How do you handle Custom requests? Referral fees not working for direct links

[Colorflow]

HI, So like many of you I am seeing no referral fees after sending customers direct links.  I recently created custom products for a few customers per their request.  One customer used the link I sent to their email and the other used the link from Zazzle messenger.   Both sales showed as 3rd party and I received a few dollars for over an hour of work.  Very discouraging and Zazzle CS responded to my email asking about the referral fee with the policy. So I expect them to say "well they were already on Zazzle when they messaged you so they are now 3rd party sales."

I want to be able to respond to custom requests and make enough money to cover my time.  How do the rest of you do this?  Are we allowed to ask for a separate payment, like using paypal, for our time? I am not sure if Zazzle allows this. I have an etsy shop and even thought about selling them the digital design there and they can use it to make their own Zazzle product. 

[Cat]

I've just stopped helping customers with their designs. If they need help I refer them to customer support. I feel bad, but I just can't afford to spend so much time for so little money. I know some folks are accepting payments through PayPal or Venmo, but that seems like it could get messy. 

I will create new publicly available templates if they need a matching design or something, but once you go down the road of helping them with one-off designs it seems like it becomes a never ending "oh could you do just one more thing?" sort of deal. If I was getting paid a reasonable amount I'd be willing to deal with it, but for pennies? Um, no. Of course, I totally suck at setting boundaries, so YMMV! 

[Van]

I hesitated to post this, but in light of how designers are hurting right now I'm going to do it anyway, hopefully I won't get into too much trouble.

If you design on any other pods, would it be viable to customize an item and privately post it there for the customer if they were agreeable? I don't like saying this, I really don't, but with our earnings cut as they have been, with the difficulties getting referred or none sales (and speaking for myself) I have to look out for my bottom line. I'd never have said this "pre-April1st."

I recently sold two shirts on two different pods (I did not promote them) and earned $4 each shirt. Here, my gross royalty would have been $2.81 and after all the fees I would have earned $1.69.

Compare that to: my only self referral in forever here nabbed me a total referral commission of $3.99.

On one of those other pods, designers do not set their price or commission - and on that one, had they been having a 'sale' (which they do often) I'd still have earned $2.

Currently it seems the only way to make decent money here is to get a self referral and that is such a hit and miss thing it's beyond discouraging.

[NigelSutherland]

I wonder whether temporarily setting stores to "Private" might help. A store with such settings wouldn't be a part of the open marketplace whilst in this mode... Thoughts?

[Cat]

Not sure how that would help. If private products automatically got self-referrals it might, but they're subject to marketing fees just like everything else, so all you'd be doing would be to cut yourself out of the marketplace.

[rebeccaheartsny]

I've stopped accepting custom work via this platform. I do hand illustration (pen and ink, watercolor, marker) and a custom illustration can easily take a full day, especially once you factor in the time spent scanning, cleaning up the image, uploading to Zazzle, and then adding the finished design to product(s). Plus time spent e-mailing back and forth with the customer to get everything right.

Even before the changes, I'd do all of this and still only make a few dollars, compared to the 100+ I'd charge elsewhere. And that's if the customer ever returned to purchase--I've also been burned quite a few times, putting all of that work into a product only to have the customer disappear.

I'd love to accept custom work again, but Zazzle really needs to introduce a way for designers to receive fair compensation. We should be able to set a fee for custom work, and also accept a deposit/partial payment so that we'd be compensated for our time and labor even if the customer never purchases the product.

I'll still do very teeny tiny changes (like adding a customizable text field to an existing product) if it's something that only takes a few seconds of my time, but as far as fully custom products/illustrations, I just reply to the request and politely decline.

[Zorinda]

I tell customers that I no longer accept custom orders and place the blame on Zazzle where it belongs: 

“Recently Zazzle made changes to their royalty structure which dramatically negatively impacted their independent designers, of which I am one. Given how much time it will take to create the design you have requested, it no longer makes economic sense for me to do custom work. Sorry”

If I receive a message that’s customer service related, I no longer even respond.  Redirecting the customer to customer support, which I have always done as a courtesy, takes time for which I am not paid ( and in fact have just received a massive pay cut) so why should I bother lifting a finger?  I will no longer agree to be an unpaid extension of Zazzle’s paid customer support. 

[Anne]

I wish Zazzle would offer the option to turn off chat.

[dbvisualarts]

a few months back someone bought paper invites, then canceled and did the digital download.  They later contacted me to use the design on a sign, but needed it bigger.  Then while setting up a custom design for the sign, she began adding table cards, then another sign for seating arrangements. Then asked that I add the names of the people she was inviting to the sign for seat assignments for over 100 guests.  This got changed many times due to misspellings ( on her part not mine) in the end it turned into a 6 week project.  I was depending on the affiliate referral for my "fee" for all the additional work, but, as it goes 3 separate orders, each one from as clear a link as we could hope for resulted in no referral.  She and I cleared caches, cookies everything we could think of.   That really burned me on doing customs hoping for that additional referral money.  
Should I have requested a fee, sure, I should have especially when it grew into such a hands on project from my end of things.  But the affiliate referral money had been good in the past.  That was my last custom without a fee, and I disabled the digital downloads for all products.

[Marcia]

@dbvisualarts Sorry you went through all that. However, if she 1st contacted you through Zazzle chat, you were never going to get the referral. They would have embeded their cookie in that 1st communication.

[dbvisualarts]

Thank you.  This was a long term project.  over 6 weeks.  we often cleared caches and cookies and she came in on two different computers, from emails as well.  so something should have stuck right.