I totally agree!
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@ColsCreations But those Cross-over links will then count as 3rd Party, so you’ll be losing up to half of your royalty to the Marketing Fee.
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I just sent Zazzle a follow up question about the Referral Cookies through the form, but I’ll also post it here:
Follow-up Question about Referral cookies, PLEASE! If a customer CLEARS THEIR COOKIES and THEN clicks on a CLEAN LINK direct from US, will we get the self-referral, regardless of whether they had any previous cookies in the last 45 days? In other words, is that original 45 day cookie somehow tied to their ACCOUNT itself rather than their device, so that even if they clear their cookies and use a private browser, a clean link will still show up as 3rd Party?
This sounds like they have the 45 day cookies tied to the account itself, rather than the device:
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Oh wow… That’s an excellent point. I didn’t think of that!
But Etsy doesn’t have a way to post templates where the customer can fill in their own information. You’d have to make a Canva template, then send that, but it would mean the customer would have to purchase first before seeing what their information would look like on the invitation.
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That’s fair and thank you for that example, I truly didn’t think of that! However I think that is a practice most common with wedding invitations and occasionally graduation invitations, and is not a regular occurrence for many users. What about the other 1000 products on the website? Many of Zazzle’s users are likely not members to get free shipping and are not ordering samples and paying shipping for 1 invitation. And only on invitations, thank you notes and inserts are they *typically* ever ordering samples.
Let’s take your same example and flip it a little. A customer orders your sample invitation they found from Pinterest, but decides they do not like it. They continue looking on pinterest, and click on my invitation. They decide to go with mine. They purchase an order of 300 invitations, and inserts to match…and you get the referal sale? That’s not very fair either. You could have no sale or sample order from the customer that clicked your link, and you would still get hundreds of dollars off a link I promoted. There’s no perfect system but I do believe that in 90+% of cases, the customer is most likely purchasing from the most recently clicked link. Again in wedding invitations this percent would be completely different. But not all of us are focused on wedding invitations.
I feel like I basically have to get lucky enough to get a customer that has never clicked a Zazzle link from Pinterest in 14 days to even have a chance at a fair compensation for my design Nomatter how hard I promote…if they even looked at another sellers graduation invitations first… I’m out of luck! 
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Yeah, but the Marketing Fee applies to ANY referred sale. It’s just that with a “Self-Promotion” link where you are the referrer, it doesn’t really matter because your total earnings will still always be that 35-50% of order. But this earnings cap (“earnings goal” as referred to in the FAQs) only applies to Self-Promotion links. That is not a loop-hole, that is how Zazzle has structured this. So you can potentially earn more with a flat 15% Cross-Over referral + high royalty, even after the fee, then you could with a SP link that’s subject to the earnings cap.
Here’s an Instant Download that sells for $10 at a royalty rate of 91.5%. (Downloads are in the 50% category.)
Obviously, the most desirable situation is a ref=None sale where you’re going to net 86.9% of the sale.
If it’s a Cross-Over sale, your net is 56.2%.
If it’s a SP sale, your net is 45.4%, $1.08 less. This because you’re capped at 50% and when you add the transaction fee back in, that’s exactly what it comes to - $5/50%.
Here’s another example where I’ve raised the royalty to 94.3% to make the sale price $14.95.
In this example you’re making 45.2% on a SP sale. (Which again, when you add the trans fee back in comes to 50% of the total sale.)
But with a Cross-Over sale, you’re making 57.4%. $1.82 more.
This principle applies to any product, not just downloads. It’s just that downloads are the only thing we can set such a high royalty on and still have the cost to customer be reasonable. For a mens tie for example, I had to go up to a 41.7% royalty for the total cross-over earnings to surpass total SP earnings. Which put the tie at $50 -yikes!!!
I am not recommending people set their royalties this high on normal products, just trying to show that in the unique situation of Instant Downloads, cross-over links are more profitable as they’re not subject to the earnings cap.
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Or… someone sees your invitation on Pinterest, they click on your clean link & start customizing. They need help, so you work with them a bit and they order a sample. You get the self-referral on the sample, Woo Hoo!
Of course, now they’re a Zazzle customer and Zazzle starts sending them all sorts of emails. So, it’s now been more than 14 days since they clicked on your link. They need a bit more help after receiving the sample, you work with them more. Now they place the big order and, whoopsie, they now have a Zazzle cookie in their system so not only do you not get the referral, you also only get half of your royalty!
This exact scenario happened to me last week. My solution is that until Zazzle comes up with some system to compensate us for helping customers, I’m just not going to do it anymore. It simply isn’t worth it. With all the back & forth time that it takes to get everything right for them, there’s only a tiny chance that it won’t come up as 3rd party. It’s like the more time you invest in helping someone, the more likely it is that the sale comes through as 3rd party, so even raising your royalty doesn’t help much in this scenario.
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Your scenario just feels sooo much less likely than mine, I am sorry. But again I do appreciate you posting but I could not think of any scenarios in the moment in which I would want that to be the case 
I have 1-2 customers reach out a month, and it’s typically in regards to the actual product and I need to direct them to customer service instead. Your situations are very dependent and sound like a very specific wedding customer, as they reach out and order samples quite a bit more.
But I just don’t think the average customer reaches out. In other forums many sellers also mention rarely getting messages so I think it is *VERY* dependent on the event & product. Where as I am talking about in general. My situation is statistically much likelier to happen on a daily basis, even to you, SO much more than the scenario you are mentioning.
