Customers Asking for Help with Designs

[whimsywhim]

Good morning,

When a customer asks you to help with a design (different words, design elements, etc), and they don't buy it, is it because they are somehow downloading / copying it? 

If so, is there a way to put a watermark on it that disappears once they buy it?  Do you refuse to do the work and, instead, tell the customer how to do it themselves?  

Thank you for any responses.

[Jadendreamer13]

Hopefully, someone who knows the answer will come along and help you. I’m just chiming in to say that I, personally, don’t do custom work for that reason.

[whimsywhim]

Thank you for responding.  How do you tell that to the customer?  Do you, instead, offer to give them directions for whatever they are asking?

[Jadendreamer13]

I refer them to customer service. 🙂

[CrazyMermaid]

I just tell them nicely that I don't have time to do custom work. No I don't tell them how to do it or give them any other advice. That would just lead to so many follow up questions that I never anticipated. 

[whimsywhim]

I'm strongly leaning toward this.

[KeegansCreation]

There is no way for us to put on a watermark that disappears upon purchase. That is something only Zazzle could do.

They have no way of downloading the design without buying it. (And they can only download it if it's one of those downloadable products that you have set to download.) When it comes to copying, their only option is screen capture which makes a small and crappy copy which can only be usable after upscaling if they turned off guidelines and it's a rectangular product. It's theoretically possible but probably not likely. It's more likely they just changed their mind. 

Putting in a lot of work only to have the customer change their mind is the more likely risk and one that can't be stopped with watermarking. I have done custom requests. Sometimes the customer has bought the altered version and sometimes they haven't. It all depends on how much time you are willing to gamble on making the sale or not. 

[whimsywhim]

I thought so.  

i wondered if there was a way to copy the design and have a program that would make it crystal clear.  I doubted it, but I wanted to make sure.

I have to think long and hard about doing custom work again.  The last time, I didn't spend that long, but even spending a second without being paid a royalty is difficult to accept.  Thank you for responding.

[KeegansCreation]

There are programs that can upscale and improve an image. I personally use Topaz Gigapixel which upscales and then improves via AI. I use it on vintage public domain images which can be quite small. However, it's a subscription service. There are free upscalers (Zazzle has recently introduced an upscaler in the design tool which gets triggered by a too small image) but they won't be as high quality as the paid ones. So it is theoretically possible that somebody could screenshot your design, bring it into Topaz Gigapixel or another upscaler of high enough quality and then re-upload it to make their own invitations or whatnot. There are scrapers who do that and then sell on another platform. But that takes some time (and money) investment.  Somebody who couldn't make changes themselves unless you walked them through it is unlikely to be up for that.

[whimsywhim]

Thank you for all of this great information.  I'm strongly leaning to telling people I don't have the time to do custom work.  This last one really p*ssed me off.

[VivianD117]

I appear to be the exception to the rule -- I actually like to help people but I was in a service business before this and compared to what I had to do there to make people happy, this is easy.  Now, as always, I must say that I'm not into weddings -- and that would be a whole different story I suspect.  For my products, changes aren't that difficult and they almost always buy the finished product.