How Merch by Amazon Tier-Ups Actually Work
Merch by Amazon tier-ups aren't about total volume — they reward consistent sales spread across designs. Here is the tier ladder, …
The Short Answer
No confirmed change to the design-slot ladder has been announced. As of September 2026, Amazon documents the royalty groups and publishes nothing on slot thresholds, and no source checked shows a dated 2025 announcement for either. The introduction date of the royalty groups is unverified.
Two things get called "tiers" in Merch on Demand talk, and most confusion in old forum threads comes from blending them. The first is the design-slot ladder: how many products you may have live at once. The second is the royalty group that sets how much of each sale you keep.
On slots, Amazon's public position is narrow. An Amazon community manager replied in a Seller Central thread that upgrades happen automatically when an account meets the program's criteria, and that support cannot push one through. Everything else about the ladder, from thresholds to timing, is seller-reported.
So for merch by amazon tier up 2025 questions asked in late 2026, the useful answer is a sort: what Amazon documents, what sellers merely report, and what nobody outside Amazon can know. The sections below keep those three apart.
Two Systems That Share One Word
Before comparing old and new, pin down which system a piece of advice is about. A seller who says "I hit Tier 100 last spring" is talking about slots. A seller who says "I got Premium after my ad push" is talking about royalties, and the two can happen independently.
Design-slot tiers
Cap how many designs or products you can have live. Commonly listed as 10, 25, 100, 500, 1,000 and higher. Movement depends on sales and other performance signals Amazon does not itemize.
Royalty groups
Creator, Plus and Premium. These set a multiplier on your royalty and are recalculated from your trailing two-month average of non-organic sales share. Amazon documents them on its Merch on Demand help resource.
Moving up one does nothing for the other. A Tier 500 account with zero self-driven traffic sits in the Creator group. A Tier 25 account that sells ten units a month can qualify for Plus if at least 2 of those units come from its own social or ad traffic, since 15% of ten is 1.5.
What Amazon Actually Documents
Amazon's Merch on Demand help resource on royalties (merch.amazon.com/resource/201858580, checked September 2026) describes the royalty groups in detail. Amazon also says these definitions are subject to change, so confirm on that page before you plan around them.
| Group | Multiplier vs Creator | Non-organic share needed | Volume floor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Creator | 1x (base rate) | None, default group | None |
| Plus | 2x | At least 15% of unit sales | 10 units/month, US store |
| Premium | 2.16x | At least 35% of unit sales | 10 units/month, US store |
Non-organic means traffic you bring yourself: your own ads, promotion off Amazon, social media. The group is recalculated monthly from a trailing two-month average, and a change can take up to two business days to apply.
Amazon computes royalty as your offer price minus its costs (materials, production, fulfillment, customer service, returns, fraud prevention), then applies your group's multiplier. Its published examples for a US standard DTG t-shirt in the Creator group are in the first column below.
| Offer price | Creator royalty (Amazon's example) | Plus at 2x | Premium at 2.16x |
|---|---|---|---|
| $15.99 | $0.96 | $1.92 | $2.07 |
| $19.99 | $2.44 | $4.88 | $5.27 |
| $21.99 | $3.18 | $6.36 | $6.87 |
| $25.99 | $4.66 | $9.32 | $10.07 |
The Plus and Premium columns are simple multiplication of Amazon's Creator figures, rounded to the cent, so treat them as illustrations of the stated multipliers. Amazon's costs do not scale linearly with price, so do not turn these into a flat percentage.
A Worked Example: Which Group Would You Land In?
Take a seller with a US standard t-shirt at $19.99, using Amazon's Creator example of $2.44 per sale. In each of the last two months they sold 30 units. Twelve came from their own Instagram posts and a small ad budget, and 18 came from Amazon search and browsing.
| Step | Working | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Non-organic share | 12 / 30 | 40% |
| Volume floor met? | 30 units against a 10-unit minimum | Yes |
| Group if both months look like this | 40% is above the 35% line | Premium (2.16x) |
| Royalty per unit | $2.44 x 2.16 | About $5.27 |
| Month at Premium | 30 x $2.44 x 2.16 | About $158.11 |
| Same month at Creator | 30 x $2.44 | $73.20 |
The gap is about $84.91 for the month. If only the latest month looked like this, the trailing two-month average would come out lower, and the group could land in Plus or stay in Creator instead.
