Like Zazzle, Amazon Merch will now take into account how much organic traffic you are driving to Amazon, and your royalties will be dictated by the group you fall into. There will be 3 tiers. Check your email to see which tier you fall into and how your royalties will be impacted when they change on 6/1.
Hello,
Thank you for being a Merch on Demand content creator. With our introduction of royalty incentive groups, your performance driving sales with non-organic traffic will now impact your upcoming royalty rates for sales in the US store……
My predictions are Amazon, Zazzle and other POD companies will change their minds about that again, once they realize artists, designers or creators are not the best sales people. I also think they will lose business because artists/designers/creators will finally throw in the towel and quit all together. A great art teacher once told me that those who are successful at selling their art, are not always the best artists, they’re just great sales people. So Amazon and Zazzle will not be selling the best product anymore.
I can understand it on Zazzle, because it’s a relatively small company without the huge reach of Amazon. But Amazon has probably the most traffic of all the websites on earth, and how could any artist hope to compete with THAT? There’s no way even the best sales people could bring in more traffic than Amazon can bring organically.
My heart sank when I received the email; Amazon was the last PoD outlet I was still seeing growth on.
Redbubble, TeePublic, Zazzle have all shaved their artists to varying degrees, and now Amazon Merch is doing the same. I’m not sure what the end goal in all this may be. Weather the economic storm? Ok, but I think we all know that even if economic conditions do recover, these artist gouging fees and tier structures are unlikely to be rolled back.
As much as I hope you’re right about these companies changing their mind, I can’t see that happening. I doubt they care whether designers actually drive traffic or not - it’s all about that bottom line. Add AI into the equation. Imagine - what if a company sets up a system with well trained AI - a few employees type in the right prompts, churn out more designs per day than one of us could create in weeks. At what point can a handful of employees making a salary replace a lot of designers - and eliminate royalty altogether…
I stopped posting on Redbubble and pulled everything off of my site because their fees went to high and just was not worth my time anymore. I hope Zazzle re-thinks these fees because their fees already too high.