Hi everyone! I just read Zazzle’s news post about locking in our royalty rates for the upcoming holiday season.
For those of you who mainly sell invitations and stationery/paper products, what royalty rate do you think is best to set for the holiday season?
Would you recommend staying around 10%, 12%, 14%, or higher?
I’d especially love to hear from sellers who have a good amount of experience with invitations and stationery. What rate has worked best for you? 
I have no personal experience to share as I’m not a top seller and don’t generally do stationery products, but I do want to remind about sales which have always been plentiful through the holiday season and sometimes offer quite steep discounts. Right now for example many types of stationery including “holiday cards” and “greeting cards” are 60% off through Oct 6th for Zazzle Plus Premium members. If you’re at 10% and it comes in as 3rdParty sale you’re only making about 5%. Add a 60% off discount and you’re making less than 2% of the list-price shown in the royalty calculator. For a folded 5x7 holiday card you’d be making only $0.06 per card. You’d have to sell roughly 835 cards just to meet the payment threshold of $50 for the month.
Let those numbers sink in before making any decisions you’ll be stuck with for the entire 3-month holiday period.
Thanks for sharing this! For those who mainly sell invitations and stationery/paper products, what royalty rate would you recommend setting for the upcoming holiday season?
I’m looking to increase my royalty rate this year and would really appreciate hearing from experienced invitation/stationery sellers.
Would you recommend 15% or higher during the holiday season, considering the discounts Zazzle typically runs?
I would also like to know what rate successful invitation and stationery designers use. It is so discouraging to make only $.06 per card. If I raise my royalty rate significantly, will it decrease my sales? Or would it make my cards seem more valuable?
Idk if I’m successful because I’m only a gold seller after being here since 2009-ish. I raised mine from 10% to 15% in July. It helped because it basically made it 7.5% of the sale. I think I did bump it up to 20% once last year temporarily. I got scared that my products wouldn’t be seen, so I put it back down. The individual royalties I did get during that time were nice, though! It’s really hard to pinpoint the effect of raising/lowering because of event seasonality/timing. If we could somehow get every single one of us to raise our royalty to 20% or some set number, there wouldn’t be any change in visibility for any of us (except against Zazzle’s own store, I suppose). Should we start a petition? Haha
I’m keeping mine at 15%
When I first started on Zazzle, I had everything set at 10% and was barely making any sales. Then I raised my royalty to 14.99% (just below the old 15% threshold to avoid the excess royalty fee) and boom! Sales started picking up. I haven’t changed it in two years, and with everything that’s been going on lately, I’m honestly afraid to mess with it 
I did pretty well during last year’s holiday season with that rate, so I think I’ll stick with it.
I actually love the idea of everyone agreeing on the same royalty rate, although I’m not sure how legal that would be. Here in Europe, that might be considered price fixing, and competition authorities aren’t exactly fans of that 
But getting back to the 15% rate, I think it’s pretty reasonable in today’s market. To be honest, I don’t really pay much attention to other sellers’ prices on Zazzle. Some may be higher, others lower. I focus more on businesses that compete with Zazzle itself and what prices look like across the market in general. I try to keep my prices within a similar range, and while mine are sometimes a little higher, my products still sell (except, of course, since August, when many sellers started experiencing a general decline in sales). So for me personally, 15% is enough for now.
