But here’s the catch: Zazzle treats all internal clicks on its site—for example, a shopper browsing through categories like Crafts & Party Supplies > Wrapping Paper before clicking on your product—as a “referral.” This means your sale is subjected to a referral cut, regardless of whether the customer was actually sent from an external source or found the product through organic browsing within Zazzle itself.
Can you provide proof of this? Because this is not how it's known to work. Referral "cookies" are set when one enters Zazzle through an external link. Browsing/navigating the site through internal links does not over-ride that.
Re the Excess Royalty Fee. We've always had one, it just used to kick in at 15% instead of 10.01%. It is my opinion that this fee is insignificant in the long run; keeping one's royalty low just to avoid it is only costing you money, not saving you money. You might find this post on the subject somewhat helpful.
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Despite everything, Zazzle is still a completely free site to use. There is no out-of-pocket expense. No subscription fee, no listing fees ... You can create as many stores as you want - each with their own storefront and set-up and theme and custom URL - and have up to 100,000 products total per account. For free. (100,000 products x 0.20 listing fee = $20,000!!! Think about that.) And if something sells, you make real money.
With Referrers making 15% of the total sale, they've always had the potential to be earning more than Creators, especially those Creators sitting at 14.9% just to avoid the transaction fee or doing only 5-10% to "stay competitive". This was not a secret. Anyone who read the terms knew that. I started writing more here but then remembered I made a blog post on this subject two months ago.
Adding to this, what is significant to me is that while the carve-out fees on the Creator end increased greatly April 1, the flat 15% paid to Affiliates remained unchanged. They could have reduced the Affiliate earning to say 10% or halved it to 7.5%. But they didn't. Their saving money comes at the expense of Creators not Affiliates. What does that say? To me it's a very clear indicator that they need people driving traffic to the site more than they need new designs. Hence the big push towards the "opportunity" we as Creators have to self-promote ourselves and earn a higher return.
This may be a gut-punch to Creators who have made their incomes based on being an artist/graphic designer, but the hard reality is the landscape out there has changed significantly the last few years, so putting aside emotions and what's "fair", practically speaking, being able to drive traffic and thus sales to Z is probably more valuable to Z then designing.
