A few days ago I followed on from having my T Shirts listed on two websites Redbubble and Teespring to adding them to another website Zazzle.com. Then after three days I received 5 versions of the below email from Zazzle telling me that all my shirts had been removed.
Zazzle Content Review Team
Dear Brendan,
Thank you for your interest in Zazzle, and for publishing products on the site.
Unfortunately, it appears that your product, [Tshirt Title], contains content that is in conflict with one or more of our content guidelines.
We will be removing this product from the Zazzle Marketplace shortly.
The details of the product being removed are listed below:
Design contains an image or text that may infringe on intellectual property rights. We have been contacted by the intellectual property right holder and we will be removing your product from Zazzle’s Marketplace due to infringement claims.
I know for a fact that none of the 5 shirts I uploaded violated any copyright infringement. So I think what has happened is one of three things.
- All 5 designs were flagged at the exact same time so it could be a case of a competitor flagging my designs to remove me from the website.
- My designs are already on Redbubble and Teespring as mentioned previously so if Zazzle crawls other websites looking for similar designs it may have seen my designs on other websites and assumed that I had copied them from somewhere else.
- It did use copyrighted terms in my product tags but this has never been a problem on any other website. So it could be that Zazzle saw this and decided to remove my shirts because of this reason.
What Am I going to do about this?
I could email Zazzle and ask for an explanation and if necessary plead my case but as it stands there are another 10 other print on demand websites that I can add my t shirts to so I’m going to put Zazzle on the back burner for now and focus on adding my shirts to another website instead. The site will probably be Spreadshirt as it seems to be the biggest site after Amazon Merch, Redbubble, and Teespring.
Merch By Amazon
I’m still waiting to be approved by Merch By Amazon, it’s been about 10 weeks so I’m starting to get impatient. That being said I’ve had about 12 sales in the last 30 days from just two other websites so I can’t really complain that much. One of my friends sells on Amazon Merch and thinks I’m going to kill it when I finally get approved as I’m already getting a decent amount of sales from sites that get a tiny amount of traffic compared to Amazon. We’ll have to wait and see. I’ll make sure to keep you updated.