Does anyone know how often the Z-rank is re-evaluated?
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It’s pretty much immediate, based on my experience. Or at least for some changes you might make. The sales component of your ranking would take longer I expect.
I say this as after bumping up my royalty rate to 14.5% (to compensate for the VAT and third party referral fees), and I immediately lost a rank on my main store.
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Thank you for the response MadjackGG. That’s an interesting observation. When reading the Z-ranking information Zazzle provides, they don’t mention anything about royalty fees impacting the ranking. Since Z-ranking impacts a shops placement/standing on the site, do you recommend staying at the 5% until sales increase? If you don’t mind me asking, at what point in your journey did you increase your royalty rate and did it impact your sales?
Z-Rank is updated occasionally and on no known schedule (not known to shopkeepers, I mean). People report that they changed this or dropped that, or altered this and then Z-Rank dropped or rose right away. I tend to think that is complete coincidence. It happens when it happens.
As for Z-Rate and Royalty, I see very highly ranking stores which sell products most of their products with a 25 percent royalty.
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I don’t think the price seen by the customer is going to be affected much by increasing your royalty rate. It also doesn’t seem to be a major component of the z rank, although upping your rate will likely see you lose a point. Instead, I found having a well stocked and well organized shop that focuses on easy browsing for the customer and doesn’t have products that need refreshing/deletion, had the biggest impact on Z rank and sales.
But to answer your question, I upped my default royalty rate when I saw that many of my sales weren’t returning 12% royalties. Instead I was getting 8-9% because of Zazzle’s flat VAT rate and third party referral fees. I didn’t notice a drop-off in sales after raising my default royalty rate.
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Very helpful! Thank you Windy.
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Thanks again MadjackGG! Appreciate your responses.
In case you don’t already know this, Zazzle automatically deducts 5% of royalty set above 14.9%.
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I did not pick up on that and was not aware. I went ahead and changed my royalty settings. Thank you WBartworks!
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