Zazzle's royalty calculator lets you choose either a product price or a royalty rate and will change the other value accordingly, and shows you "royalty you will make". That figure has proven unreliable as it doesn't take into account the deduction if the sale is referred, sometimes it seems to be taking current sales into account, and sometimes it's just plain wrong for no logical reason.
I got tired of "running the numbers" all the time trying to figure out how a royalty would shake out after fees and discounts when deciding what to set one at. And doing the same after a sale, trying to make sense of the very limited info shown in the royalty report. So a while back I made a spreadsheet to figure it all out for me.
My spreadsheet can't determine the product price if you enter a royalty or the royalty if you enter a product price like Z's calculator does. You need to pull those two numbers from the Z calculator and enter them in the spreadsheet, and then everything else will be broken down for you:
Now you can see all your various earnings scenarios, the amount of fees deducted, and can even enter a discount % to see what you'd earn when the item is on sale. You can also enter a quantity to see what you'd earn on a bulk sale, handy for say invites or other things were people usually by more than one.
After a sale, you can plug in the subtotal they paid and the royalty % applied from the royalty report to "check the math" and see why the royalty paid might have been less than expected.
In this example, $144 x 18% is $25.92, more than the $19.44 shown on the report. So I plugged the $144 and 18% into the spreadsheet and aha - it's a match for a third-party sale after the referrer fee and transaction fee were deducted.
Now, i also know this item has a list price of $15. $15 x 12 is $180. So what discount they they get to arrive at the $144 subtotal paid? This time I entered my royalty, the list price, and quantity purchased, and then guessed the discount was either 15 or 20%. So I entered 20% in the spreadsheet and aha - yep, they had a 20% discount on this order.
So you can use this in a lot of ways, before and after a sale, with no math required. There are only four fields you can enter numbers in: product price, your royalty %, and an optional discount and/or quantity. All other fields are calculated for you, and are also locked so you can't accidentally change/erase the formulas in them. (You can unlock the sheet though if you want, I set it so no password is required to do so.)
This is what the actual sheet looks like:
It's two calculators side by side so you can easily compare two different rates, or a list price vrs a sale price, or a single item vrs in quantity.
My sheet can't account for getting dinged for when customers use secondary content in your design (that's just too convoluted a situation) or the 5% mess when User Options are applied to the pay out. But other than those two unpredictable sales situations, this is a pretty handy tool for helping decide on a royalty rate and figuring out our earnings after a sale.
You can download it from this link, free, no-strings-attached. (If you find it useful, I wouldn't mind if you wanted to share/promote one of my products in return though. 😉 )
www.colscreations.com/SharedFiles/EarningsCalc.xlsx
Sheet last updated Aug 30, 2022
Sheet last updated Aug 1, 2023
I have also created a second calculator, info & link to download here:
Earnings Calculator For Understanding 5% User-Options
UPDATE March 25, 2025
Due to changes taking effect April 1, 2025 (see Announcement here), I have disabled the download link in my original post.
UPDATE March 27, 2025
Because a number of people asked, yes, I do plan on making a new calculator spreadsheet but I won't be able to do that until I know for absolute certain how Z is calculating the referral portion on "self-promoted" sales. So that won't be until some unknown time after April 1st.
Meanwhile, I've created a temp sheet that works for calculating your earnings on everything except that PP2 referral situation, so you can see what your gross & net royalty will be with the fee & new carve-outs, and what the 15% referral commission would be.
The sheet has two tabs on the bottom. "Old vs New" which compares just that, and "4 rates" which is a second sheet with a grid of four calcs, one for each carve-out rate - 35, 40, 45, 50.
All fields are locked so you can't accidentally mess up a formula. You can only enter your numbers for price & royalty and the optional quantity and discount. As before, you need to enter a percent in Zazzle's calculator and get the product price from there to plug into this sheet.
Here's the link to download it.
https://colscreations.com/SharedFiles/TransFees/NewTempSheet.xlsx
As before, totally free, no strings attached. But if you find it helpful or found the last one useful, you could buy me a cup of coffee.
https://buymeacoffee.com/colscreations/posts
UPDATE April 16, 2024
Two weeks in and I've now published an updated sheet that accurately calculates earnings under the new Ambassador Program (AP) method that went into effect on Zazzle April 1, 2025.
Here are two examples of real-world earnings reports run through the calculator:
The percents I've shown in ( ) in my screenshots are the percent of total order that the net earnings actually equal.
So using Example 2, you can see that the set royalty rate was 28%. $17.15 x 28% = $4.80.
But it's showing they only earned $2.64, 15.4% of the $17.15.