The dollar figures also assume the offer price and Amazon's costs stay as published, and both can change.
What Amazon Does Not Publish
Nowhere on Amazon's public help pages will you find a table saying "make X sales in Y days to reach Tier 100." Every specific threshold you have read comes from sellers comparing notes, third-party tool vendors, or agency blogs.
That matters for currency-checking. When a 2021 post and a 2026 post agree on a number, the newer author may simply have copied the older one. Agreement between blogs is not confirmation from Amazon.
The one public Amazon statement is a Seller Central forum thread titled "Stuck at Tier 100 with 676 Sales (100% Organic / No Ads)", at sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums/discussions/t/a08ec825-ca75-4552-924e-7aa2b60e37cc. The page showed it as posted about nine months before September 2026; the exact date was not verified. An Amazon community manager replied that tier upgrades happen automatically when accounts meet the program's criteria, that the evaluation considers sales, product quality and additional performance factors, and that there is no manual upgrade request through support.
The reply did not say how often evaluations run or which criterion was missing. Check the thread itself, since forum posts can be edited or removed.
Seller-Reported Benchmarks, Labeled as Unverified
None of these are Amazon figures. They come from third-party guides (amzprep.com, merchinformer.com and bebolddigital.com, read in September 2026), publication dates were not always visible, and wording varies by guide.
| Reported benchmark | Where it appears | How much weight |
|---|---|---|
| Ladder runs 10, 25, 100, 500, 1,000 designs and beyond | Repeated across the three guides above and in seller discussion | Rough shape only, exact steps unconfirmed |
| Sell roughly as many units as your current slot count before moving up | Third-party tier guides, phrased as a rule of thumb; which of the three carries it was not pinned down | Planning target, not a promise |
| Use around 80% of your slots before you become eligible | Circulates in seller talk with no dated, named source | Do not plan around it |
| Upgrades arrive in batches after long silent stretches | Seller anecdotes; no specific guide or thread was pinned down | Pattern sellers describe, not stated by Amazon |
Filling slots with real designs is sensible anyway. Filling them to hit a percentage nobody can source is not.
Claims Still Circulating, Checked Against Amazon's Own Wording
Guides written for the slot ladder and guides written after the royalty groups appeared sit side by side in search results. Sorting their claims against Amazon's current wording shows which ones hold up as of September 2026.
| Common claim | Status as of Sept 2026 | How to treat it |
|---|---|---|
| Tier-ups arrive on a fixed schedule | Amazon says they are automatic; timing is not published | Plan for an unknown wait; Amazon has not published any timing |
| You can email support to speed it up | Amazon states there is no manual request process | Skip it |
| Slot tier and earnings are one system | Amazon documents royalty groups separately from slot caps | Discount any guide that merges them |
| Royalty is a fixed percentage of the price | Amazon describes price minus costs, then a group multiplier | Do not use a flat percentage in forecasts |
The last two rows matter most for planning. A forecast that treats income per sale as a fixed percentage will not match how Amazon describes royalties today.
Why It Feels Like the Rules Shifted
Sellers who feel that things moved are usually reacting to real observations with ordinary explanations. Long silent stretches followed by a sudden jump are consistent with periodic evaluation. To anyone who checked the week before, that looks like a rule change.
The royalty groups also gave sellers a new number to watch. When monthly income moves because your group moved, it can feel like a tier event even though no slot changed. Compare your account's group with the royalty help resource before blaming the ladder.
Amazon names product quality and other performance factors without defining them, so complaints or takedowns may play a part in a stall; that is unconfirmed. Removed listings are one possible cause worth checking. Running titles and phrases through a trademark check before you submit is cheap insurance. This is not legal advice.
Building a Growth Timeline That Survives Rule Changes
Stop treating the next tier as a date on a calendar. Treat it as an outcome you influence through sales and account health, with unknown timing. Keep one spreadsheet and follow these steps each month.
1
Create the log
Make a sheet with these column headers: Month, Slots allowed, Slots used, Units sold, Units from own traffic, Non-organic share, Royalty group. Add one row per month. Your own history beats a forum's memory.
2
Count your own-traffic units
Tag every link you post or pay for, and count only sales you can tie to those sources. In the Non-organic share column type =E2/D2 (units from own traffic divided by units sold), formatted as a percentage.
