What is the Streamlabs Merch Store and Why Use It?
Last Updated on March 16, 2022 by Michael Brockbank
When streaming live on platforms like Twitch, you have a variety of ways to make money. While tips, bits, and subscriptions are often the most common, you can also sell products. In fact, the Streamlabs Merch Store helps you sell goods to the viewers.
For instance, what if you have a logo or an image that you associate with your channel or brand? Slap it on a shirt or a mug and your viewers may buy it.
And this is where Streamlabs comes into play.
What is the Streamlabs Merch Store?
The Streamlabs Merch Store is similar to platforms like Teespring and Printful. Essentially, you upload graphics to go onto a product of your choice, set a price and sell them to your audience.
Streamlabs gives you everything you’ll need to generate revenue through sales.
Items you have for sale are available on your Streamlabs tip page. The audience can buy directly from this screen. It’s like having a small store attached to your channel.
You can take a look for yourself by visiting my Streamlabs store. It’s actually quite easy to get set up and running.
How Does the Streamlabs Merch Store Work?
When using the Streamlabs store, you’re using a print-on-demand service. This means that items are printed as soon as someone buys them from your merch page.
While it does help creators make money, print-on-demand services are usually more expensive per unit. This means you’ll make less of a profit as opposed to printing out thousands of items at once.
A lot of creators will use systems like Teespring to generate a bit of revenue. This is especially popular on systems like YouTube as ad revenue isn’t always the most reliable.
Streamlabs provides a similar service by giving you a way to create a store filled with branded merchandise.
The store itself is an addition to the tip or donation screen. This is what people see when you connect donations to Twitch. However, visitors can choose from the “Donate Money” or the “Merch” tab.
You can also share the store’s URL as you could with any other selling platform.
Like the other printing services out there, the Streamlabs Merch Store gives you a platform which to see a higher return for branding yourself and your channel.
It’s always a good idea to diversify where your money comes from, and this is just one more outlet to help drive more money to your bank account.
All it takes is a few moments of your time, a popular channel, and making sure the audience is aware you have merchandise available.
What are Some Notable Features?
Although I am not a huge fan of drop shipping practices, the Streamlabs Merch Store does have quite a few benefits. For example, anyone can get started right away without worrying about becoming a Twitch Affiliate.
Several Goods to Choose From
The system gives you several goods to sell with your art. Although you have access to far more with a Streamlabs Prime account, you still have access to a few items that you can sell to your audience on the free version.
You can sell merch from various categories such as:
- Accessories
- Clothing
- Headwear
- Shoes
- School
- Home & Living
The hardest part is really coming up with your own artwork or marketing idea to sell your goods.
Well, and the fact that some items you want to sell might be “unavailable,” which is a bummer. I was looking forward to buying some tank tops.
Low Profit Margins, Par for the Course
One of the reasons why I don’t like using drop shipping of any kind is because it cuts heavily into profit margins. For instance, you’ll only make about $3.00 on a shirt you sell from your channel for $20.00.
The fees that come with services such as manufacturing costs are often extremely high. But, this is to be expected unless you can afford the thousands of dollars to print thousands of the same shirt.
Print-on-demand is more expensive than traditional manufacturing. Which means you won’t make as much money per item sold.
If you want to make a living off of selling products, you would have to sell at least 25 items per day.
Easy-to-Use Interface
Creating items in your store is relatively simple. Just like everything else from Streamlabs, it requires very little expertise outside of having some talent designing graphics and artwork.
Most products you can sell follow a quick, 3-step process that can have you selling in mere moments.[template id=”505″]
Data Tracking for Sales
Who doesn’t like data when operating an online store? It’s the data that helps drive strategies for selling new products, removing ones that don’t work and determining what your target audience likes more.
The Streamlabs Merch Store keeps tabs on your performance and offers a sales report to help structure your future ideas.
Minimum Price Requirements
Each item has a minimum retail price you can charge. This is to help make sure the item is paid for in terms of manufacturing as well as sharing the profits with Streamlabs 50/50.
Unfortunately, you won’t make a lot of money selling items unless you can unload them en mass. This means you need a large, high-quality audience willing to spend some money.
