Mama kat Thursday: Recent Disappointments

The Mama Kat prompt I chose today was, "Share a Recent Disappointment."

Two recent ones come to mind.

One was at a Long John Silver's in Indiana, while we home visiting recently.  Long John's has a new set of grilled tacos available and I ordered the grilled shrimp taco. It was a to-go order, but when I opened my taco pack, I discovered I only had regular fish tacos.

The order was correct, so it was a miss on the part of the food prep people. We'll visit again in due time and I'll try again.

But that is a trivial matter compared to a greater disappointment I have with Zazzle. Disenchantment might be a better word.

There are a number of online print-on-demand companies that specifically work with independent artists, like myself, providing a virtual 'store' space to post art on products those companies can then print when ordered. Those artist's earn a royalty per item. Zazzle is just one.  There are several others.

I've had such a store at Zazzle nearly 8 years.

To stay competitive, Zazzle, of course, is always upgrading their systems and how things work. Some of those changes have been good, but recently their changes are seeming less and less beneficial to me.

#1)  Zazzle used to rely strictly on their army of independent artists for all their art. Suddenly Christmas 2019, Zazzle, launched their own virtual stores to sell their own in-house designed holiday cards thus competing with us, their independent artists, reducing our opportunity to earn royalties.

#2)  We artists used to all have an option to turn on or off a button allowing customers to email us, but as of 2019, Zazzle launched a "Chat with Designer" feature giving customers a direct chat link to all of us artists, willy-nilly---without even setting up a working Chat for their own Customer Service!
 This stupidly resulted in customers contacting the artists with their Customer Service related questions, like shipping or cancellations; artist's who aren't even on their computers all the time either and aren't supposed to be handling that stuff.

No option to set available hours. No option to opt-out. No choice what so ever. You can't be an introvert artist with them anymore.

3)  And probably worst of all---just before Christmas 2019, when they go on holiday break, Zazzle launched something called "free secondary content," which are background designs customers can choose to add to a product. This content was created by other independent Zazzle artists, who signed up with Zazzle to do so, but---and here's the tricky part: their royalty fee is cut from the original artists royalty.  For example, if a customer added one of these "free backgrounds" to something I created, then 5% is deducted from my royalty to pay the creator of the secondary background!
This arrangement is part of a new "Collaboration Agreement" contract Zazzle set up in November of 2019, so now, anyone opening a virtual store in Zazzle automatically agrees to this contract!

Also, if a customer clicks on any secondary content, a window pops up promoting that secondary designer's "other designs," and not the original artist's other work at all!

It's a crumby deal. It was fine print in the contract none of us were aware of until after New Years 2020, when everyone at Zazzle came back to work and the Forum opened back up. Then the soup hit the fan.

There is a way to prevent Zazzle customers from adding secondary content like that to your designs, but it can only be done on newly created products: you can check a "no customization" box at that time.
 Zazzle has made it quite clear their direction going forward is this "collaboration" model of  promoting direct communication between artists and customers. They're soon even going to add a LIVE Designer option in the near future, like Vistaprint has.
 I foresee that independent artists not willing or interested in this collaboration activity may gradually find themselves pushed further and further out to market place fringes, which earning less.

So, in light of all that, I've decided that I'm going to relocate my creativity elsewhere. There are a good number of other online companies that similarly offer free virtual store space that are reputable, seem easier to use and have better royalty rates. 

You might wonder why I haven't left before now? 

Well, when I first started with Zazzle 8 years ago, it just happened to be the most viable option at the time. Many of the companies available today either didn't exist, were just getting started or hadn't moved to the free virtual store model yet.

The other reason is it takes so much effort promoting a virtual store, I didn't feel I could do 2 at the same time and things were going fairly well at Zazzle, despite the increasing speed bumps, until this past fall. That royalty sharing thing was the last straw.

My Zazzle store isn't going away. Just me is going away to invest my designs in a better place. I'm simply going to stop making anything new at Zazzle. I'm looking forward to reinventing myself and use my best designs more expansively.

Thanks for Visiting!
(photos from Pixabay)