Are 5% Commissions the Future of the Print-On-Demand Industry?

[stockastic]

I dumped Zazzle long ago - it's a very shabby operation in every way.  FAA has some big and serious deficiencies but they do let you set your markup, which makes all the difference. 

I fear though that FAA is systematically turning itself into Zazzle.  Today, they announced shower curtains.  Woo hoo.     At some point, we'll be "urged" to reduce our markup because, of course, we'll make more sales that way.  Eventually,  we'll find that our FAA search ranking depends on our markup.  The guy that owns FAA is interested in one thing, and it isn't art; he got into "fine art" retailing basically by accident.   After shower curtains, t-shirts can't be far behind.  And on products like that, he'll want to compete on price.   

Hope I'm wrong.

[Freedom]

I share your fare. Let's hope FAA stays a fine art site.

[pkphotos]

5% wouldn't be worth it apart from the hosting site.

I find FAA to be a complete failure. It seems a lot of people don't like Zazzle but they work very well for me and I have royalty set at 18%. At zazzle I've sold hundreds of phone cases compared to 0 (ZERO) on FAA.

[sharpshot]

Same here, I get regular sales with zazzle and I haven't put much work in to it.  Sold nothing with FAA over 2 years and I put much more effort in to that.  I have sold with other print on demand sites like redbubble, so I have no idea why I couldn't sell a thing with FAA.

[ShadySue]

I sell a little on FAA, but the market seems to be predominantly US. What I'm selling is US content or a very few iconic tourist destinations to Americans. Not something I can keep up. Outwith the US, I've only sold greetings cards and phone covers (2). Since I realised that their recommended $5 for small sizes gets me almost nothing after currency conversions and PayPaL charges and put them up, they don't sell.
The prices are far too high for the UK - totally uncompetitive - even though I priced 'low' based on what a very well-known photographer in my main field was pricing at.
I think there should be an option for US/rest of the world pricing. 
Still, even if I put all my print prices at $5, it would still be uncompetitive here.

[panicAttack]

Only if artists allow that.

[PaulieWalnuts]

With any of these sites the results depend on a lot of different things. And yes I'm not big on FAA focusing on small margin products. I'd rather see them offer a wider range of high demand high margin prints like wood or whatever.

The fact that he posted this means its a concern for them. Maybe like if contributors keep spreading stuff all over he'll have no option but to adopt a similar model to Zazzle or whatever. And if he does head that route hopefully my personal site will have grown to a point that it won't matter much or at all. I'm working on reducing my reliance on partners.

[ShadySue]

So this morning I got the "Fine Art America coming to a store near you" email.
Well, yeah, if 3225 miles is 'near me'.
 
Yeah, I know they're FAAmerica, but they also have Fine Art England, Fine Art Europe and any number of others (but not FA Scotland, which is a pointer to another site).
I wish we had a similar outlet here, but more competively priced for this market than FAA.

[stockastic]

Oh yeah and did you read the entire announcement? Your markup is cut in half, to feed these new "partners".     Take it or leave it.   I left it.

[KB]

Oh yeah and did you read the entire announcement? Your markup is cut in half, to feed these new "partners".     Take it or leave it.  I left it.

And I noticed that if you don't do anything, you're taking it, as the default for this particular option is set to "Yes".

[ShadySue]

Oh yeah and did you read the entire announcement? Your markup is cut in half, to feed these new "partners".     Take it or leave it.  I left it.

And I noticed that if you don't do anything, you're taking it, as the default for this particular option is set to "Yes".

I didn't read down that far; but yeah, I'm pretty sure the default is always to accept what they're suggesting.

[KB]

Oh yeah and did you read the entire announcement? Your markup is cut in half, to feed these new "partners".     Take it or leave it.  I left it.

And I noticed that if you don't do anything, you're taking it, as the default for this particular option is set to "Yes".

I didn't read down that far; but yeah, I'm pretty sure the default is always to accept what they're suggesting.

The email didn't say the default was on. The email implied (to me, anyway) that it required action in order to participate in the sales (when apparently the exact opposite is true).

[Braznyc]

You cannot compare Zazzle to FAA... I have sold a lot of products on Zazzle and ZERO products on FAA.

[stockastic]

There's a long thread about this on the FAA forum.  90% are woo-yays, and the few criticizing the deal, or asking the hard questions, have been slapped down by the admins and told to stop posting their "negativity".

This guy (Sean Broihier) is smooth.  He writes big PR pieces about how those other places only want to give you 5%, whereas FAA lets you set your own markup.  Then he quietly makes a deal with 3 new partners by cutting your markup in half, and it's opt-out.   

[ShadySue]

At least we get to opt out.
I want a two-tier pricing structure!

[Justanotherphotographer]

Much prefer Zazzle to FAA. My advice for Zazzle is just ignore their advice about pricing your stuff low. I make much more now with 50% markup then I ever did keeping below the 15% they try and push.

FAA just looks shabby and has so much pinched copyright stuff on there I can't deal with them.

[stockastic]

Much prefer Zazzle to FAA. My advice for Zazzle is just ignore their advice about pricing your stuff low. I make much more now with 50% markup then I ever did keeping below the 15% they try and push.

FAA just looks shabby and has so much pinched copyright stuff on there I can't deal with them.

Sounds encouraging - but do you rely on keyword search for your Zazzle sales?  I thought if your markup was more than 15% they buried you in the search.

[Justanotherphotographer]

Much prefer Zazzle to FAA. My advice for Zazzle is just ignore their advice about pricing your stuff low. I make much more now with 50% markup then I ever did keeping below the 15% they try and push.

FAA just looks shabby and has so much pinched copyright stuff on there I can't deal with them.

Sounds encouraging - but do you rely on keyword search for your Zazzle sales?  I thought if your markup was more than 15% they buried you in the search.

I don't do any promotion so 100% zazzle search and customers stumbling onto the my zazzle pages from Google etc. I haven't studied it too much but if there is a drop in search ranking it certainly hasn't had an impact on my overall earnings.

[stockastic]

A big part of why I gave up on Zazzle was the incredible clunkiness of their site.  The process of "creating products" was just too tweaky and time-consuming.    Why can't these companies get with the program, and provide a streamlined upload process - that reads and uses the IPTC data, lets me set (and change) prices with bulk editing functions, and supports multiple uploads?  If they did that, I'd have 200 quality photos for them tomorrow.   

Not gonna happen, I know.   

[Freedom]

Don't know if it is just me, but whenever a site announce they have new partners and new revenue sources, my sales tend to drop.

FAA did well for me last year, but this year my sales are declining. People used to buy the biggest size a lot, now they only buy medium sizes.

[stockastic]

Well it's official.  "Fine Art" America now sells t-shirts.   Nothing left but stickers and coffee mugs to differentiate them from Zazzle.  I assume those are coming.

Let's all get to work on funny cats, cute babies and copyrighted sports logos.