what's up guys today i wanted to drop a
follow-up video on the issue
with the people abusing the brand name
born with their merch by amazon products
now i personally never tried to post
anything to this brand
i hope that you guys didn't either
because it appears
to me
that there may be some action being
taken against them i did see some
chatter in some facebook groups about a
bunch of these born products getting
removed which would be great
i also did my own
research and it does appear
that
strides are being made in the the right
direction as far as removing
the born shirts and hopefully patching
whatever loophole or back door was being
used to exploit this by the way can we
all take a second and
clap it up for this amazing thumbnail
that i did look at this thumbnail behind
me this is honestly probably the dumbest
thumbnail i've ever made in my youtube
career but i absolutely love it i was
trying i was thinking like it was like
we slayed the born dragon and so i had
to go ahead and give myself a little
night helmet and a sword but in this
video guys i just wanted to do a little
update like have some fun with the you
know community facebook posts that i had
seen where people were making light of
this issue uh you know because that's
really all we could do we didn't have
that much more at our disposal um so
yeah it's gonna be a fun video i think
we are finally making progress however
again i don't work for amazon so i don't
know this definitively i have as much
like actual knowledge as you do uh so
yeah so anyways let's get started
so i wanted to open this video up by
sharing some of the posts that people
had shared in my merch by amazon
facebook community which by the way if
you want to join all you got to do is
use the link in the description and i
will let you in myself but uh let's
let's have some fun with it so
uh carrie said okay so what is born
everyone's posting about it and i
haven't a clue anybody that missed out
on my video on born or if you just have
been living under a rock and haven't
been doing any niche research on
uh amazon merch basically it is a brand
name that appears to have some sort of
special status
within the amazon search algorithm uh
somebody said it was like a shoe company
i think uh whatever company it is it
appears that the amazon algorithm will
give favorable placement to certain
brand names and while i'm gonna venture
a guess pretty confidently that if
you're on like seller central
and you try to list a product in the
brand born it'll probably say this brand
is gated you know you can't get in here
yet somehow through the merch portal
which is a separate way of selling on
amazon
it appears that somebody found an
exploit and was able to list on the born
brand and then get their t-shirts
listed way ahead of all the existing
t-shirts even it appears even if these
shirts had no sales history the last
time i did my boring video the video on
this born issue what we call it the
bourne brand issue
um we looked up like black history month
and literally i mean this is like very
valuable keywords in the month of
february especially the whole first page
was shirts listed to this brand born and
it appears that they were virtually all
stolen and all posted recently so
they're outranking like the actual best
sellers
with hundreds of reviews and obviously
that creates a big problem so it seems
like amazon
maybe uh i'm just guessing but maybe
they were dragging their toes a bit
because they were rolling out this
update to the
the amazon merch designer integration
and it appears that like this is just me
saying this so i don't know this
definitively but it appears like right
after they released the merch designer
update
the the bourne issue appears to start
going away as well so maybe they
released an update to something related
to the bourne thing as well and just
didn't post publicly about it
uh
carlage said i'm disappointed
this one's funny he said i'm so
disappointed born has not copied a
single one of my designs are they that
bad
i laughed when i saw that people were
loving it uh yeah cause the bourne a lot
of these designs posted to born uh are
just pixel for pixel clones i actually
posted i think in my top five niches of
the week video
that uh i went and i did some digging
and i found the original like one of
these designs i don't remember what
niche it was but it was like the
original design because you can see the
date first uploaded and so i knew that
one was the original it also wasn't
posted to the born brand name and then
there was like three clones all posted
to the born brand name all out ranking
the original
because they posted in that brand name
and they were all later upload dates you
know so this is definitely an exploit
uh somebody marcelo i don't know if this
is like actually bourne's brand uh sales
like is this like a tool that can
estimate this i don't know but he he or
it was just a joke but he said this is
born
today's sales
according to that brand
and it says that the bourne brand did
almost 19 000 sales in a day
for
33 000
profit now
again i don't know where this came from
if it's a joke or what but it actually
kind of looks like maybe it's not i
don't know or it could just you know
obviously if you have some web developer
skills you can like hack any of these
pictures and whatever
but it wouldn't surprise me if
in the run-up to the tuesday two two
tuesday by the way happy tuesday
everybody uh hopefully you guys made
some tuesday shirt sales if you're in
that niche uh but i could definitely see
people abusing the bourne exploit and
making 33 000 in a day
across all these different niches like
in my mind it seems possible
uh ah achinta said they are thieves they
steal other people's designs born stole
her brand design or sorry her
design or is that he sorry the pixel
picture's pixelated but anyways their
design was stolen
pixel for pixel and then saeed said in
response the born future is the dogs of
amazon and it looks like maybe they did
start to actually
start removing these accounts these
listings and switching them over to the
dogs of amazon which is what happens
after you get your listing deleted on
the amazon catalog
now this one's not related to born but
abu
shared that he was doing some pi day
shirt research and found a brand called
happy pi day mathematics
shirts or mathematic apparel
uh anyways that basically somebody was
ripping off pixel for pixel a bunch of
pi day designs so if we can get the
merch team if you do end up watching
this video thank you first and foremost
for amazon merch in general because i
love amazon merch but if there's one
thing we could request as sellers after
fixing the bourne issue it would be that
we don't expose
the
the 4 500 by 5400 transparent pngs on
the front end
of
our product listings because obviously
people have written bots that scrape all
of them download them and repost them
and you know if we're competing with
bots like we're not going to win even if
we're trying to report all these thieves
but yeah then you get brands like this
that pop up
and yeah it sucks
so i that's how i think most of this is
being done uh barry had posted basically
a little feedback a little
recommendation that
you know
he said original designs now i know most
of us pretty much all of us are doing
original designs i think what they meant
maybe was like
if you're just kind of
following the the crowd into these
what do we call it like low-hanging
fruit niches like the low hanging fruit
right now as of recording this is
probably mardi gras and then you know pi
day st patrick's day those are probably
the next low-hanging fruit niches and
those are also the ones getting crushed
by the born exploit so he's basically
saying like hey like if you
do something else
you're less likely to run into issues
with these people
abusing the born exploit and i gotta
agree there
teresa said merch by amazon needs to
stop accepting new applications for a
year or two shut down and block all the
ips and accounts
of all these uh born unknown and other
team of thieves clean up this mess yeah
i mean you know obviously like it's
easier said than done and you know
obviously they can like vpn cycle their
ip addresses and all that so that's why
it's really it's really tough when you
get people that know what they're doing
know kind of how to uh
kind of go about like anonymizing um who
they are and you know there's you can
even go further than that with some of
the stuff
i'm not going to like pretend like i've
you know i'm only using speculation i
have like a bachelor's in master's
degree in it so like i have a little bit
of background in this but like
yeah i agree like if they stopped new
applications i know that would also suck
for all the people that still want to
get in i don't know what the actual
answer is but i do know that the giving
you know preferred placement to to
certain brands and then people getting
loopholes to get into those brands like
that definitely caused a huge problem
you know i'm not going to pretend to
have all the answers but yeah something
it would be ideal if something changed
uh what can we do guys so here's a
couple quick recommendations uh while we
wait for the bourne thing to be
officially behind us which like i was
saying it looks like the start of it
maybe now but you know if you're in
amazon merch tier 10
this is where it's really tough because
you do typically want to be in those
low-hanging fruit niches where the most
sales are going to take place uh because
that's the highest likelihood of you
making that sale i mean if you're in
tier 10 and you price at the lowest
price possible and a customer searches
from price low to high a lot of the born
products while we did see some of them
min price
a lot of them are more than min price so
if a customer searches price low to high
you have a nice chance of outranking the
bourne products because if you're at mid
price in tier 10 you're deferring
profits because you just want to scale
up your account and raise your tier that
is a nice little thing you can attempt
to do
tier like 1000 plus
and i know there's a gap in between
there but
sorry i don't know what to say about to
you guys you can kind of take this
advice too tier 100 plus let's say uh
you know maybe try to
post some evergreens like a lot of the
born exploit designs were not in
the evergreen niches that don't do a
bunch of immediate sales in the
immediate future like the whole born
exploit i think the people that did it
knew that they were
that this was a means to an end that it
wasn't gonna last so they hit all of the
like major cash grabs like i didn't
check but i'm sure they didn't spend
nearly as much time posting christmas
designs while we're in february right
because they didn't think this exploit
was going to last until christmas
another thing you can do guys quick
reminder let me hide myself here because
i'm blocking it take advantage of like
etsy you know etsy plus my designs etsy
plus printful you know spend some time
on etsy they're not having the same
issue with this exploit so uh definitely
if you are not on etsy yet i put a
playlist together too on my youtube
channel if you just go to the
youtube.com reinhard passive income or
click the little icon on this video
you can see my playlist that i just put
together to help you get started selling
digital downloads on etsy it's a good
way of getting something for nothing you
know what i mean it's not even like
where you sell print on demand and you
still have to keep a credit card on file
to pay the initial fulfillment costs so
check that out guys i mean there's lots
of options lots of ways to make money
online obviously don't abandon merch by
amazon because i'm loving the potential
for merch by amazon accounts i've got a
video coming up by the way it's going to
be really good talking about like what
we can learn from the highest tier most
valuable merch by amazon accounts and
you know merged by amazon sellers so
it's going to be a good one make sure
you're subscribed for that and this is
the last thing i wanted to leave you
guys with it is just me
going back and doing some research on
black history month now here we do have
one shirt at the top of page one listed
as born
and
you know i'm assuming that's going to be
removed hopefully soon
but the rest appear to be pretty well
diversified in terms of like upload date
you know what i mean they're not all
like uploaded in february 2022 with the
brand name born which was a hallmark of
the people abusing the exploit so it
looks like we are
trending the right direction i do you
know knock on wood uh i hope that we are
my monitor my monitor stand is wood so
every time i knock on wood that's uh
it's very close
uh but yeah guys hopefully this is the
start of the return to normalcy and if
that's the case
um you know jump back in hit all those
trends hard and you know like i said if
you're in tier 10 chase the trends if
you're into your 1000 plus chase trends
but also hit some evergreens as well
because that's how you build that
sustainable recurring passive income
base that's a little bit more passive
right if you're chasing trends
constantly it's not that passive uh so
guys thank you for watching as i wrap
the video did just want to remind you
that i have a full print a full merch by
amazon course where i walk you through
how i went from tier 10 to tier 200
thousand if you want to learn more the
link is in the description
thank you that's it please like please
subscribe please let me know your
feedback your thoughts in the comments
below so i i gotta learn from you guys
you can see this was kind of a community
oriented video so let me know what you
think about it did you laugh at the guy
who posted that he was upset that bourne
didn't steal any of his designs pixel
for pixel i thought that was a really
funny joke um guys thanks for watching
i'll see you soon
you