The marketplace map

Same design, many doors

The operators who make money at this do not pick a platform. They pick an order. A design file works almost everywhere, so the question is where it goes first and why. Here is the map, honestly drawn.

Etsy: start here for learning speed

Etsy is the best teaching platform for this business, and it gets a full walkthrough later in the course. The short version: built-in buyer traffic hungry for gift-type products, full control over pricing and listings, and fees you can calculate to the cent. The trade is competition, fee stack, and rules that shift. Etsy wants sellers who disclose production partners and design their own work, both of which you are doing anyway.

Merch on Demand: the patience play

Amazon's Merch on Demand (the renamed Merch by Amazon) is the platform operators spoke of most highly for years, because Amazon's buyer machine is unmatched and listings carry the trust of the Amazon brand. You upload a design, pick products, set a price, and Amazon pays a royalty. You never touch fulfillment, customer service, or fees. It is the cleanest version of this business. Amazon also hosts its opposite: the private-label inventory business, where you buy the goods upfront and Amazon warehouses and ships them. Royalty versus inventory is the exact line between this course and that one.

The money side changed in June 2026, so learn the current shape, not the old one. Amazon scrapped the flat royalty for a tiered system that pays based on where your traffic comes from. On a $19.99 tee, the base Creator royalty is $2.44, roughly half the old flat rate. Sellers who drive 15% or more of their sales from outside Amazon qualify for a Plus rate of about $4.88, and 35% or more earns Premium, about $5.27. Sellers who relied on Amazon's own organic traffic absorbed a pay cut, and the community reaction was loud and unhappy. The honest read for a new seller: the application is still free and worth filing on day one, but the upper tiers now reward the harder skill, sending buyers to Amazon yourself.

The catch is the gate. Acceptance into Merch is an application, reviewed slowly, with no guarantee. Accepted accounts start at tier 10, meaning ten design slots. You tier up, 25, 100, 500, 1000 and beyond, as your designs sell. One caution carried over from the royalty change: the old playbook of pricing at the bottom of Amazon's suggested range to buy sales now buys less, because a low-priced sale at the Creator rate pays about half of what it used to. Fill your slots, price where the base royalty still clears your floor, and treat tier-ups as capacity, not the goal. Apply early, expect a wait, and build elsewhere while it processes.

Redbubble and the passive marketplaces

Redbubble, TeePublic, Zazzle, and Spreadshirt run a different deal: you upload, they price, they pay a small margin, and you control almost nothing. Their traffic is real but thinner per seller, and margins are the lowest in the space. Their role in your stack is passive distribution: every design you make can live here too, cap-daily-uploads permitting, and the occasional sale costs you three minutes of uploading. Do not build your strategy here. Do collect the checks.

Amazon Seller Central and eBay: the wide catalogs

Selling print-on-demand through a third-party Amazon seller account or eBay gets you marketplaces where your production partner's catalog, mugs, posters, blankets, things Merch does not offer, can be listed. It also means managing a seller account, returns handling, and policies of your own. This is a later move, once Etsy is humming and you want more shelf space for proven designs.

Shopify: the graduation, not the on-ramp

Your own store keeps every fee the marketplace would take. It also has zero traffic. A new domain gets no search visibility, so you would be buying every visitor with ads, and paid traffic stacked on thin print-on-demand margins is the fastest way to turn revenue into loss. Operators treat Shopify as a graduation for sellers with an audience or a hit product, not a starting point.