OK, so I didn’t do enough research before I made my last post about Zazzle’s recent news. I always seem to forget to check the forum announcements which is where they placed the FAQ about the new UK site. I do blame Zazzle partly because of their featureless forum though.

Zazzle’s new UK Site – FAQ

You should click on the link above to read the finer details but below are the points I felt are the most significant.

1. The items are still being distributed from the US but prices on the Zazzle.co.uk site are inclusive of VAT (Value Added Tax) and customs duties.
2. For shopkeepers, if you are earning your royalties and earnings in Dollars, and your product is sold on the Zazzle.co.uk website to a customer who pays Pounds, the earnings for that sale are converted to Dollars and paid in Dollars and vice versa.
3. At the moment the earnings for each domain will appear separately and to check you will need to log into the respective domains but they are working on a soon to be released consolidated account system which will hopefully also give us the ability to consolidate different stores rather than just .com and .co.uk versions of the same store. (I said hopefully because I hope so but I couldn’t find any indication that this will be the case.)
4. Referrals: This is a point I am very unhappy about as Zazzle are not living up to their promise here. If you refer someone to the zazzle.com but they end up buying from zazzle.co.uk, which I assume anyone ordering from Europe will do, we will not get the referral commission even though Zazzle clearly says “You get a 15% referral fee on every product sold, even if it’s not your content!” on their website (link). So we are immediately losing referral income here and when Zazzle creates even more localized sites, such as Canada and Australia we will also lose those commissions too.

In this case I think that Cafepress seem to have installed a much superior localization system as it doesn’t look like affiliates will lose commission because people shopped in a different currency. Zazzle has only recently introduced their improved Zazzle Seller Incentive Program but now I bet a lot of people are going to lose the incentive to promote Zazzle items.

Referrals are domain-specific, so someone who clicks on a referral on a link to zazzle.com won’t get referral for purchases made on zazzle.co.uk because the user cookies are different for each domain.