That's because the net of $2.64 shown is after the ERF and MRF fees have been deducted.
Hopefully the new reports being promised will include columns to show the fees so that people aren't pulling their hair out wondering why the royalty shown as earned is so much less than the subtotal shown x the royalty % shown.
If a "self-promoted" sale, you can see that the net referral amount earned + the net royalty earned does equal the advertised goal of 40% of total order. (A little less due to the Excess Royalty Fee deduction.)
This particular example happened to be a coffee mug published under the main Wedding category. Weddings are in the 50% bracket but mugs as product type are in Home & Living, the 40% bracket. So this answered a very important question for me: Which category rate is applied? The actual product type cat, or the one the designer chooses on publishing? This sale shows it goes by actual product type.
This leads one to think, "Great! Glad it wasn't in the 50% cat or would have earned less ...."
But that brings up the other interesting observation - that that's not actually the case. 🤔
Here you can see the same sale with the four different rates applied:
Look at the numbers in the yellow sections.
While total earnings on a Cross-Over link decrease as the cat rate increases, it's the inverse for a Self-Promotion link, total earnings actually increase as the cat rate goes up. That's because the MRF is a percent of your royalty while the referral commission is a percent of the total the customer paid.
Well anyways, here's the link to download the free sheet:
https://colscreations.com/SharedFiles/AP_EarningsCalc.xlsx
* As before, you need to first put your royalty percent into Zazzle's calculator to get the actual list price for the item, and plug that list price into my sheet.
(Also shared here.)
P.S.
Have also disabled the link to the temp sheet I posted above on 3/27
Hi,
Yes, I disabled the orig links when I released the current updated version. See this post above, link to download the newest version is at bottom of it.
UPDATE - SEPTEMBER 30, 2025
I've made some updates to my spreadsheet that I think make it more helpful and provide new insights.
First, I added cells that show how much you earn vs how much Zazzle earns, as percents of total order price customer actually paid. Check out this post here for why these percents are so interesting to think about.
Second, I brought back a page where you can compare two scenarios side-by-side when deciding what rate to set. I had this in my original spreadsheet but neglected to include this helpful comparison view in my post-April 1st version.
This new version has three "pages" to it. They are actually three separate sheets you will see as tabs at bottom left of sheet. The tabs are 'Old vs New", "Compare 2", and "4 rates".
Old vs New lets you compare what you will earn now vs what you would have earned under the old pre-Ambassador Program terms. Enter your royalty percent, the resulting list price for the product, and an optional quantity and discount on the Ambassador Program side of the sheet. Everything else will be calculated for you so you can instantly see all the numbers both new way and old way.
Here's what this sheet looks like. (I put a red dot on the 6 fields you can change. Everything else is locked and calculated for you.)
All of the percents shown are percents of total sale price customer paid which is Line 6, "Final product price your royalty will be based on". So here we can see for example that the Transaction Fee / Excessive Royalty Fee equals 1.19% of the $118.00 the customer paid and that total earnings on a None sale ($26.68) equal 22.61% of the $118.00 the customer paid.
The percentages listed at the bottom are the five different sale types I talked about here .
Zazzle + You will equal 100% of the total sale.
For 3rd Party - Other it will equal 85% of the total sale. This because the 3rd Party affiliate gets the other 15%.
Compare 2 gives you two calculators side-by-side so you can easily compare the effects of two different royalty rates on same product or two different discount amounts or bulk sale vs just one.
Here I am comparing same bulk sale of 50 wedding invites at 10% vs 23.8%.
Here you can again see the total the customer paid ($100 or $118) broken down into what percent of that total sale you earn vs what Zazzle earns on it. The top text row is editable so you can note whatever it is you're comparing.
4 Rates is same as it was before. This is a grid of four calculators, one at each of the possible rates (35, 40, 45, or 50). If you're not sure which category your product was assessed at, you can enter the "subtotal" and royalty rate as they appear on your Royalty History in each of the four calcs (leaving the discount and quantity fields at 0) and see which one matches the earnings shown on your report.
Due to rounding differences, my numbers are sometimes off by a penny compared to what you see on your Zazzle reports. Likewise, this is why the total you see on your main Royalty History report is sometimes a penny less than what you see when clicking the eye icon for the detailed report.
(*I believe that a Zazzle forum Mod did confirm that the amount shown under the detailed eye-icon report that is often a penny higher is what you are actually credited as earning.)
So that's my updated sheet. I hope it is as helpful and eye-opening to you as it is for me. It is completely FREE to download from my own website, NO strings attached. But if you feel inclined to buy me a cup of coffee I won't protest. 😉
Here's the link to download it.
~ Col's Creations
September 30, 2025
