This is not the case. They're just not displaying the info ideally so it does look like that at first. I checked all my sales since April 1st (not a big task, LOL) and all work out exactly right.
Net Referred Sales (NRS) = total customer paid ($11.56)
Earnings goal = NRS x department rate ($11.56 x 40% = $4.624)
So that's the max you can earn on this sale, royalty & referral combined
Now just add up the next three lines:
Referral ($3.70)
Royalty ($0.85)
ERF ($0.08)
= $4.63
Total earnings are 40% of the total customer paid, less the excessive royalty fee.
Just as Zazzle says it's supposed to work.
When this new plan was first announced, people were saying it looks like the ERF is being deducted twice. Zazzle's response was basically, we know it looks like that, but it's just a math thing we can't explain so trust us. I give them that one. When I first was looking at their examples at that time, it did look like it was being deducted twice but the math always worked out properly where it's not.
All one needs to do to re-assure themselves is add up those three things - Royalty, Referral and ERF.
That's going to equal the Earnings Goal (what customer paid x marketing bracket %)
Since the "formula" to figure out total earnings is [Net Royalty + ERF + Referral = Earnings Goal].
The referral amount is always the wild card, it is whatever it needs to be to make the EG total correct. Which is why they removed the % it works out to from the reports, it was just confusing people and isn't a meaningful number in this new system.
Disclaimer here - I haven't had any sales since April 1 that include a 5% User-Option or Secondary Content (have never had that before) but for a normal US sale without those odd things and no currency mess to figure out, everything is correct on my end, and what shows on the regular report line-items matches what is shown on the detailed view.
