because a takedown can hit a new account hard.

Get items 1 to 3 in place before applying. Items 4 to 6 can be handled while the request is pending, since the wait is the cheapest time to do it. Applying costs nothing, so the real cost is the unpredictable wait.

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