It is too bad Z doesn’t show the math (in an email to us) so we can better understand what the heck is happening.
I’ve made a free spreadsheet calculator for figuring out User Options. Info & download link here:
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Same thing just happened to me. Two big sales and I get NOTHING! This is so wrong. I should have earned $45.95.
Here is one where I did earn a royalty. The one I did not earn anything on had Parentheses. Did the customer have a credit on something they purchased from me before and returned?
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Wow, that’s probably the most extreme one we’ve seen. I would really like to work this one out but to do that I need to be able to go to the product page. If you don’t want to share it publicly you could private-message me the link via the chat box. Also need to know if it was a referred sale or referrer=None.
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It was not referred.
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I started selling on zazzle 10 years ago. I understand they nickle and dime us with the 20% 3rd party referrel fee and the 5% “transaction fee” for royalties I set over 15%. I started a new digital downloads store on zazzle last month. And for some reason zazzle ignored my royalty rate and set all the products at 94.135%. I wanted to promote the store as low cost downloads, but they cost more than my prints. I shut the store down, why waste my time! I am adding digital products to my existing shopify store. $0.00 on what should have been a $40.00 royalty has really soured me on zazzle. All these fees have added up to $1,000’s over the years. Makes me reconsider if I want to continue to add more products?
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@john You have every reason to be upset. In my case it has happened 2 times that I can remember and I do not understand that strange math that makes our royalties 0 when it has been sold for a fairly high value, a part of those profits must be ours. It’s your company and it’s your rules, that’s for sure, but this seems very unfair to us. I don’t think I’ll do many poster designs in the future if this keeps happening, I don’t want to waste my time and I guess other designers will think the same. I hope they are looking for a solution about it.
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That’s actually not a bad idea. I might steal your strategy!
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Hahahaha! I don’t know if you can call it a “strategy” when it was really just came about by me being clueless and having no idea that frames were only available for standard sizes! But sometimes I guess “mistakes” turn out for the best! 😅
@Cat I have a question about this… So your poster designs have non-standard measurements and you only allow them to be purchased with those measurements that you created? Is that? So the option of framing is not offered like this?
I don’t restrict the sizing at all - and now that I look at it again, I’m not sure that choosing a non-standard size makes the frame option disappear - when I designed them, it seemed like the frame option was there for all sizes, and then when I looked after this issue was raised, it seemed like frames were only available for standard sizes, but now it looks like the option is back for all sizes - standard or not. So who knows - maybe the sizing thing just a red herring!
My point in designing things this way actually had nothing to do with frames - most of my posters are seating charts, so when I designed them, my aim was simply to try to fit xyz number of tables onto the thing with fonts that were big enough to read, and a layout that looked good with the artwork. A lot of them just ended up being odd sizes.
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Thanks @Cat !! Of course, the problem did not exist or was not visible when you made your designs! Well then we can’t fix anything like that and we can only keep praying that they don’t buy our posters framed and at a deep discount so we can keep our royalty
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Yeah, I guess hoping and praying is our best option - which sorta sucks. I guess I’m in a better position than most folks because people rarely want to fork over the money to have their seating charts framed - plus they’re usually in a hurry and don’t have time for that option anyway. However, seating charts are the product that seems to require the most customer hand-holding, so I think I’d be really annoyed if I spent an hour or two helping someone with their design and then got totally stiffed on the royalty. Really hoping Zazzle will fix this or find some way to make it right for the designers that have had this happen to them.
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Thanks. If that is the link you clicked through to from your Royalty History, it shows they bought a 20" x 28" print on the standard matte paper, with a ‘Black Modern Wood Frame 7/8" wide’ which was an upgrade/User-Option of +$158 and the numbers shown in your screenshot are an exact match for them somehow getting 75% off the order. I wasn’t keeping up with all the Christmas in July sales but don’t recall seeing anything higher than 50% off so maybe this customer had a special promo code from Z for 75% off, I couldn’t know. Anyways, I’ll post a break-down tomorrow night.
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@ColsCreations 75% discount??? That seems a bit exorbitant… I have never seen such a high discount and from what I have seen, it is not allowed to accumulate discounts. Hopefully you can figure out what math was used, but even if it’s explained and the math is correct it still seems unfair to the designer. I’m curious how the math was applied in the case of a referral… I’d be curious if the designer’s royalty was 0 and the promoter’s was not…
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The sale was not referred. The only people making money off the sale was zazzle.
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Oh yes @john , I already read it. She was only thinking about general referral sales. One of my cases did get referred and I’m curious if that person received a royalty or not
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I just posted a break-down here.
I have no way of knowing what happened with this sale or what promo code the customer used or how/why they got it to use, all I know is the cold hard math aligns with them having received a 75% discount.
As for what the referrer (if there is one) receives, there is nothinghere (section 4) or here that mentions anything about User-Options reducing your pay-out, both just state a flat 15% of the purchase price. Combined with the fact that I have never seen anyone post questioning how much they earned on a referral, I am working on the assumption that referrers get 15% of the total purchase price regardless, that they are not affected by weird User-Option calculations. So in John’s case, if the sale had been referred, they would have earned $7.35 as opposed to John’s $0.00.
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@ColsCreations Thank you so much for your time and help. I’ve been going through your other posts. A real education on zazzle.
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