Stream Alert for Sales
One feature that may pique your interest is how Streamlabs will send an alert when someone buys your goods. This means everyone watching your channel will see when someone picks up a shirt or coffee mug.
Of course, you need to make sure you have alerts running on your stream.
The visuals of someone buying your goods also work as a way to market the product. What if a viewer doesn’t know you’re selling coffee mugs and then all of a sudden he or she sees an alert during your stream that somebody bought one?
Twitch Panels
Once you start adding things to your Streamlabs Merch Store, you can download and use pre-designed image panels to add to your Twitch channel. These are simply images that you can use as buttons so people have direct access to your store.
You can always use your own images, but Streamlabs gives you a few color options to choose from. You download the lot as a ZIP file, which you can then upload to your channel’s panels.
Monthly Payouts
Luckily, there are no minimum requirements for payment thresholds. If you only make one sale inside of a month, you will get that money.
Payouts are on the 5th of the following month. So if you had $25 in profits for June, you would be paid on the 5th of July.
This is a good feature for several reasons. The most important is that you don’t have to hit a $100 payment threshold to see your money. Most systems will hold your cash until you meet this requirement, such as Amazon, Twitch, and AdSense.
The Streamlabs Merch Store will send any money you made in a particular month regardless of how much it is.
Automated Giveaways
One feature I am looking forward to using some time down the road is the automated giveaways. Essentially, you pick the product to giveaway and a random viewer is chosen by the system. He or she simply fills in the address form to get their item.
It’s a great way to engage the audience and keep people coming back for more. I did something similar to this when I had closed Beta keys for World of Warships a couple of years ago.
Decent Quality
I received my coffee mug in the mail depicting my logo some time ago. As for the print job, it’s a nice representation of my colors and the mug itself is nicely crafted.
Unfortunately, I don’t know whether to set it aside as a collector’s item or fill it up right now. A cup is meant to be used!
At any rate, the mug has stood against a great deal of use and still looks good overall. Well, aside from a few scuffs and scratches that come with usage and moving.
I’m actually quite impressed with how well it has held up, to be honest.
Not Ideal in Terms of Shipping Fees
I ordered it on the 18th and it arrived on the 26th…so an eight-day delivery. Now, a week isn’t bad considering it’s print on demand. What I am more concerned with is the price-to-shipping ratio.
For a $20 item, I had to pay $6.50 in the cheapest shipping method available. So in essence, I paid $26.50 for a coffee mug.
However, it was packaged safely and I would trust Streamlabs to ship more often. Well, that is I would trust Streamlab’s drop shipper to send items.
Can You Start Using Streamlabs Merch for Free?
So, Streamlabs is a bit misleading when they say you can start selling merch for “free.”
Yes, you have access to a small variety of products you can sell under the free version of Streamlabs. However, you will still have to pay for the printing service as well as share the profit with Streamlabs.
This can be somewhat helpful for new streamers who are trying to bring in a bit of extra cash outside of donations. That is if your audience thinks your designs on the merch are worth buying.
The underlying point, though, is Yes, you can start your own store without having to pay upfront expenses. But, you will have to give up a larger portion of the profits unless you upgrade to Streamlabs Prime.
Is the Streamlabs Merch Page Worth Upgrading to Prime?
There’s no doubt that you have access to far more items for your merch page by upgrading to Streamlabs Prime. What you also need to keep in mind is that some of those items you might want to sell are going to be out of stock.
Unfortunately, Streamlabs doesn’t give you an ETA on when items will become available again.
With that being said, you do get quite a bit from the Prime version in addition to access to more merchandise. When you think of Prime as a whole, it’s essentially an all-in-one platform for gamers in general.
Plus, you share less of the profit with Streamlabs if you use Prime. This means you make a buck or two more per item depending on your price scheme.
Hopefully, Streamlabs will make a few tweaks for those of us who want to sell things that are “unavailable.”
The Bottom Line…
It all boils down to being able to market your goods to an active audience. This means your channel needs to have a high enough popularity of those willing to buy your goods. If the majority of people are just lurkers, don’t expect a huge payout.
Once you establish yourself as a semi-popular streamer, I can see how the Streamlabs Merch Store could be an asset to making money. But like most other ways to generate revenue online, it all comes down to having quality traffic.
And that is an aspect that is completely controlled by you.
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