customized products, ranging from tshirts to stamps, and sell them on the zazzle website …

On Zazzle, we take great pride in the kinds of content that people around the world produce and contribute to the Zazzle gallery. We get thrilled at the business and success that our contributors see when their products are sold and they earn money. And it’s important to us that Zazzle is a safe and engaging environment for people of any age, including children, to explore and enjoy the content.

Because we are enabling people to earn money from their content, we have to also take issues such as copyright and content ownership very seriously. We have rigorous standards for what content may be posted to Zazzle and to ensure that proper copyright owners are profiting from their works.

While we do our best to ensure that every customer is happy, sometimes there are mistakes. As soon as we become aware, however, we do whatever it takes to try to make it right. In some unfortunate cases, some people have chosen to flame us publicly rather than work with us on the solutions. For example, we have been working with Mr. Rountree (author of several posts here) for several months, and unfortunately, it looks like we are unable to come to any kind of resolution to work together positively.

I strongly hope that anyone who reads this thread of comments will trust that we do our best to ensure that people have a great experience and receive quality products every time they use Zazzle. And we hope that a couple of individual instances do not negatively affect the perception of how much we do care about delighting each and every customer. A passionate team of Zazzlers is here, every day, committed to that goal.

Thanks,
Josh Elman

Product Manager, Zazzle

Truth Seeker’s allegations are troubling if founded. The whole basis of the business is the designer having trust they will be paid the commissions on products they have designed. I would hope that Zazzle is not guilty of fraud as Truth Seeker alledges, but we have no real way to check up on them. The question remains should a person trust a company with pro-Nazi positions. I can only say I won’t be going to take any showers at Zazzle headquarters!

Are they trying to stop bad press rather than fixing problems with their service?

They haven’t been paying people either, on their form of click referals.

We found this out using a DNS redirection that counts the clicks before the client is passed to the special zazzle URL. We also looked at when they did pay and what amount of clicks, on average, generated a sale for them. Fraud? Yeah it looks that way.

We are now working on finding out what the scale of this underpayment is, in terms of $ and numbers of people ripped off.

That said, I still think that Zazzle is currently the best option for the consumer, but I would still like to see it better. Internet shopping may be the way of the future. Zazzle stands to reap huge profits if they get a few things straightened out. The product quality is outstanding, and most things are generally as promised - delivery time, etc. Many policies and customer response could be improved. On the bright side, Zazzle is making many constant improvements and are now offering customized cups/mugs/drinkware. The reason I have spent so much time in reporting problems at Zazzle is that I would like for it to be the kind of company it ought to be!

As for the commissions on my lost account, they are supposed to be on the way. They may only total $47, but that is my $47! If I had not raised hell, I would have never gotten them. To be honest, I had to spend far more than $47’s worth of time to get them.

In closing, I would like to say that Zazzle is a great concept and has many wonderful features. I hope that lots of people will use it to expres their ideas, etc., but they need to know the problems they might encounter. Zazzle is a good company, but it could be a great company! Other than my problems with censorship, I think all the problems I have had with Zazzle are things that slipped through the cracks and not really deliberate. That said, they were not handled well once I had the problems. Guess what? I still use Zazzle and will continue to do so. Sure, things could be better, but they aren’t going to get better if no one speaks up!
I am sure that thousands of people (the vast majority)use Zazzle and never experience any problem. I hope that by speaking up, I will help change that to all customers. Zazzle is much better than when I started using it and will probably continue to improve!

By the way, I still have not received my commissions from my account deleted by their mistake in October or November. I lost over 200 products which is a pretty serious error on their part. These products could have probably been easily recovered if they had handled it promptly. Instead they took their time and waited until the backups containing the products had been overwriten!

Can you count on receiving your commissions or your products being secure? Even if the censorship-happy individuals don’t delete your products, it is readily apparent secure backup procedures are not followed.

As far as copyrights, I understand and respect them. I had posted a very small number of products that were actual copyright violations, and I repect the decision to remove them. I have even reported some of my own products as copyright violations and asked that they be removed! That said, mention of someone’s work such as a title or a character from a literary work in a product that can be classified as commentry or a short quote is not a violation of copyright law. For example, one has the right to say I hate “The Cat in the Hat” if that is how he feels. As far as the rating system, I do try to adhere to it although when a designer creates over 3,000 products, he is bound to make a mistake once in a while! It is also far to say that it is sometimes impossible to guess what Zazzle staff would consider a rating violation. The solution to this would be quite simple - have the Zazzle employees change the rating on the product rather that delete it or at the very least move the product to the designer’s personal products section. I s this done? NO! Note that in the following email, it is said that a designer can repost a product if the Zazzle staff removes something they should not have. What kind of customer service is that? Why does Zazzle not repost it? Some designs are complicated and involve a great deal of time, and Zazzle maintains an archive of deleted products or so they say.

Zazzle is a privately operated company and, as such, has every right to run its business any way they see fit. They have the right to set whatever rules they like, but they should follow the rules they set!

Dear Jennings,

Thanks. We too are tired of this nonsense. Zazzle is committed to the values of self-_expression and open creativity. Zazzle is also committed to keeping our website a place where anyone of any age can view, explore, and personalize amazing content. Furthermore, we are committed to protecting artists’ digital rights, including with respect to copyright and trademark.

In order to ensure that we are properly paying owners of content for their products, we sometimes have to remove or restrict content that we believe is a violation of copyright, unless we can prove otherwise. Additionally, in order to ensure that our public “G” gallery is appropriate for viewing for people of any age, including children, we do sometimes determine that a piece of content is inappropriate and should have instead been placed in our PG-13 or R galleries. Given this, we do ask that our contributors and participants in Zazzle do their best to help us maintain these standards. If we find or hear about something that does not fit within our standards, we will have to remove that content or ask that it be reposted in an appropriate gallery. We ask for everyone’s help to appropriately rate and consider these standards when posting their content.

