I was just wondering in Zazzle’s financial modelling for the new system if it there was consideration given to alternatives to the marketing fee levied to the designer? I’m sure there was.. but is Zazzle open to suggestions to rework things?
Alternatives such as increasing the referral for 3rd party affiliates to say up to perhaps from 17-20% (from 15%) to encourage more 3rd party affiliate marketers etc promoting Zazzle rather than designers paying 50% of their small royalties in marketing fees.
Alternatively if the marketing fees stayed could you allow (in your algorithms) designers to increase their royalties to 20-25% (because we receive effectively 10-12.5% then) and not be penalised in the marketplace I.e no impact on their store rank and allow products to be included in top searches with royalties up to 20-25%. This could alleviate some burden on the designer. At the moment we fear increasing royalties will hurt our presence in the market place and/or those products may be not promoted by Zazzle. Can Zazzle allow that so we can recoup some of our losses? at the moment it feels like Zazzle prefers royalties at 10% but the income is just too low unless the product is very popular.
Also designers aren’t naturally marketers, so paying designers for designing and paying marketers for marketing makes more sense. Designers are wasting money trying to figure out or paying to market their stores in addition to the marketing fees already charged… chasing the large promoter referral income, but that money would be better used to pay designers for better designs
i could be wrong here but it seems like designers are the only ones taking a pay cut? Owners /executive staff may wearing some costs too? but I’m assuming advertisers/supplies or employees are not exactly taking a pay cut (and I wouldn’t want them too). in a typical situation you would you rarely see a contractor or employee take a 30/40% pay cut overnight and just continue on business as usual.
I love working with Zazzle, I just want it to continue long term so trying to think of some ways to make it work for everyone?
I’ve seen plenty of products with higher royalties on the first page of searches, so I don’t think they penalize us for having higher royalties, beyond the small “Excess Royalty fee.” I raised my royalty for most products, and haven’t noticed a decrease in activity from doing that.
I believe that more reasonable marketing fees would make things easier. As you said, we are not marketing experts, so it seems logical for someone who is to take care of it—but at a fair cost and in an equitable way. I also think that the way the announcement was made caught everyone off guard. Z was always a friendly place, and then suddenly this, at a time when sales were already declining… It raised a lot of suspicion. It made us feel like the ground was crumbling beneath us and we were left hanging in the air. We can all understand the challenges Z might be facing and that they need to make the right decisions for their business, but putting so much weight on the shoulders of designers felt like a punishment.
I think this is a professional, well-worded query that summarizes quite a few of the things we’ve all been thinking.
Specifically, I’d LOVE to see a response to the final question in your first paragraph. I have wondered this, and frankly, my impression has been that the company is not interested in making a change to what they’ve rolled out. At least at this time.
As someone who has driven the vast majority of my sales during my time on the platform (not nearly as long as others, I’ve only been here two years), I have to say my disbelief when I saw that I would lose half my royalty for driving my own traffic created a lot of emotions.
At first, I stopped promoting completely. And pretty much stopped creating here.
I have returned to creating and promoting in the meantime, but every time a sale comes through, self-referred or not, it hurts.
I recently earned my Bronze level after really targeting the goal HARD since around this time last year through a lot of promoting and creating. I have zero hope of ever making it out of this level, and for someone who has loved this platform since joining and created several informative videos to encourage customers to shop here, I am strongly considering moving my new work and promotion efforts elsewhere once the holiday season passes.
If Zazzle is indeed looking for feedback on what needs to happen to help creators feel more hopeful, my number one request is that we not be penalized for promoting the site and our stores. Especially with cookies very much already impacting the number of self-referrals we are all receiving, my enthusiasm to “talk up” the site and even my products is suffering greatly. To be honest, the main reason I am still promoting so hard right now is because I plan to enter the contest. I don’t think I will win, lol, but with the lost income, I figure it’s worth a shot for a little influx of cash and maybe some more eyes on my products.
Like I’ve said before, Zazzle is hoping designers will eventually accept this change and move on, but that’s not happening. The only way designers will move on is to move on to other platforms where they have a better chance of earning a decent royalty.
To an extent, I think Zazzle can now afford to lose a good number of creators. The problem is that they can’t choose which ones to lose. They also have quite a few other avenues for revenue at this point, Including large brand partnerships, and more and more tools for customers to bypass creators entirely.
There is no denying the competition right now is tough. For us as designers, and for platforms themselves like Zazzle.
I feel like the hardest part of this change has been that many of the creators, quite a few who have been here for quite a long time as well as talented and ambitious, new creators, all feel like they were ignored and not considered in the change. I don’t know if Zazzle had any sort of team from multiple aspects of the business, including the creators, as they talked about possible moves, but the perception certainly is that they did not. And that is truly disappointing from a company that many of us have considered a high regard for so long. And it is disappointing because the amount of creative thinkers here is incredible. It is interesting to ponder what other Direction may have been pursued had there been more communication prior to a decision being made.
You’re referring to customers bypassing designers to create their own designs using AI art, I’m assuming. The problem with that scenario is non-designers don’t typically have sufficient design skills to create quality art using AI. It takes skill to develop accurate and detailed prompts plus knowledge of the basic principles of graphic design and typography to generate high-quality results. Take a look at this platform and you will see many examples of really bad designs created with AI.
