why do some of my products have 0 royalty?

sugarhai
New Contributor III

I just had an order for 8 items and five of them have $0.00 royalty

why is that?

13 REPLIES 13

WHS_Designs
Honored Contributor II

@sugarhai in a nutshell, secondary content was added to the order
(see other threads below for a more detailed explanation)

•  Solved: Royalty % changed when customer order multiples - Zazzle
•  Solved: Digital download royalty in "Your Recent Sales" em... - Zazzle

sugarhai
New Contributor III

wow, ok thanks

sugarhai
New Contributor III

some more details, sorry it was actually 13 items in total and I was only paid for 5 of the items

the items were postcards and some items are not named, just says "product image not available" and that the items were "based on" one of my designs, I don't know what that means

when I look at my royalty history, only the designs that I was paid for show up, the sales that I was not paid for only show up in the sales notification email 

I am paid for some of the "product image not available" items and not paid for some, I am paid for some of the products showing my designs and not paid for some

if I didn't look at the email and only looked at my royalty history I would never have known 

 

Cat
Honored Contributor III

OK, so I looked through my sales emails and royalty reports, and it looks like "based on" means that the design was transferred to another product. I found one example of a "based on" sale with a zero royalty in my emails and it seemed to be a duplicate - in other words, it has the same order ID as another sale. When I looked at the royalty report for the order, there are 2 lines for the sales price. This generally means that the customer added something like an envelope. 

The royalties on my sale here don't make a whole lot of sense to me - like the numbers don't really add up - but I'm guessing that the long and short of it is that for some reason the card & envelope showed up as separate sales in the email, and I got a royalty for the card, but not the envelope. Why that should be, I have no idea. 

zero-royalty-email-and-report.jpg

Does this seem like what's happened in your case?

____________________
Cat @ ZB Designs

PAZP
Valued Contributor II

I would not have figured that out. Thanks for sharing that @Cat .

Cat
Honored Contributor III

Well, I still think it's clear as mud, but at least we know which puddle we're in! 

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Cat @ ZB Designs

That was funny. I liked the way you worded it!

PAZP
Valued Contributor II

sugarhai
New Contributor III

that is some good investigating cat! thank you

I see the same thing, there are sets of customized invitations with a duplicate order ID

one set is for postcards, it's a little different, it still says customized but it shows the product on both sets instead of "based on" but postcards do come with envelopes too so maybe...

and one product has 3 duplicates, so they added envelopes and something else maybe

thank you!

@Cat 

is 7.8% the royalty you set for this product? Maybe you set it at 8%?

my guess is that on the email the 2,75 dollars is the royalty for the card plus the envelope, like on your royalty report.
While the duplicate at 0% and 0 dollars with the same order ID stands for the background or other image added by the customer

Zolice @ ZazzleA Cherry On The Cake @ ZazzlePinterest

Cat
Honored Contributor III

I dunno... the numbers don't make a lot of sense to me. My royalty is set at 8%, so would the 7.8% reflect secondary content, or would it be because it was 3rd party referred? 7.8% of $42.50 is $3.31 so maybe it's both secondary content and 3rd party? If I subtract 15% (for the referral) from $3.31 it comes out to $2.81 - which is closer, but still doesn't add up.

Either way, it doesn't look like I got paid for the 4.9 % of the $4.25 - which I'm guessing was for envelopes?

Who knows. It's such a tiny amount of money that I'm not gonna worry about it. But it would be nice if it all made sense!

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Cat @ ZB Designs

the royalty changed to 7,8% because of secondary content (whose creator gains the 0,2%), not the 3rd party. In the same way, the royalty for the envelope changed from 5% to 4,9%.
But this is all I know (and all I can understand) about how royalties are calculated.

Zolice @ ZazzleA Cherry On The Cake @ ZazzlePinterest

Connie
Honored Contributor

Yes! I just posted about that in the other thread. I've seen that a lot in my emails, and always just assumed that it was the same 25 invitations or whatever, just the customer added on something that doesn't get a royalty.