Getting better results out of MerchPipeline
A reference for every setting that changes what a job produces — what it does, what we recommend, and why. Ordered the way you actually work: set up a job, watch it run, review the output, then download and upload it.
How a job runs
Every job walks the same 8 stages. You do not need to stay on the page — once a job is started you can close the tab and come back later.
Queue as many jobs as you want
A queued job is picked up as soon as a worker is free. Your plan decides how many of your jobs run in parallel and how high they sit in the queue — it does not limit how many you may queue.
Results are kept temporarily
Designs and listings are stored for a window that depends on your plan. The remaining time is shown on the dashboard and on the job page. Download before it runs out.
What each plan changes
Only the four things that affect how a job behaves.
| Plan | Markets | Parallel jobs | Queue priority | Results kept |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | Any 3, chosen per billing period | 1 | Standard | 48 hours |
| Seller | All 6 | 2 | Standard | 72 hours |
| Pro | All 6 | 3 | Priority | 1 week |
| Max | All 6 | 5 | Highest Priority | 2 weeks |
Core settings
These three fields shape research, generation and the listings at once. They are the highest-leverage settings on the form.
Niche Name
Write it in the market languageEnter the niche only — no product words. Leave out “shirt”, “t-shirt”, “hoodie”, “design” and similar: the pipeline already knows it is making apparel designs, and product words narrow the research to the wrong pages.
- Fishing — US / UK
- Angeln — DE
- Pesca — IT / ES
- Pêche — FR
- Fishing Shirt
- Angeln T-Shirt Design
- Funny fishing gifts for men
- Fishing — for a DE run
Why this matters
The niche name is the seed for competitor research and for keyword discovery. Written in English for a German run, research lands on English-language marketplace pages, so the design styles and search terms we find are the ones that sell in the US — not the ones that sell on amazon.de. The run still works, it is simply less accurate. Product words have the same effect in miniature: they pull research toward product listing pages instead of design ideas.
Markets
One market per job. Your choice decides two things at once: which marketplaces we research and which language the designs and listings are written in. Picking IT researches the Italian marketplaces and returns Italian sayings and Italian listings. To cover the same niche in several markets, run one job per market.
- StarterAny 3, chosen per billing period — set in Settings → Markets.
- SellerAll 6
- ProAll 6
- MaxAll 6
Why this matters
The market is what points our research at the right place. The same niche is not the same market twice: buyers in Germany and in the US favour different sub-themes, different humour and different phrasings, and each marketplace has its own best-sellers. Researching the marketplace you are actually selling on is how we capture that audience's preferences instead of an average of all of them.
It also drives listing generation. Keywords, search-term suggestions and the phrasing buyers actually type differ per marketplace, so the market decides which terms we find and prioritise in your titles, bullets and tags. Keep the niche name in the same language as the market so both halves — research and listing — work from the same market.
Background Color
The product colour the designs are optimised for. Choosing White produces artwork that reads well on white garments; choosing Black produces artwork for dark garments. The same choice also drives the colour configuration written into your bulk upload files.
Why this matters
Contrast is decided at generation time, not afterwards. A design built for black cannot simply be dropped onto white — dark linework disappears and light outlines float. Because the choice is also written to the colour column of the upload files, a mismatch here means re-doing the run rather than editing a spreadsheet. If you sell the same niche on both, run it twice.
Rendering engine
Three rendering speeds. Turbo is the default, and it is what we run for our own stores.
Turbo offers the best value by a wide margin in our own testing. Default and Quality take longer and can render more cleanly, but in practice the difference is negligible on typical text-and-motif apparel designs. Stick with Turbo for standard work; consider the slower modes only for graphics-heavy designs with dense illustration.
Why this matters
Print-on-demand output is a volume game: what sells is decided by the idea and the keyword coverage far more than by the last few percent of render fidelity. Every design also passes background removal and upscaling afterwards, which evens out much of the difference between modes. Spending 3.5× the tokens for that margin means a third of the designs live.
Creative guidance
Reference images and custom instructions. This is where you steer a niche toward a style or a sub-niche instead of taking the market average.
Reference Images
Add up to 10 images by dropping them on the field, picking them in the file browser, or simply pasting from the clipboard.
By default we scrape competitor designs to detect the styles that already dominate a niche, and blend that with anything you upload. Switch Use only my reference images on when you want your own look and nothing else — for example to keep a shop-wide visual identity. The option only becomes available once at least one image is uploaded.
Why this matters
Competitor scraping is what keeps output aligned with what a niche's buyers already respond to, so turning it off trades market fit for consistency. It is the right trade when you have a house style; it is the wrong trade when you are entering a niche you do not know yet. Either way research still runs, so your keywords and listings are unchanged.
Custom Instructions
Free text that shapes prompt generation. Use it for a style (vintage, pastel, minimal line art) or to push a whole run into a sub-niche.
- Reel Cool Fisherman
- Bass Whisperer
- Fly Fishing Since '92
- Just One More Cast
- Ice Fishing Club
- Catch & Release Crew
Why this matters
Without instructions a run samples the whole niche, which is the right default for exploring. Once you know which corner of a niche sells for you, instructions let you spend an entire run there instead of getting three usable designs out of thirty. Keep them short and specific — one style plus one focus is usually enough; long lists of constraints fight each other during prompt generation.
Processing options & listing keywords
Review all generations
Leave onOn by default. Quality control filters out designs with generation artefacts or misspelled text, which means you can receive fewer designs than you requested. In practice the number rejected is small. Turning it off always returns every generated design, including ones with potential quality issues — useful only if you prefer to sort through everything yourself.
