Already rejected
The Merch by Amazon 25 MB limit
Nothing is wrong with your artwork. The ceiling is real — but you have more room to move than most guides admit.
Where the pressure comes from
Amazon states the 25 MB ceiling in two separate places on its Best Practices page, so that number is solid. A 32-bit transparent PNG around 4500 × 5400, carrying any gradient, grain or photographic element, typically exports between 30 and 60 MB. What has changed is your room to manoeuvre: this used to be a genuine deadlock because the dimensions were mandatory at exactly 4500 × 5400. Amazon has since dropped that requirement — the design editor now accepts anything above 485 × 485 and scales it — so reducing the canvas is back on the table as a last resort, alongside the levers that cost you nothing.
Batch, auto-fix and exports
Everything above is free for one file at a time, and always will be. Doing it to a whole folder — batch checking up to 100 files, one zip with every platform file for every design, and a CSV report — is part of Seller.
Exports are padded and centred to each platform's size on a transparent canvas. Nothing is ever upscaled — a file enlarged to pass a dimension check still prints soft, which is the failure this tool exists to prevent.
Try these in order
- Trim the empty transparent margin — costs nothing in quality, and Amazon asks for it anyway: their centring tools measure the artwork bounds, so padding makes the automatic placement wrong as well as the file bigger.
- Re-encode (offered by the tool on this page) — strips metadata and re-runs PNG compression without moving a single pixel. This alone is often enough.
- Reduce the colour count — quantising to a 256-colour palette cuts size dramatically but changes how gradients step. Fine for flat illustration, wrong for photographic work.
- Simplify gradients and grain — PNG is lossless, so random noise is expensive to store. Removing decorative texture often halves the file.
- Scale the canvas down — now possible, but last. Every pixel you drop is print resolution you cannot get back, so exhaust the lossless levers first and stay well above 485 × 485.
Frequently asked questions
Can I submit a JPEG instead?
No. JPEG has no alpha channel, so the background becomes solid white or black and prints as a box on a dark garment.
My design is only a few flat shapes. Why is the file still huge?
Check whether it was saved as 32-bit PNG with large semi-transparent regions on the canvas. Some export tools also embed colour profiles and preview thumbnails, which a re-encode strips out.