I’ve seen a few other designers bring this up in various threads and I just want to echo the suggestion and expand on it a bit because I think it could really help a lot of us who do custom work or promote our shops outside of Zazzle.
Right now, if a client types the product name into the Zazzle search bar or gets pulled in by an unrelated affiliate link, we risk losing the referral even if we were the ones who created the product specifically for them.
Here’s what I’m proposing:
Give us the option to tag certain products as Direct Only in our dashboards. If that product sells, it would be treated as a self-referral no matter what referral cookie is present.
How It Could Work:
There could be a simple toggle or tag such as
• Custom Design Work Only
• External Promotion Only
This would signal that the product was created for a client or promoted directly by the designer and Zazzle would bypass any affiliate override.
Why This Matters:
It protects our earnings in cases where
• We’re working one-on-one with a customer
• They return and search for the item instead of clicking a direct link
• A last-minute affiliate cookie takes credit for the sale
If Zazzle can track and reward affiliates, it can also track and credit designers who bring in their own sales through hard work and personal outreach.
Several designers have pointed out the need for something like this and I think it’s time to bring the idea forward again.
Would love to hear others’ thoughts especially if you’ve run into this same issue with your custom or direct clients.
I’m not sure I understand your suggestion. The current system already allows for a product to be published as direct only where the only way to reach the product is through a link. If people could search for these products, that would make them available to the public and they would no longer be direct only. What am I missing?
Any way you slice it, I think it’s a moot point unless Zazzle decides to make direct only products self referrals, and I haven’t seen any indication that they’re open to that idea.
Thanks for your reply. You’re right that we can already publish a product as Direct Only in the visibility settings, which hides it from public search. But what I’m suggesting is a little different.
The idea is to give designers a way to tag a product as “Direct Only” for referral purposes, not just visibility.
This would protect the designers who are doing custom work and actively sending people to Zazzle but still losing credit when customers return through other paths. Right now, if a client types the product name into the search bar or ends up with an affiliate cookie, the designer can lose the referral even if they were the one who brought the customer in.
I completely agree with your last point. This only matters if Zazzle decides to recognize self-referral as a protected status for these cases. But if enough of us share how this affects our work and income, maybe they’ll see the value in making that change.
I’m confused too, but I know that if I produced a one-off design and a private link for a customer I brought in - I would want that to be protected from being gazumped by another cookie.
How It Could Work:
Why This Matters: