with the way things are now I dont list new art anymore as a matter of fact I removed alot of it because I’m not gonna let Zazzle make a huge profit off my art when I make pennies its Rediculous! NOw that they take more the least they could do is at least let us buy our own stuff at a discount! Ive been printing out my own designs and selling them and making more money than i make here. The earnings here are an insult!!! After I get my next payout Im probably going to remove everything and just do it all myself. I only used Zazzle cause I liked the convenience of not having to print my own stuff and ship it out but now its just not worth it for a few cents!
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I feel your pain. One way you can get a discount when you’re buying your own products is to purchase your items in a way that allows you to receive a referral fee in addition to your royalty.
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It seems like designers on Zazzle have fallen on hard times, don’t know how many but the new royalties hit everyone. Hang in there, we are all in the same boat. 
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I’ve definitely already seen my best days at Zazzle. It’s just the way it is, and in a few years - maybe less, who knows, they certainly wouldn’t share it with us at this point - they’ll have AI installed into their system and it’ll be over for all of us. I don’t think there’s any “hang in there” now. I still like to design stuff, and still get sales, so I’ll keep at it, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s all winding down.
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@chefcateringbiz
Yes, I am afraid you’re right.
Worse: with our asking AI for help, we’re training it to take over from us …
Another worry about this is that AI is using all energy and water, and communities are already being denied access to those basic necessities. That needs to be resolved.
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It isn’t “almost” not worth it - it is DEFINITELY not worth it anymore. I used to make a few hundred every month…now make maybe 10 bucks. I might just hide my items and use Zazzle as an image hosting site. Not to mention, it competes with my own Etsy shop, Greeting Card Universe, and the other print on demand sites. It’s sad really, I used to LOVE Zazzle - the way we could create our own royalties, different products than other sites, better design interface than other PODs etc. At this point they are basically stealing from their designers - of course since we are abiding by their contractual agreement, technically they aren’t actually stealing, but it’s so unethical to have us set our royalty to 10% then only give 5%. The only things that sell for me now are postcards and cards and they might bring in 5 - 7 cents - it isn’t worth it at all - and I’m not selling many. I tried upping my royalty but it only ends up too expensive for the consumer. I asked Google AI if Zazzle is huring these days and apparently they aren’t hurting at all - from Google AI - (it could easily be wrong) “Financial data intelligence firms like(data intelligence firms) Similarweb and Gripsintelligence place Zazzle’s annual revenue between $400 million and $500 million.” and " The Projected Net Profit: If Zazzle aligns with these healthy e-commerce benchmarks, its prospective net profit after all expenses is likely in the ballpark of $20 million to $50 million annually." This is surprising to me, but again, it could be totally wrong. I know times change and AI has taken over the arts. Thankfully I don’t have to rely on my art revenue to live but some artist friends do and they are not doing well.
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Couldn’t agree more, @robmolily
And you are stating the numbers BEFORE tax and not counting the costs we have to create anything.
You don’t have to set your royalty at 10%, but no sales is no sales, so that wouldn’t make any difference.
I’ve also been thinking about not linking anything to Zazzle any more, but at this point it would only hurt my own business (not that it makes a difference). I just keep my own site for now, but don’t pin anything any more because of Zazzle’s lack of ethical principles and the waste of time.
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Sad, I keep on designing everyday but not making money at all.
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I’ve been with Zazzle for over 5 years and enjoyed the opportunity to display my artworks at Zazzle. Even though I didn’t get a lot of sales, if I did get a sale, it was a decent sale, and I was excited each time. I get even less sales now, and I no longer get excited if I do, because Zazzle takes half of my royalties. For this reason, I rarely design anything at Zazzle anymore, and have devoted more time on displaying my artwork at other POD sites, where I may also not make much money, but I also don’t have to spent much time on designing, creating cover pages, and mock-ups.
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I know AI can do great things and I have seen some amazing pictures created via AI. However, I think that hand paintings and drawings will still be favored by some, as AI created images look too “plastic.”
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A lot of us have felt the impact of the changes, but I want to share a different perspective based on running both a downtown gift shop and my Zazzle store.
When I owned my freestanding shop, I learned quickly that you can’t just unlock the door and expect customers to walk in. You have to drive your own traffic. Online is no different. Years ago, you could list products on Zazzle and the marketplace would eventually bring shoppers to you. Those days are gone. If you want sales now, you have to promote consistently. Visibility doesn’t happen by accident.
