at Shutterstock I get:
25 cents; 81 cents; $1.88; or $28 ... until I sell $500 of images then .
 

To be fair, it isn't DT alone that make these huge discounts that cut our share too.

I've recently sold an item at Zazzle and its price was at a 75% discount!  Given that part of the item's cost is its production, I wonder if the 25% minus my 15% commission even paid for the costs - or otherwise the production cost is much lower than I imagine and so Zazzle's commission is very high.

Here is another little trick I am experiencing, just had an image that has sold 5 times but I have only been paid for a level 1 percentage. You imagine if they are doing this to every image that moves from one level to the next higher level, they are making a nice little earner on our sales, it's worth checking your sales to see how you are affected as well.

The discounts a seller gives to its customers shouldn`t affect the supplier at all.
......Or a Supermarket who suddently gives 30% off and pays then 30% less to CocaCola. This is not the way business works. We work with dreamstime as an intermediate, and not directly with the customer.

Actually, with retail supermarkets, it's worse than you suggest.  Suppliers are pressured to offer marketing programs that include heavily discounted merchandise to promote sales at various times throughout the year (hence the various sales you see in the weekly flyers), slotting fees are required to "buy" shelf space, as are slotting fees for placing new items into distribution centers.  Then there are the endless deductions from invoices - "damaged" goods, fees to unload trucks, late fees for late deliveries, the list goes on...  Please don't give the micro sites any ideas, they'd have us offering up discounts to move up in searches, charge us for ftp uploads, charge us for storage on their servers, oh, then they would charge for reports on our sales too!