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I wouldn't trust that website If I were you. It looks so shady.

Yes it's shady.

You pay them and they will send take-down notices for you. I would hope that they would make 100% certain that the notices they send are legit (i.e. that the person requesting the DMCA notice to be sent is lawfully the owner of the content). But, who knows. For $9.99/month, I really wouldn't expect them to look into each case to verify the validity of the claim. When you pay a lawyer, it costs upwards of $250 per DMCA sent. So, you'd expect more for the cost.

My question though is, did you get a message from them about one of your shirts on merch and did it come directly from them instead of from Amazon? Because then I'd have to wonder how they got your email address to send the DMCA to you directly instead of to Amazon to forward on to you...

If someone asserts fraudulent claims and it impacts your business - especially monetarily you have cause to pursue damages from them. If it is impacting your business i would contact an Attorney.

I run Merch DMCA. Feel free to ask questions.

In short, the extension just copy/pastes a lawyer-written DMCA notice and sends it in an email. It's just a faster way to do what you can already do by loading up your email, hire a laywer to write out a good DMCA template for you, paste it in, find your shirt URL, paste it in, find the infringing URL, paste it in, send it to the right email address... blah blah... there's no validation when someone does that either, the validation is up to whomever receives the complaint (ie. Amazon, Shopify, etc.) Merch DMCA is just a faster way to do it since it's automated.

We're not a legal service. We're just a software provider. All the DMCA notices come from whoever is using the extension and submits the take-down notice. The email address and name of the reporter is in the extension options, and if you don't want to use your personal info you can simply enter your company's name or some other DBA name. Users also declare under penalty of perjury that their reports are accurate and true, so if we get complaints of abuse, we will terminate those users accounts and we will also provide reports to those who decide they want to take legal action toward those individuals who violated their agreement under penalty of perjury.

The only reason there's a monthly charge behind it is because most (not all, but most) abusers of DMCA claims aren't going to pay for it, so it helps limit those false claims. Either way, false claims can just be done by using the cut/paste method as I explained above. No matter what method of reporting you use, there's always loopholes. Again, we just make it faster.