Suggestion: Fee-free custom orders

[SORS]

I’d like to suggest that Zazzle consider waiving marketing fees on custom orders—especially those that come from customers who find our stores on their own, or who reach out to us directly through the storefront messaging system or by email, without clicking on a paid ad.

Custom work takes time. When someone contacts me for a personalized design—whether through Zazzle messages or by emailing me directly—I often spend time discussing their needs, creating new versions, making edits, and guiding them through the order process. In many of these cases, Zazzle didn’t pay for that customer to find me. It was either my own outreach, a referral, or someone who came across my storefront or website organically.

It feels discouraging when those custom orders are still subject to the full marketing fee, as if they came in through paid advertising. On lower-priced items especially, those fees can cut deeply into the small earnings left after custom work is completed.

Would Zazzle consider one of the following:

• Exempting orders placed within 24–48 hours of a message thread or customer contact?
• Creating a toggle or order tag for “custom orders” to help flag them as designer-driven?
• Allowing a way to send a private link that’s automatically exempt from marketing fees?

This would go a long way in supporting designers who offer personal service—something that keeps many customers coming back.

Thanks for considering it.

[Cat]

I totally agree. My suggestion would be to exempt direct only products from marketing fees. It actually seems to me that direct only products are by definition self-referrals since the ONLY way a customer can access them is if the designer provides them with the link.

BTW, I totally feel your pain on this situation. I had a customer who I'd worked with since January. I had well over 40 hours of time sunk into helping her with her wedding suite - custom invitations, programs, signage, cards, favors, seating charts, thank you notes - the whole 9 yards. Then right before she placed her order the ambassador program launched, her orders all came in as 3rd party, and I made next to nothing for my efforts. I felt so totally burned by the whole thing that I've just stopped doing custom work for Zazzle customers. I actually really enjoy doing custom work, but under the current system it simply isn't workable. Even if you published everything direct only with really high royalty rates, the sales would probably come in as 3rd party so the customer would end up paying a whole lot more, and you still wouldn't make a reasonable rate. I think the only option would be to set up some sort of payment system outside of Zazzle, and that just feels messy and uncomfortable to me so unless and until they come up with some way to handle these situations I'm just opting out.

For our own customers - people who reach us via our own websites, I think the best solution is to use a different POD where we can control our royalties. I haven't actually set that up yet - I had a lot of hours sunk into my website to send my customers here, but then the ambassador program happened, so I just tabled the entire thing until I can figure out a better approach. 

I dunno. I mean I think the idea behind the ambassador program was to encourage us to send customers here, but the way it's set up it's almost like it's backfired - certainly in my case it has! I mean it does encourage you to do general purpose promoting, but the system creates a huge DIS-incentive to send actual live paying customers here because you cannot effectively control your royalties anymore.

Sorry for the rant. Apparently I'm still feeling pretty burned by the whole thing. 

[SORS]

Thank you for sharing this — I really resonate with everything you said, especially about feeling burned after investing so much time into a client only to watch the new system eat away your earnings.

Your point about direct-only products being by nature self-referrals is spot on. If the customer literally can’t access the product without us giving them the link, how does it make any sense for that to be classified as a 3rd party? It’s like we’re being penalized for doing our own marketing — the very thing Zazzle has encouraged us to do for years.

And like you, I’ve seriously reconsidered custom work through Zazzle. The joy of creating something meaningful for a customer is so often undercut by the new structure. Even when we raise royalties to try to offset the loss, we risk pushing prices too high — and still end up with less than what we’d hoped for.

I also agree that it feels messy to consider taking payments outside the platform, especially when we’ve built our brands and websites to send traffic to Zazzle in good faith. The current setup has really reversed the incentive — it punishes designers for bringing actual customers in.

I don’t think your message was a rant at all — it’s honest, and I’m grateful you said it out loud. So many of us are in the same boat, and I pray Zazzle listens and considers creating a fee-free custom order system or a way to verify designer-sent traffic so that we’re not left carrying the cost of our own success.

[Cat]

And one other thought. I'm not sure that exempting orders placed within 24-48 hours of a chat would help. In my experience for wedding stuff, the bride often wants to run things by other family members and/or place a sample order before making the big purchase. So if only sales placed within that timeframe were exempted you might get full royalties for the samples, but not for the big full order.