On the fee issue I know it feels confusing, but Zazzle isn’t “stealing” royalties. The marketing fee is over a year old and the excess royalty fee have been part of the contract for years. The marketing fee is taken from your royalty, not added on top of the sale. And we’ve always paid an excess royalty fee when we set royalties above 14.9%, long before April 2025. The new marketing fee is higher than we’d like, but every POD platform has added fees. It’s not unique to Zazzle it’s the direction the whole industry has gone.
Another thing I’ve learned, both offline and online, is that you have to create what your customers actually want. I love flowers and cats, but that’s not where my customer base is. My customers love birthday cards, so that’s what I create. Knowing your audience and pricing your products in line with the marketplace makes a huge difference. Even small royalties add up when you’re making steady sales.
As for Zazzle’s revenue yes, the company may be doing fine. That doesn’t automatically mean every shop will thrive without adapting. Every business evolves. Etsy changed. POD changed. AI changed the landscape. That doesn’t mean Zazzle is “not worth it.” It means we have to adjust our strategy, just like any business owner would.
I know every shop is different, but I don’t believe the answer is to hide your products or walk away. Many of us are still doing well by staying competitive, promoting consistently, and creating for the customers we actually have. Summer is always slower, less sales, but that’s when I work ahead for fall and winter. Throwing in the towel when things get tough has never led to long‑term success, online or offline.
I’d hate to see talented designers close their shops based on discouragement. There are still opportunities here but like any business, it takes adjusting, promoting, and creating more of what sells in your store. @Anne @Veselka_Store
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AI is not the villain here. It didn’t ruin Zazzle, and it didn’t ruin our sales. AI is here, it’s not going anywhere, and if you learn how to work with it, it can actually help you grow. It’s a tool just like a camera, Photoshop, or a paintbrush and it can teach you a lot if you let it.
AI can help you understand SEO, what’s trending, what shoppers are buying, and how to write titles, descriptions, and tags that customers can actually find. Google just updated their search system again, and AI can help you stay current and modernize your store so you don’t fall behind.
And as for the AI art tools they’re absolutely amazing when you learn how to prompt them the right way. I’m a wildlife photographer and a painter, and I still have my traditional work in my store, but that’s not what’s selling right now. My AI watercolor products are selling because I learned how to prompt for brush strokes, bleed, texture, and the look customers love. They’re buying it because it’s beautiful and it fits what today’s shoppers want.
AI didn’t take anything away from us. It opened a new door but you have to be willing to walk through it, evolve with it, and learn how to use it to your advantage.
We can’t stop the industry from changing, but we can choose to adapt with it. AI isn’t the enemy it’s a tool. And when you learn how to work with it, it can actually help you grow.
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I don’t see AI “taking over” anything. The real issue isn’t AI it’s the massive data harvesting humans created. Surveillance capitalism, corporations hoarding global data, governments building enormous data centers, and the obsession with tracking every click and behavior… that’s all human‑driven. Those data centers use huge amounts of electricity and water because people decided to store everything forever instead of deleting data the way we clear cookies and browser history. AI isn’t demanding any of that. It doesn’t act on its own, it doesn’t start my day, and it doesn’t create anything unless I ask it to. The problem isn’t AI it’s humans choosing to collect and keep every piece of data for power and control
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All these new data centers being built are not because “people decided to store everything forever instead of deleting data”. We have had plenty of data centers for the cloud, streaming services, business software and gaming. For someone that uses AI as much as you have you should know this isn’t about storing data at all. These new data centers are for running computations that take thousands of watts per machine with hundreds and thousands of machines in one center. They have specialized networking, extremely high-powered electric systems with liquid cooling. This is why people are infuriated about the water usage and how their energy rates are through the roof.
Training modern AI models requires enormous amounts of computing power. A large AI model may be trained on tens of thousands of specialized GPUs. Those GPUs consume massive amounts of electricity. They generate huge amounts of heat, requiring advanced cooling systems. Training can take weeks or months continuously. A single AI-focused data center can require as much electricity as a small city.
People focus on training AI, but actually running AI for users could require even MORE infrastructure. Every time someone uses ChatGPT, generates an image, creates a video, uses an AI coding assistant runs an AI agent (like Zee), servers are performing billions or trillions of calculations. Using more water, using more power.
