Can someone help me figure out what's going on with my royalties?

[wanderlust]

I noticed this issue a few months ago when a few dollars was taken away from my balance suddenly. I contacted support and never got a helpful response.
It's happened again and it's extremely obvious now something's up.

I had 4 sales, 2 canceled and 2 of which cleared. One for $1.16 and one for $1.17. I had $2.33 in my balance. Today, I log on and see I have only the $.33. I was told in the past, customers can return orders even after things are cleared now and tried convincing me that that's why money was being taken out of my earnings. Except now, there's no way that's happening here because if both items were canceled, I should have a 0 balance, not left with the $.33 cents.

Does anyone know why money would be withdrawn like this? Is there something new I'm not aware of? I've been wanting to get back into designing and have a little nice side gig going, but if the very little I do make Zazzle just takes away without an explanation, I don't know if I want to now.

[Windy]

There is a two dollar fee deducted for inactivity on your account. I do not know if that is what happened here, but it's worth knowing about. https://help.zazzle.com/hc/en-us/articles/360019101674-Non-Contributing-Account-Fees

[wanderlust]

Honestly it probably is, and I wish it was explained to me when I contacted CS about the loss of funds back in March. I had never heard of this policy in all the time I spent focused on designing when I had time.
My life has gotten pretty hectic in mostly bad ways in the past couple of years, and that has affected my creativity so I put off designing anything, and I didn't think there was something that would force me to or lose money. That's troublesome.
I looked it up and found:
"The fee applies to accounts that haven't had any product sales or uploads in the last 15 months." Except I have had many product sales in the past 15 months. Obviously that's wrong, they really just want new uploads.

Thank you for answering, I really appreciate it so I can prevent losing more than I have.

[Windy]

The policy came into effect a few years ago. Many people probably don't know about it at all. I had been inactive for a long time, so I popped in one day and just did a remake of a postcard, changing the background or something. That's all you have to do to keep it going. 

[ColsCreations]

"The fee applies to accounts that haven't had any product sales or uploads in the last 15 months." Except I have had many product sales in the past 15 months. Obviously that's wrong, they really just want new uploads.

I don't know where you read that but in the link Windy provided it clearly says it has to be a Referred sale.

An account will be deemed a 'Non-Contributing Account' if either a public Product has not been published, or there has been no Referral Sale attributed to the account in the previous 15 month period.

Technically one could earn a referral on a link they shared somewhere years ago, but I think the intent here is that if you're promoting (and thus earned a referral) it shows you're an active member. Likewise with publishing a new product. 

[jophb]

I had this happen in either early 2023 or late 2022 before I came back and started being active again. I believe it sends an e-mail warning, because I remember getting one and popped on to Zazzle long enough to add 15 items.  Maybe check to make sure you receive Zazzle emails ok still.

[SimplyDesigned]

I've known about the inactivity fee since I signed up in 2019. It also does very little for us designers to contact customer support, its customer support not designer support, so they very rarely know what's going on for non-customer related issues.