How is it fair that I’m driving traffic directly to my own products—doing the hard work of promotion—and yet the compensation for those very efforts has plummeted? My self- referrals payments have gone down by 66%. Wasn’t the whole point of the Ambassador Program to reward creators for sending customers straight to Zazzle? If we’re now being paid less for our own sales through our own links, then where exactly is the incentive? Right now, it feels like we’re being penalized for doing exactly what the program was built to encourage. Please help us understand how this new structure is helping designers. Because for many of us, it’s not adding up.
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Do you mean that the percentage you receive per self-referral is 66% less than it used to be, or do you mean that in aggregate, the total amount you’re receiving for self-referrals has gone down by that amount?
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I am confused too. Are you saying that your number of sales and the order size are the same, but the royalties have decreased by 66 percent. O are you saying orders are down 66 percent.
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Thanks for asking—great clarification. What I meant is that the total amount in my earnings from self-referrals has gone down by 66%. So it’s not just the percentage per sale—it’s the overall total that’s taken a hit.
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The monthly monetary amount I receive from self-referrals has now dropped 66%. It was steadily climbing up until April 1.
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That’s disappointing. I don’t know what exactly to make of it. My only guess is that now that the non-overwritable window has been extended to 2 weeks, it’s really hard to find a customer who doesn’t already have a cookie/flag in the non-overwritable stage. Either that or there is now just so much more competition for referrals that your chances of getting them have gone down dramatically. Any way you slice it, if the goal was to encourage us to promote our products more, it doesn’t seem to be having that effect. I for one feel quite discouraged on that front.
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Why should a customer retain a cookie for two weeks? If they now click on one of my products, I should get full credit for that sale. Or, am I misunderstanding how the “two-week cookie retention” rule works?
Any way we slice it, we’ve all taken quite a financial hit. I don’t see any benefit to designers from Zazzle’s new ambassador program.
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Well, I think that the idea is that all cookies (or flags, or whatever they’re using to determine who gets the referral) are not overwritable for a period of 14 days - so in theory that would protect you from having your referral overwritten if a customer clicked on some other link during that time period. But in practice it doesn’t seem to work out that way. Maybe there’s just too much competition for the referrals anymore.
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No. If I create a blog post that attracts a person and they enter Zazzle through my link, then I am the person that created the relationship with Zazzle. They only found your product, because I sent them the link. So I get the referral and you get the royalty. If you want more referrals, then you have to go out into the world and create those new relationships. It has to be new, because if it is someone that has already been trolling around Zazzle looking for a personalized gift, there is probably already a tracking code attached to them, and clicking through my or your blog post won’t override it - and that’s the way it should be.
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I would get out of the program, but my understanding is that all my links would be rendered useless as well as nothing would change. I would still get hit with half - and more - of my royalties gone. I’m at a loss as to why this program is even around. I hope Zazzle rethinks our royalties for the better.