If hundreds of millions of people use AI daily, companies need enormous fleets of computers available 24/7. You are right about its not an AI problem and that its human. Humans are greedy. From the average tech savvy person trying to make a quick buck with AI because it’s easier than their day job all the way up to CEOs and board Executives trying to buy a 3rd or 4th house so they dump as much business funds into AI as their company will allow.
There is no nice way to say this but there is no ethical way for AI data centers to be built or ran. Even if you use solar, wind or hydro-electric, that’s only one half of the issue. Using our precious limited drinking water is something I have a bigger issue with since people around the globe are still dying from dehydration every day. That is why I personally refuse to be a contributor no matter how tempting it may be. My biggest ask is just people be informed, if companies are trying to build a center near you locally, do everything you can to protest it because once its built, there’s no going back.
The only option I see for these companies to do things even “semi” right, would be to pull water straight from the ocean and use desalination to make it safe to cool their centers. But desalination is expensive and they won’t do that unless they have to. They have billions of dollars to throw at new infrastructure and computing power, but they won’t spend even a percentage of that money to do things “right” by the people to have as little impact on them as possible.
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For me the water problem in cooling is here just because they are offered drinking water freely or at a very low cost and then don’t see the need to recycle it. The nuclear power plants we have here use the water in closed circuit for the cooling of reactors, the water is retreated and recycled over and over again, in order to avoid pumping more and rejecting hot waters in natural rivers that would change the ecosystem, so I really don’t see why this system couldn’t be applied to data centers, except that such a system is expensive .
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I’m not confused about what AI training requires. I’m talking about something bigger and older than GPUs, and something I’m dealing with firsthand because I’m actively fighting a data center being built in my own city. So you’re preaching to the choir.
The point I made and I’ll restate it clearly is that the explosion of data centers didn’t start with AI. It started when companies decided that every click, movement, purchase, and behavior should be collected and stored indefinitely. That’s the foundation everything else sits on. AI compute is built on top of that system, not separate from it.
If companies weren’t hoarding global data at the scale they do now, the physical footprint of these centers would be dramatically smaller. The water usage, the electrical load, the nonstop expansion all of that comes from the decision to keep everything forever. That’s a human choice, not an AI demand.
So no, I’m not misunderstanding anything. I’m pointing out the part of the problem that existed long before the current wave of AI hype and will continue long after it unless people stop treating endless data retention as normal.
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@Susang6 Thanks for the advice Susan. Me too I’d hate to give up, I love designing too much and what’s the point of closing my store, I say let it be.
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I hear you. I haven’t been motivated at all to create anything new since we were all forced onto the 5% royalty thing. Just not worth my time or effort anymore. While none of the POD sites are perfect, there are others that I think I’ll focus on instead for a while rather than feel my time here is just wasted. I honestly do wonder though, if Zazzle will make more $ for themselves in the long run (even though they’re getting even more earnings from us now with the forced royalty changes) because surely there must be other artists who feel the same way and will jump ship - if they haven’t already. Classic case of killing the golden goose IMO. 😑
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Same… I have just done some sums and my income has now reduced to quarter of what I was earning before the changes! I am actually posting and creating at the same pace, certainly promoting more, and my only difference is I have been forced to up my hours in my other job to help with the short fall of income. So working more hours overall… I am knackered! The cost of living is crazy here now in Australia too and exchange shocking. It is so sad, as I was slowly making progress on here selling for over 12 years and working at hard my Zazzle stores every single day. Now gone so far backwards, I sadly just don’t see a way I can ever recover from this. I still love designing on Zazzle (after doing it daily for 12 years it is a part of my life!) so hard to just give up on it ;( but I need to face facts soon as this is no longer a real income source anymore just pocket money and will need to quickly refocus my time elsewhere to keep my family afloat! I am glad Zazzle are able to keep going but I am not sure how much longer I can. I started Zazzle to showcase my hand painted artwork, I have shifted into my graphic work but even that isn’t helping. I need to get more self referrals I have had some but I just can’t seem get enough, and I am getting further and further away from my painting… and any hope of retirement. I hope this isn’t the end for me. But I have to be realistic sadly. I am sad to see I am not alone. 
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That is at least a good point 