3
Test against the two lines
Compare the average of the last two rows with 15% and 35%, and confirm at least 10 units a month in the US store. For example, 20 units needs 3 own-traffic units for Plus and 7 for Premium, and 100 units needs 15 and 35.
4
Handle fractions conservatively
At 10 units, 15% is 1.5. Amazon does not state a rounding rule, so aim for the next whole unit up, which is 2, and treat anything closer as a coin flip.
5
Fill slots with your best designs
Do not park weak filler in every slot. Upload work with a clear niche and a title you can defend, and note which designs actually sell so you can make more like them.
6
Build a fallback platform
Keep a second income channel so a slow tier-up does not stall your business. See how the Redbubble and Merch by Amazon models differ before you split your design time.
Three Seller Situations and What They Should Do
| Situation | Main risk | Sensible move |
|---|---|---|
| New account at the first tier, no audience | Slots fill faster than sales arrive | Research a small set of niches and upload a few strong designs per niche instead of many weak ones |
| Mid-tier account, all organic, stalled | Waiting with no signal from Amazon | Check for takedowns, keep uploading good work, and do not assume a rule changed |
| Account with its own social or ad traffic | Ignoring the royalty group system | Measure non-organic share monthly and decide whether pushing it toward 15% or 35% pays off |
Entry to the program has historically involved requesting an invitation and waiting for approval, so check merch.amazon.com for the current sign-up status. For niche selection, the roundup of print on demand niches and the walkthrough on niche research give you methods that do not depend on any single platform's rules.
Specs and Timing While You Wait
Amazon's artwork requirements (merch.amazon.com/resource/201849250, checked September 2026) are documented, and rejected files waste slots. The essentials are RGB color, 300 DPI at 100% of print size, files up to 25MB and true black #000000. Minimum type is about 32pt on light fabrics and about 48pt on hoodies, so recheck the resource before a large batch.
Because you cannot predict when an evaluation will happen, avoid stacking a seasonal plan on extra slots arriving by a given month. Fit holiday designs inside the slots you hold today. A seasonal calendar for print on demand helps you decide which designs deserve those slots first, and the design upload checklist catches rejections before they cost you one.
How to Check Any Tier Claim Yourself
A dated claim without a source deserves suspicion. Run each one through the same short filter.
- Is it on merch.amazon.com or in an Amazon staff reply? If yes, it is official.
- If it comes from a blog, does it say when the author last checked and what account they used?
- Does it distinguish slot tiers from royalty groups? If not, discount it.
- Does it promise a timeline? Amazon does not publish one, so any exact timeline is an anecdote.
- Does your own dashboard agree? Your account is the only source that counts for your account.
Vendor pages, agency blogs and course sales pages, this site included, are not Amazon sources. Use them for ideas and check every number against merch.amazon.com.
FAQ
Did Amazon change the Merch tier system in 2025?
No source checked shows a dated 2025 announcement. As of September 2026, Amazon documents Creator, Plus and Premium royalty groups, separate from design-slot tiers, and does not say when the groups began. Slot tiers still exist, but the thresholds are unpublished, so any claim of a specific change to them is unverified.
How many sales do you need to move up a Merch by Amazon tier?
Amazon does not say. Third-party guides commonly suggest sales roughly equal to your current slot count, but that is a community rule of thumb without an Amazon source. Amazon staff have named sales, product quality and other performance factors, without giving numbers.
Can I email Amazon to request a tier upgrade?
No. In a Seller Central thread, an Amazon community manager stated that there is no manual tier upgrade request through support and that upgrades occur automatically when criteria are met. Emailing support will not speed things up, so spend the time on designs instead.
Are Plus and Premium the same as higher tiers?
No. Plus and Premium are royalty groups tied to how much of your volume comes from your own non-organic traffic, with a 10 units per month floor in the US store. They do not raise your design cap, and higher slot tiers do not automatically move you into them.
Why am I stuck at the same tier despite good sales?
Nobody outside Amazon knows for certain. The thread quoted above involved a seller with 676 organic sales who was still at Tier 100, and Amazon's reply named no missing criterion. Check for removed listings, keep uploading strong designs, and record your slot usage so you can spot real movement.
Clear your titles before you spend a slot
Octozia's Trademark Checker looks up phrases against USPTO data before you list; it sits behind a 3-day trial, card required, and does not touch Merch on Demand tiers.
