Those people will suck all blood out of you! Very unprofessional and pathetic customer service. I wanted to simply make a custom t-shirt and poster for my friend's birthday. It took me a month. Why?! Because zazzle.com has incredibly rude and unhelpful content management team. They cancelled my order 2 times and had a big dispute 3rd time telling me that my design is somebody else's intellectual property. It takes 10 days for them to refund your money. To make the long story short I've been convincing them that my design is my own "intellectual property" and I created it myself, people in content team told me to translate what my t-shirt design says (it was in russian)...i mean, why?!?! What's the point and besides why can't they do it themselves using the google translate...where in their policy it says to attach translation to the design. Horrible experience! I always liked zazzle for the quality of their products but that was the last straw. People in customer service have no skills, never answer your complaint letters and never apologize. Use it if you are willing to deal with thousands of pointless question and LONG time to process your order. Have a nice day!
The complaint has been investigated and resolved to the customer’s satisfaction.
Wow, I had a similar experience this week - wish I'd read your comments first. I wrote about it on my blog - and hours later, received petulant, defensive comments there - gee, I wonder who it could have been? So I responded in kind. This is no way to run a business.
http://johndstanton.blogspot.com/2009/12/zazzle-tip-wear-cup.html
The content management team are just a bunch of low paying drones that don't know anything about copyright protection. They may claim that you violated copyrights while in fact they are bunch of ###s making assumptions without any proof.
Basically, under the content management team's eyes that you are guilty until proven innocent (if at all possible).
The content management team should all be fired.
I couldn't agree more.
I had to explain copyright law to these idiots and they STILL continue to cancel and order that I have the legal right to make.
They are completely incompetent. And that is the nicest word I can possibly use for them.
I spent hours and hours designing a calendar on Zazzle.com. I took great care to avoid trademarked text and images because I have had horror stories with Zazzle's arbitrary, incompetent and secretive content review policy. They make you play guessing games. They claim trademark/copyright violations but won't say exactly what. They claim image violations and then link me me to an image I photographed of an object I own! They make you try and guess if there is any complainant at all. And if you ask for any kind of reasonable details to fix the problem they say it cannot be divulged because of legal policy. Oh but it gets even better. This time around they removed the calendar from public sale AND ALSO removed it from my private list and even from my in-progress designs. It is completely gone. So I LOST HOURS AND HOURS of design work. Zazzle sucks.
I am a shop owner there and dont get any better explanations that you. I had an image up ona number of products for a week, then they were removed saying I may have violated some UK Defence department. May have. I then looked through their shop for similar products and guess what? There were not only heaps of them using the same image background I used, but I have a similar image that is up(A Spitfire of WW2, the image in controversy is a Hurricane of WW2) and that image is ok? These incompetent fools simply do not have any idea on what the copyright laws are, and if they did, they would know that it is not their responsibilty for the images, but the copyright holder to take legal action against the person who is putting the image up. All I can say is what a bunch of ###ing idiots.
Yeah, Zazzle content review are absolutely a type of 'special' all of their own. I got a basketball reviewed and deleted because it featured the Portuguese national flag. Apparently, such content was not 'suitable for display on Zazzle or printing by their partners'. This despite me, and many others have hundreds of other products featuring the Portuguese flag.
Could this be yet another example of Zazzle employing such low life [censored] in their CRT that they actually don't know what the flag (or Portugal) is, and think it is some kind of racist thing? Probably, but alas, we will never know, because as others have pointed out here - Zazzle CRT never actually read and respond to questions, beyond sending a link to their Content Guidelines. You couldn't make this stuff up. Really considering closing my Zazzle account, despite selling quite a lot (and hence making them a lot of money) every month.
Zazzle - the worst service in the history of the internet. AVOID.
What it all boils down to with these "content managers" is whether or not their personal politics and sensitivities were in some way, shape, or form accosted. In short, whether or not you created said image or not is irrelevant. If the individual "assessing" the image, listing name, and tags doesn't like it---oh well.
They sell themselves, or at least they used to, as being a resource for artists to sell their work. Yep, it sure is. What they don't tell you is that they charge so much up front for their hit or miss quality, that designers are forced to lower their royalty rates to the bare minimum if they have any hope of generating sales. Also, their "discount codes" do not come out of the Zazzle profits, but out of the designers profits.
Zazzle appears less about helping artists than they are themselves and their personal political agendas. Take a look at what they offer as "trending" and what they promote and ask yourself, does Zazzle help designers or just a specific type of designer?
My frustration stems from the arbitrary decisions being made. I often create, or buy, items with original artwork from famous painters. I recently received a cancellation for an item that had a famous portrait of Queen Elizabeth II. I did not create, or alter, the item…it is sold on their site. Research into the artwork shows the painting is in the public domain…there is no copyright. The cancellation notification states they don’t have a license to sell merchandise of the person. Okay, you don’t have a license to sell merchandise of Queen Elizabeth, who is all over the site? Is it de Laszlo’s, the artist? Again, I purchased the item, already made, from the site. If a license is needed to sell items linked to these two individuals, perhaps the company should remove the multitude of items being offered on their site. I am fine with maintaining a policy that is compatible with laws, but this makes no sense.