Idea

Figured this would not get much attention but like it or not it should happen. shirts that's been on here for a year and never sold one. If we could reduce the clutter we could all be making more money

I certainly think this saturation issue will become more of a problem in the future as more and more listings are added. Directing traffic to Merch by Amazon designs from outside channels will absolutely become more important in the future. But once you get some organic sales on a particular design if it's a good original unique design in a particular niche it should sell well and obviously will have a higher BSR and therefore rank higher than a shirt that never sells a single copy. So at the end of the day how big of a problem are bad, unoriginal, or poorly performing designs if nobody is buying them? Sure, it might be harder to get a fresh design up on amazon building traction now that there's more noise but that's how most low barrier to entry markets work. And that's exactly the kind of market amazon is... you can buy a $30 USB cable direct or get one drop shipped from a 3rd party vendor in China that will probably break in a week and has a boatload of 1-star reviews. But guess what... it's still allowed on the marketplace. Amazon works because of this and feeds off of these smaller margins spread out across an infinitely scalable number of vendors. You want your designs to stand out and hang out amongst top selling shirts my advice would be to do something to promote them or take them off amazon and put them somewhere that has a stricter content policy or takes a more active role in curating it's products.

I agree that promotion and directing traffic to Merch by Amazon is going to play a more important role going forward as saturation and increased competition becomes a bigger issue. Perhaps organic sales have been more easily attained in the past but targeted social media promotion may become necessary in the future to achieve sales, given the low barrier of entry into the program (unless one already has a built-in following or 'fan base' upon entering the system.)

I agree, the issue is only getting worse. Some of the designs are clearly made on paint.

It doesn't help that the Search function is pretty bad. Do a search on a keyword and you'll get a page or maybe two of relevant results and after that just random stuff that isnt even connected. Basically designs get lost very quickly in the marketplace.

Personally, right now I'm having a bit of an issue getting to the next tier which is weird because my designs have performed well on other platforms for more money but I digress. I'd like to wipe out some of mine or put them into a pending state until I have room for more stuff...

Good points!

I can understand some shirts not selling year round and would exclude them like holidays and awareness shirts ect. When you have a random though and it has sat in the database all year and not selling then what good is it doing you or amazon. Clearly though first these copyrighted and copy cats need to go. Do almost any search on any thing popular like the walking dead, game of thrones or disney and get 8-20 pages of the stuff. Also the lack of care when uploading I have seen many shirts where the design is clearly not aligned or near the bottom of the shirt. Or like a very blurry 800 pixel mask someone did with extremely rough edges. This is the type of stuff people buy and face palm and never want to order another shirt from here.

Amazon has nothing to do with that.

The seller should take responsibility for that. I'm against "babysitting".

All sellers should be taking responsibility for poorly performing shirts and that should include NON-Merch by Amazon vendors too, who by my rough calculation account for over 85% of t-shirt vendors on Amazon. Merch by Amazon vendors only account for approximately 15% or 840,000 t-shirts on the market at the time of this writing. So, yes, the market is becoming saturated and I feel like others do that my designs are getting lost in a sea of shirts out there.