I am not just talking about other ambassadors getting the sale when it’s not warranted. Remember, it appears it will now be Zazzle getting those referral links off their ads and new marketing tactics. Ads and marketing they are charging us for in every single sale as a “marketing royalty fee”. They will be profiting the most off this 14 day first click system. Not us.
*so sorry for so many edits, I mis-read your post, responded incorrectly and wanted to update. Then had to edit 5 more times for grammar and errors I found. It’s late, I should go to bed 
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No worries. My point (other than to whine and complain about my recent experience 😋) was mostly just that I don’t have much confidence in this referral system to reward the correct person. Actually, with all these different scenarios, it’s kinda hard to determine who the “correct” person to reward would be! It all feels very chaotic to me with sooo many different referrers (including Zazzle itself) vying for the referral, and everyone feeling like they have the more legitimate claim.
I totally get it that Zazzle has to come up with a system that is manageable on their end, and that “works” in the majority of cases. I’m just having a hard time trying to figure out how my situation fits in with this new system and where I should or shouldn’t invest my energies. It all seems pretty hit & miss to me.
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YES!! I think something we can all agree on is that there must be a better system in place, at the bare minimum one we don’t have to do 5 steps of math to figure out. And one where the 3rd party is never Zazzle, atleast while we are being charged every transaction for their marketing. If marketing & costs were increasing as they stated… then you raise the product prices and take the difference. You don’t take your marketing costs from your artists.
If they can’t manage this, maybe they need a system similar to Etsy’s. Although I do not love their promotion tools 100% either…If Zazzle wants to take a portion for marketing my items (be it on Pinterest or via emails like abandoned cart), then there should be an option for me to opt in and out of that. I feel like I am actually competing with Zazzle more than other artists and their designs 
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I agree that the whole structure of this system sets things up to be adversarial rather than cooperative, and I think that’s unfortunate. I know there’s a limited amount of money that comes in with each sale, and you have to come up with some method for divvying it up between, creators, referrers, Zazzle, etc., so there’s always gonna be someone who feels like they’re getting shortchanged. But honestly, this system really seems like it goes out of its way to pit people against each other in a manner that is both unnecessary and unhelpful.
It almost seems like Zazzle’s not sure if they are a company that sells products and pays its artists a royalty, or if they’re a storefront app for independent creators to market their own wares. So they keep awkwardly trying to straddle the two models, and ending up with a chaotic situation where customers don’t know who they’re buying from, and “creators” feel frustrated because there’s a mismatch between who’s got responsibility and who’s got control.
But alas, it is what it is. Our only choice is to either figure out some way to adjust our approach so that it works for us, or to go elsewhere. Sigh.
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@Cat wrote:
It almost seems like Zazzle’s not sure if they are a company that sells products and pays its artists a royalty, or if they’re a storefront app for independent creators to market their own wares. So they keep awkwardly trying to straddle the two models, and ending up with a chaotic situation where customers don’t know who they’re buying from, and “creators” feel frustrated because there’s a mismatch between who’s got responsibility and who’s got control.
But alas, it is what it is. Our only choice is to either figure out some way to adjust our approach so that it works for us
I’ve also wondered about this since they started calling us creators - it seems to me that’s when the customer confusion began. Please Zazzle, change the lingo back to designers rather than creators, please.
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I don’t think the name change helped, but I think the problem is bigger than that. I think it’s a conceptual issue.
Zazzle keeps trying to put the artists up front - listing us inside of the design tool, the whole chat system, etc. It’s like they want to cash in on the homegrown, unique, independent artist, cottagecore angle. And that’s all great, fine & wonderful, but it’s also put us in a situation where they’re pushing responsibility off onto us for communicating with customers, creating promo cover images, and now marketing with the new emphasis on referrals over royalties - but responsibility only works if you’ve got control to go with it, and that isn’t exactly how things are working.
Like the chat system - it puts us in the position of fielding customer questions that we cannot answer. Or the review system - we feel like we’re held responsible for printing and shipping errors which we cannot control. And this new ambassador system in particular seems designed to push responsibility for marketing off onto us, while simultaneously giving us less control over our royalties. It’s a really bad combination, IMHO.
I don’t have all the answers here - I think it’s a complicated and somewhat awkward hybrid business model, so there isn’t really an easy way to navigate all of these issues. But wherever the “sweet spot” is, I think this ambassador program moves them further away from it.
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Yes, I can see how that would be more profitable with Instant Downloads. It’s a shame we can’t have an “Instant Download Only” option for cards, to promote them separately.
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This may be a dumb question but how do we share the whole store? It says we can share our store or collection using Zazzle’s “share” tool. Where is this “share” tool? I only see it in each product, but not for the entire store or collection.
@Echo from your store backend - “view public storefront” then press the share buttons
and with collections - you can share from the backend when you edit the collection
or from the collection’s main page
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Oh. Thanks! I appreciate you taking the time to post the images. They was super helpful.
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I have never helped a customer without requesting they delete cookies. I have been told they do not know how to do that to silence. I have yet to receive anything for special requests. All third party and a couple none, I have stopped asking and it seems like this has become the last thing I do in a day. 
I am not proud of that.
I have been adding my ?ref= code to the links of the ambassador links and I am hoping that is ok? Is that what you are talking about? I do not understand this part of designing. I learned years ago to add the referral link and never looked back. In other words did not study up on how links actually work. I remember a time when I could add another code to links to tell me which store it sold from. It is a bit much for me.