Why this matters
A misspelled shirt that reaches a marketplace is worse than a missing one — Merch by Amazon in particular penalises accounts for rejected content. Quality control is also the stage that catches the artefacts that survive upscaling, which are hard to spot in a thumbnail grid and obvious on a printed garment.
Priority Keywords
Up to 10 keywords you want used in the listings. We prioritise them where they fit. This field is optional — we already determine the best keywords and customer search suggestions for the niche ourselves, so leave it empty unless you have a specific term you must rank for.
Why this matters
The cap is deliberately tight. A title and brand hold roughly 110 characters between them, so a longer must-use list can only be honoured by stuffing — which reads badly to buyers and to marketplace search alike.
While it runs
Nothing is required of you between starting a job and reviewing it.
You can close the tab
Jobs run server-side. Start the run and leave; progress and results are waiting when you come back.
Queue while you wait
Queue the next niches immediately. They start as workers free up, in plan-priority order.
Recent jobs live on the dashboard
Every run and its remaining time to deletion is listed there, so you can see what still needs downloading.
Designs appear when generation is done
Once the pipeline finishes, the Generated Designs and Generated Listings cards fill in on the job page.
Reviewing designs and listings
Every design has exactly one listing attached to it. What you keep here is what ends up in the download.
Generated Designs
10 readyGenerated Listings
10 listings readyYouth enabled on 1 design- Click a design to select it — its listing opens in the panel beside the grid, with a live character count per field.
- Use the expand icon on a tile for an enlarged view of the design together with its listing.
- Deleting a design deletes its listing, and the pair is excluded from the final batch. Nothing else is affected.
- Every field is editable — title, brand, bullets, description, tags and fit type. Step through the listings with the pager and fix what you want before downloading.
Download & upload files
At the end of every job we build batch upload files for FlyingUpload and LazyMerch, so designs and listings can be imported directly.
Two places to configure them
Saved to your account and applied to every job from then on. Set this up once.
Overrides for a single download. Nothing here is saved back to your defaults.
Design folder path
Check with previewThe stem of the path where your designs will sit after you have downloaded and extracted them. LazyMerch uses the design path to find the files during upload, so this has to match the machine that will run the upload. Type a path below to see exactly what we would write into the LazyMerch file.
Windows and macOS/Linux are both supported. We do not guess from the computer you are sitting at: the separator is taken from the path you typed. A path already using forward slashes is written with forward slashes, anything else with backslashes. That way a sheet prepared on a Mac for a Windows machine — or a path pasted from another computer — still resolves where the files will actually be. The pre-filled suggestion follows the platform you are on (/Users/<you>/Downloads on macOS, C:\Users\<you>\Downloads otherwise), but it is only a suggestion — the value is yours.
Why this matters
A wrong stem is the single most common cause of a failed LazyMerch import: the sheet is valid, the designs exist, and LazyMerch simply cannot find them. The path in the sheet has to describe where the extracted files actually live, including the folder your extractor creates from the archive name. Because the separator follows what you typed rather than the computer you typed it on, a trailing slash is safe to leave in and a foreign-platform path stays intact. The preview shows the exact string — compare it against the file location in your file browser before you import.
LazyMerch templates
Enter the names of the templates you use for Merch by Amazon, Teepublic and Spreadshirt, and mark one as default per platform. Leaving a name blank leaves the field blank in the file, which makes LazyMerch fall back to the standard template configured on its side — that is a valid choice, not an error.
Pick the target markets you upload to, and whether to publish to the Spreadshirt marketplace, to your own shop, or both.
Choose whether designs are uploaded as drafts by default, and whether the auto-translate listings option is pre-selected.
Mark designs as adults only
Job level onlyAvailable on the job page, for Teepublic and Redbubble. Switching it on sets the corresponding fields in those bulk upload files. It also makes us warn you at download time if any listing in the job still has a youth fit size enabled, since an adults-only design should not ship in youth sizes.
Listing instructions & limits
Settings → Listing instructions lets you set an instruction and a maximum length per listing field. Leave a field empty and our proven best practices apply.
Per-field instructions
Typical uses: force the same brand across every listing of a run, leave the bullet points empty, or require the design saying to appear in the title.
| Field | Standard | You may set up to |
|---|---|---|
| Title | 60 characters | 120 |
| Brand | 50 characters | 100 |
| Bullet 1 | 256 characters | 300 |
| Bullet 2 | 256 characters | 300 |
| Description | 1000 characters | 2000 |
| Tags | 15 tags | 30 |
Platforms disagree on length. Merch by Amazon accepts titles up to 60 characters, Spreadshirt only 50 — so if you upload the same run to both, set the title limit to the stricter number rather than trimming by hand afterwards.
Why this matters
A title generated at 60 characters and then cut to 50 loses its ending — usually the product term or the keyword that made it rank. Generating to the limit instead lets the sentence be built to fit. The same applies to a brand you own: an instruction guarantees it, whereas editing 30 listings after the fact does not scale.
Markets tab
On plans with a partial market entitlement, the markets available to your jobs are chosen in Settings → Markets and can be changed once per billing period. On the plans that include all 6, every market is always available and no selection is needed.
When something fails
Jobs fail rarely. When one does, the job page offers a restart — that is the first thing to try, and it usually succeeds.
In a small number of cases a job cannot be restarted. Do not re-create the run blind: reach out to us and we will take a look and sort it out for you.
Start a job with these settings
Niche in the market language, Turbo, quality control on. Queue as many as you like and come back later.
New JobStuck on something?
If a job will not restart, or an import behaves strangely, get in touch with the job link. We would rather fix it than have you burn tokens guessing.