Understanding the Logic Behind Zazzle's New Fees Structure 2025
The way I see it, Zazzle’s new fee structure is about protecting their bottom line.
1. They run big discounts (sometimes as high as 40% ), and to ensure those sales are impactful prices must appear significantly lower. High royalties might cancel out the impact of sales. Hence discouraging higher royalties?
2. Google made massive changes to what they show via images so the promotional pins took a hit, they don't appear in results like they once did. Sales overall might be significantly down. We have Amazon and Temu offering personalized goods at significantly lower prices. That has got to have made a dent.
The way to overcome that is to focus on personalized goods that neither of those providers is capable of producing!
3. Part of it is also about royalties/referrals. With a high royalty rate and 35% self-referral fee Zazzle could actually end up barely covering their own costs once sales and discounts were applied. So now with the carve-outs and caps, they’ve made sure that doesn’t happen anymore. I can see the logic there.
4. I also think Zazzle wants us to market ourselves more. By making royalties alone less reliable, they’re nudging us to use referral links, which saves Zazzle the cost of advertising. Hence cover images and videos and reward systems/features for those sharing media and so on. I expect to see more reward systems in the future for those doing particularly well on social media.
5. And then there’s the category thing — higher carve-outs in areas like home décor and digital products just mean Zazzle makes sure they always get their cut, no matter what we set as a royalty.
So yeah, it’s built to make sure Zazzle stays profitable. Our job is just figuring out how to work with the system instead of fighting against it. I'm working on that now.
I as you know haven't been active on Zazzle a while so it will take some time to work out new strategies.
But I am on it!