Straight to the harsh idea, I believe Zazzle has lied to us.
Zazzle states: “When you share Products you create, you’ll earn 35–50% of the sale”
It looks like I made %5.9 on sales. Not even the 10% i have set on the product.
I had a suspicion that referral links are not working correctly. I found my way to this forum in search of this “Marketing royalty fee” and it seems as though others are coming to the same conclusion.
I had about zero views on products until I started promoting them on pinterest, where I then started driving more traffic. I looked at stats from zazzle and it says my links are bringing in traffic. But i’m supposed to believe the purchases are from 3rd party referal? I saw someone else say that since April, they have not once seen NOT seen 3rd party sales listed on their sales.
I dont think our referral links are working correctly, and I want to see zazzle fix this problem. And until they address the issue, I have no other reason to believe my first statement is incorrect, and I think that we are driving traffic to the site, putting all the work for them, and giving us pennies.
Do I hike up the royalty percentage to %60? Do I make another account and start doing referrals to get the 15%?
How do we get them to fix the issue? Do we do this mass campaign to all put in complaints? Zazzle needs to know this is not okay.
I completely understand why this feels like Zazzle changed the rules on us the shift has been rough for a lot of creators. But Zazzle did notify all of us last year that the Marketing Royalty Fee and the Excess Royalty Fee would begin on April 1, 2025, and that every creator would be moved into the Ambassador program. We had until April 1 to accept the new terms
For many of us, walking away wasn’t realistic. We’ve spent years building large, high‑quality inventories and promoting daily, so most creators accepted the new structure and hoped the Ambassador program would balance things out.
What caught people off guard wasn’t the fees themselves it was what happened after April 1. A lot of creators who used to earn steady referrals and monthly bonuses suddenly saw their conversions shift to “third‑party” with fees deducted. My own referrals stopped completely, even though my traffic didn’t change.
So the frustration isn’t coming from a lack of disclosure. It’s coming from the way attribution has behaved since April. That’s the part many of us want Zazzle to review and clarify, because it directly affects earnings for creators who promote consistently.
If the person who clicked your link and bought your designs already had an active and recent referral cookie by someone else (which isn’t that improbable), you don’t get the referral.
I’d argue that isn’t fair. If Designer A promotes their own work, a customer clicks the link, and ends up buying one of Designer A’s designs, then it shouldn’t matter whose cookie came first. Designer A made the customer return to the site. Designer A’s work is what they chose to buy. Designer A should get that referral, imo. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’ll ever work that way. Therefore, no matter how much you promote, you might still not get any referrals. It depends entirely on the customer’s online behavior before they clicked your link.
And you don’t need to make another account to start doing referrals. So long as you use your Ambassador ID when sharing links, you’re eligible for the referral. Whether or not you get it, however, is a different matter. For the same reason as above.
The only thing that’s certain is that, so long as you promote, you at least have a chance to get a referral. And people do get them and I do believe the changes made it easier to track at least clean self-referral links, because I went from a few self referrals a year tops to several a month over night. So, no, I don’t think Zazzle’s lying. There’s simply no guarantee that you’ll get the referral because of how the cookies work. At least that’s how I understand it.