We are constantly working to improve our customer service and policies to make this even easier and smoother. Since you and I have been working together, we have discussed our policies in depth, as well as making many significant changes, for example launching notification systems to let people know when their content may be in question.

However, it seems clear that you continue to refuse to respect our guidelines, our employees, and our mission, as exhibited by both your private messages to people on our team as well as your public comments about our company.

If you feel it will be necessary to broadcast your frustration in public forums, then I obviously can’t prevent that. I will be happy to respond publicly as well. If this behavior continues, we will ask you to look elsewhere for a place to display and sell your work.

Thanks,

Josh Elman

As for being a business oportunity, I want to laugh! I still have not received my royalty commissions on the products that they lost due to their error. They certainly have their profits they made off of selling my products but where are mine? This has been going on since October, and it is now April.

As for Wilbert’s concern about stamps, we all know the stupidity of the Federal government, and this does ivolve them. I designed some stamps for Christmas, and Zazzle would not produce them because they contained religous imagery. What a joke! I have bought thousands of stamps from the post office of the Holy Mother and the Christ Child similar to the ones I designed.

I am sure that thousands of customers never have any problem with Zazzle, but when a customer does he can expect the worse service possible. A concept of customer service is that if a customer has a problem, and it is handled properly and quickly, he ends up being a more loyal customer than if he never had a problem. Zazzle breeds no loyalty. When I finds another site that can match their design features, I will not even mess with Zazzle anymore.

The censorship policy seems rather un-American to me. My anti-KKK and anti-Nazi products are removed while pro-KKK and Pro-Nazi products as well as the Osama product with the slogan “Death to America” remain. I would attend a KKK or Nazi rally just to see if any Zazzle employees are there except I wouldn’t recognize them!

The reason we get such bad service is that so few people speak up! Only when they can see their profits being affected will change come.

There are still many improvements that could be made at Printfection, but they are still a very young company, and it will take time, but they already have some features in place that would put Zazzle to shame! Let’s wait and see.

Zazzle is still up to the old tricks. I tried to make stamps of my book covers. They made one from Jacy’s Girl but rejected Pulp Graffiti because “it could be construed as advertising.” Duh. Show me a stamp that isn’t. The whole purpose of posting an image of something is to make it visible to the public. With logic aside, why would one be okay but not the other. It just doesn’t make any sense. This isn’t the first time Zazzle has rejected a stamp design I sent in. And every time I submit it elsewhere and get my stamp. Again, this is sad because Zazzle has the best layout. My book covers fit perfectly in their stamp field. Everywhere else, I have gaps down the sides to make the length fit the page. But, oh well, what can you do when the flunkies in charge think they know everything?

Cheers,
Wilbert

As I mentioned, I still think Zazzle has the best design features. That does not mean that will always be the case. Printfection.com has added features that allow the designer to place a design on multiple products at the same time. They still do not allow the additon of text and multiple images,yet, but I understand that is coming! When everything gets worked out at Printfection, they will give Zazzle a run for the money. They have good customer response and are constantly making huge strides in improving things. To be honest, Zazzle also works on making improvements, and I have noticed a number of them. The problem is they are not fixing many basic issues that should have never been a problem in the first place! Another issue with Printfection is image sizing. They may work that out as well.

As far as quality of products, Zazzle and Printfection both do a good job. In fact Printfection’s high standards for image quality ensure any kind of problem with image quality will not occur. Personally, I think they are too strict, and the image enlargement issues greatly limit design capabilty as they might be a bit of overkill.

It is true there are other companies out there. CafePress is the largest and offers the greatest selection of products, but I do not like their design process. That said, they do offer greater freeedom of expression than Zazzle - I have seen products on CafePress that Zazzle would never allow!
I suspect they are the largest because they were the earliest and people do not like change.

Speadshirt seems bizarre as it did not even offer search options that I could find.

Zazzle and Printfection seem to be the ones to watch. Both score high marks on the product quality standard. Zazzle scores very high marks on design capability, both I think Printfection may catch up in time and even surpass them. The speed at which the customer receives his products is good at both although a recent order from Zazzle was overly delayed through the fault of the delivery service,not Zazzle. Customer Response is second to none at Printfection. (Josh at Zazzle gives good response, but nobody else at the company does)If Printfection can resolve certain design issues such as text and image sizing, they will be the industry leader in time.

Cheers,
Wilbert

Yeah, right. I just sent my third email in three weeks to request an RMA number. The first two (sent two weeks and one week ago, respectively) have yet to generate a reply. Snappy service, eh?

http://www.printfection.com

They won’t censor artistic nudity, artistic violence, etc. Plus it’s more like your own store, rather than just a “gallery”. (you can customize the look and feel of the store completely including custom CSS and HTML to make it look just like your existing website)

my artwork is morbid and dark. while not involving graphic blood gushes and gut spillage like a cannibal corpse cover, it does/will involve dead/undead things and/or dismembered body parts drawn in black and white comic/illustration fashion. sometimes in a humourous way.

these are the kind of works that people aged 8-80 can like. i know because every summer, i set up displays and sell original artwork right out on a busy street where other artists gather and i’ve received compliments and admiration from everyone in that age range. parents and grandparents with babies and grand kids point it out to the children as they watch me draw such things and they think it’s great.

so unless i decide to release some artwork involving a bowl of fruit or a vase of roses, i think i’ll be looking at alternative options. anyone know of another site that would fit me perfectly?