According to my Royalties total cleared, I have more than $25,000 now. So I wrote and asked why am I not upped to “Silver” from Bronze. This is what I got as a reply:
“Only USD on .com count towards Pro Level. You would need to download the CSV file and count all the earnings made in USD and that are cleared.”
Since when does the store owner have to go through years of sales and add up the USD? That never happened when I went from PRO to BRONZE. The total royalties cleared in the green are USD from what I understood.
And, doesn’t Zazzle keep track of the USD royalties from the foreign royalties for tax purposes?
Have any of you had to add up your own USD royalties in order to go up in rank? I mean, even if you did, who would you turn that in to and would they even bother to validate it? This seems like a cop out to me. I’ve got to add up all my royalties for them!
The message to me is that they’re not even bothering to monitor this so they can raise store ranks when the amount is earned.
It isn’t that you are responsible for adding up your USD royalties and then reporting that to Zazzle before you go up a level. Rather, it’s that you won’t truly know how close you are to going up unless you do that sorting. You don’t have to report that to anyone (as you didn’t for Bronze) but you can think you have made 25K$ USD when (hypothetically) you’ve only made 24K$ USD and the other 1K$ are other currencies so you’d have to get to 26K$.
The green cleared column is all currencies cleared, not just USD. Look at the green column in your royalty history and you will (likely) see other currencies. My green column in royalty history has plenty of euros.
I did it in Excel. It’s a pain in the neck but it’s the only way to know how close you truly are.
Off topic: I went to your store (because I always go to people’s stores because I’m nosy like that) and it looks like you’ve carved out a niche for linemen and ham radio operators, among a few other underserved niches. That’s awesome! No wonder you have done so well. I think serving the underserved niche is a great path to success. I wish new designers who are demoralized that they have few views/sales could see that and realize their own lives and the lives of those around them can be a source of design inspiration and there’s no need to adhere to what’s on the 1st page of a department. I have made many sales of my microbiology designs because that’s a niche I know well. Everybody has multiple niches they could design for and I wish more new designers could see that when they get demoralized because their very cute baby shower invitations are invisible and outranked by 10K other cute baby shower invitations.
I hate spreadsheets, etc. Anyway, I just added up all the “cleared” USD sales. I did not count the pending or the cancelled USD sales. The total still comes to more than $25,000 :grin: So, I guess I write customer service and tell them this wondrous news. I won’t live long enough to reach Gold status unfortunately, so I have to embrace my Silver-ness.
Sara, I wish you tons of luck. I’m sure you’ll make it, especially since Christmas is coming. That’s my biggest sales time so I’m sure it’s also yours.
Well, I just added it all up and it’s more than $25,000 USD. I did not count pending or cancelled USD. So, I should be seeing Silver soon according to my calculations. Thanks for letting me know I had to do this.
Thanks Scott. It confused me that I had to find the number and turn it in. Well, I know I’m over $25,000 so I guess it’s just a matter of waiting. But, waiting isn’t my greatest skill.
There’s nothing terribly exciting about getting to silver, in any case. You get access to another forum where we don’t really talk about anything more than what everybody else is talking about. There are no “benefits” outside of that. The real excitement for anyone would be how much of those earnings have been tucked away for the future. After you get to silver, they’ve eliminated the gold category for lack of interest or whatever the reason, so if you’re young enough and you hang around for another 10-20 years you can get to platinum. I’ll be dead before getting there.
I see the GOLD on the page. It’s $100,000. So you have to go from $25,000 to $100,000 in order to go up. Then PLATINUM is $250,000. My store isn’t that phenomenal in sales and I doubt I’ll live long enough to get to GOLD. But I don’t sell popular items like wedding stuff, etc. My store is a niche. So, it’ll take some unforeseen miracle for me to ever hit PLATINUM. Congrats to those that have.
I should’ve been gold a while back. Can’t remember who it was that also should’ve jumped to gold but… nothing also. In any case, I imagine there would be a new, amazing forum just like this one where we talk about the same stuff everybody else talks about. It took me since 2009 to get to that $100K, can’t imagine patience instead of marketing savvy is anything to brag about. Why should Zazzle take me seriously when I have an issue or an idea? I get paid, that’s why I’m here.
My gold designation showed up right on schedule. I got an email and my Pro Gold badge flipped on the same day. It was quite a bit over $100,000 overall, but as soon as I reached $100,000US it happened. I smile with the notion of making $250,000US. This is the motivation more than seeing the Pro Platinum badge on my profile page.
Just an update. I just wanted clarify about the earnings for these store colors of Bronze, Silver and Gold requirements actually being applied whether paid by check or PayPal.
After a few problems with lost checks, by July I went from being paid by Zazzle via a check to being paid via Paypal. This is how I discovered something.
Last week I got my PayPal 1099, which covers from July to December. Today I received my Zazzle 1099 which covers only the check payments from January to June. Together they equal my total Zazzle earnings for 2022 for my taxes. QUESTION: Since Zazzle’s 1099 only was for 6 months of earnings via check, is that’s all that’s applied to my store to qualify for going up to Silver? Or do earnings sent to Pay Pal also get applied to my store’s earnings account to qualify my store to go up to Silver? It hasn’t changed yet and I’m so baffled on this. And, now that I see Zazzle only crediting me 50% of my annual earnings on the 1099 (check payments directly to me), I thought I’d ask. Thanks.
Anyway, I just added up all the “cleared” USD sales. I did not count the pending or the cancelled USD sales. The total still comes to more than $25,000 :grin: So, I guess I write customer service and tell them this wondrous news. I won’t live long enough to reach Gold status unfortunately, so I have to embrace my Silver-ness. 
I wonder how many platinum members there are?