The landscape is changing for designers, but there will always be a need for qualified, experienced, professional designers.
I agree with you about AI. lol. It’s like turning a kid loose with a firehose: Don’t anticipate good results! I know how to design and basic concepts of design, and I can’t get the darn thing to do what I want.
The tools I’m talking about are current additions to the design space here. The first that come to mind are grids and frames. They are not as complicated to use, and I daresay many users will be quite pleased with their results. Will they look like ours? Nope. But you know what? Sadly, a lot of people don’t *really* know the difference when it comes down to it. Some are discerning, don’t get me wrong. But many will play with the tool and create something they like, and they’ll like it even better because they created it and will have more ownership of it.
These new tools certainly make things easier for us, and I’ve always thought Zazzle’s editor was quite impressive even before the changes. But I don’t believe for a second that most of these changes were made for designers. They were made for customers. Designers have already figured out workarounds eons ago. We created opaque rectangles and uploaded and layered them before we got transparency. We made our own grids. We used masks and brought in more complicated shapes to make even fancier ones than what was available in the program.
Now Zazzle, and the customer, don’t need us to do this anymore. We REALLY need to step it up and get clever now to provide things the design program can’t. That’s the challenge, and luckily we are creative and many of us will “bring it.” Until others catch up and the designer gets another upgrade. lol
It’s just reality. There WILL always be a need for the professional designers you identify. Unfortunately, I think the market who will actually be willing to PAY and reward these designers is shrinking rapidly. And I mean that from both a customer and POD service standpoint.
Hope this makes more sense. In no way was I discounting the value of any designer or creator.
Maybe, but that is quickly changing. There are now AI platforms that can spit out fully formed designs - ads, invitations, etc. with formatted text as well as artwork. I think it’s only a matter of time until Zazzle has that technology - no need for artists, designers, fonts, etc. That being said, people often don’t know exactly what they want until they see it, and I think there will always be customers who would rather have something designed by hand, but any way you slice it I think the role of the designer is going to be greatly changed in the not-too-distant future.
The other thing I wonder about, and admittedly haven’t looked at myself, is how established the items ranking high with higher prices (royalties) are. We know that past sales figure greatly into marketplace ranking. It could be that a higher royalty downgrades an item, but that sales are weighted more, allowing these established designs with a history of great sales numbers to stay at the top.
It’s unfortunate, but without transparency on the ranking system for marketplace placement, we are truly just guessing.
I was just going to do a quick test search but one interesting thing led to another and whelp, here I am with more observations then people probably want to read. …
I picked a double-sided luggage tag of mine created Nov 2024, that is set to 21.5% Royalty and has not ever sold.
I searched for three keywords + luggage tag and then used the category filter to narrow it to just actual luggage tags. That gave my 203 results, all of which were actual luggage tags.
My item turned up in the 16th spot. So then I started looking at the other top 20 results .. why is an item with a higher-than-average royalty, that’s never sold, in the top 20?
Here’s a breakdown of the top 20 results. The prices shown are the list-price.
(The five X’s are results published as single-sided w/ card slot type which are higher priced to begin with, so I couldn’t include them.)
All Pro levels are represented here and the Royalties range from 10% to 25%, $13.95 to $16.70 list price. I obviously can’t know the stats of the other 14 results here, but I know mine. So I am scratching my head, why is a never-sold item with a higher than average royalty/price (third highest of these results) from just a Bronze level at zRank 6 placing in the top 20? So then I looked at creation dates, which range from 2014! to 2024. Mine created nine months ago is the newest on the list. These other by higher level designers that have been on the market for years, surely they have tons of sales and views. So why am I in these results??? I was stumped until I realized - mine has a custom cover image. The #1 result also has a custom cover image (w/ covers noted in red). None of the others do. So then I scrolled through the rest of the 203 results to check and only five of them had cover images. So bingo - that’s got to be it. Having a cover outweighed my royalty %, pro level, zRank and sales (none) status. I could be wrong but I don’t see any other way to explain why my product ends up in the top 20 here.
The cover thing is a bit of a side tangent, but if we ignore that factor, we still have a Silver at 19% royalty placing better than both a Diamond and Platinum at only 10% royalty. I could totally be wrong, I don’t know what Zazzle’s secret sauce is for search results, but I feel very strongly that a higher royalty % doesn’t keep one down.
@DancingPelican One of yours was the #10 on that list, which also happens to be the oldest, created July 2014. It doesn’t have a cover and the product page says it’s been viewed 65 times. (I can’t believe that could be correct for a 10 yr old product). Mine at #16 shows only 31 views, so just half as many. If I PM you the particular product, would you be willing to share how many times it’s sold to place another piece of the puzzle?
The marketing fee is paid to the referrer and is used to offset the total 15% payment Z makes to the referrer. If we straight had to pay the 15% it would end up being more loss for us (35-50% of our royalty will be less than 15% of the sale). Naming the carve out / offset a “marketing fee” made this all very confusing.
And I agree that we should get the % royalty we ask for. The base price of the product should increase to cover the difference.
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