Zazzle Reneges on Promises; Lies; Right Hand Does Not Know What Left is Doing; Hides Problems Internet

1. For the last 4 years Zazzle encouraged store owners to customize their store using CSS, XHTML, and XML. Then they suddenly discontinued this and forced all stores to follow the same format. All the time store owners took to learn and code CSS and XHTML, and XML is now wasted effort. All the money store owners spent to host their own domain for storing images for the purpose of "skinning" their store is now a wasted effort. Many store owners even went to the trouble of setting up their own offsite web sites which matched the look and appearance to drive traffic to their Zazzle store, but now their offsite web site does not match their the look and appearance of their Zazzle store. Yet, Zazzle continues to provide custom stores for big box sellers like Disney and South Park. So what we have here is another company building its business on the backs of small store owners and then giving them a knife in the back once they have become established and instead giving favor big box sellers. These big box sellers were not on the site when it began - it was small time store owners that built Zazzle.

2. Zazzle made claims many times that the custom html on individual product pages would not be touched with the last update in which they eliminated the custom stores, yet this is a lie because most of the tags, aside form the image and line break tag no longer work,. This means many store owners will have to go through many thousands of products and fix that product's custom description area because the html no longer works'. Store owners will also have to wonder how much longer it will take Zazzle to suddenly announce another update, which will then cause store owners to fix thousands of products again?. Zazzle has also started to hide much of the product description by default, which requires customers to click a link to see the information;.

3. Zazzle fails to provide store owner's a place to publish their own terms of service (tos) to help legally protect their designs!. Instead, Zazzle tells store owners they are protected by Zazzle's own user agreement. This is not true at all. Zazzle's user agreement is there to protect Zazzle and certainly provides no protection to store owners in regards to sites outside of Zazzle that may steal store owner's designs. Zazzle's lawyers make Zazzle place copyright notices and a link to their user agreement on every Zazzle page for Zazzle's protection, yet Zazzle prevents store owners from publishing the same information in their own stores. Not having a tos statement in your store may seriously jeopardize any legal actions you may choose to take against individuals who may steal designs from your store. For example, such as tos agreement can include a clause stating that anyone violating your agreement is agreeing to pay for all legal fees in regards to you taking legal action against them for violating the tos. Small store owners are regarded by Zazzle as second class citizens on Zazzle, not worth having their own legal protections in regard to their designs. Publishing your designs on Zazzle can place your work in legal jeopardy because you are unable to publish proper legal statements on Zazzle in regards to the use of your store and designs by others. A simply copyright statement is not enough, which is why Zazzle and many of big box sellers have their own tos.

4. Zazzle routinely abuses its users by removing their posts from their forums which point out problems with their products, stores, and Zazzle. Their customer service wants to put a smile on everything, but sweep the dirt under the carpet. One pathetic company period! Yet, if you contact them directly via their email they rarely provide any solution - they simply say they will forward your email to this and that division, while in the mean time store owners are left in limbo - damned if do and damned if they do not. Zazzle acts like their are a bunch of air head Valley girls form the 1980s who are all shiny on the outside, but have no substance. A arrogant company that does not listen to its customers, thinking it knows everything, will eventually die off.

5. If you want to know how seriously idiotic Zazzle customer service is check out this post (link below) in regards to a Zazzle customer wanting to honor his or her own 91 year old mother who helped save the U.S. during world War II. Zazzle customer service instead refers to his mother as a prisoner.

http://www.ripoffreport.com/r/zazzle/internet-california-/zazzle-tanvir-content-management-tanvir-said-my-91yr-mother-is-a-convicted-criminal-inter-1018424

6. Zazzle has made recent changes in its associates program in regards to paying people for referring sales. By reading the store owner's posts on this matter in their forum, they clearly did not think this through - of course those posts are probably gone by now.

7. If you make posts on their forum, but you suddenly find you can no longer view their forum it likely means you've been banned. A way to check is to try to view the forum through a free web proxy. If you can then there is nothing wrong with their forum, your ip address has been banned (i.e., the web proxy has a different ip thus you can see it). Of course Zazzle will lie to saying it must be a problem with your computer, browser, and so forth. After you point out that you can view the forum via a proxy they will then typically ask for your ip address, but never admit to banning your ip. OK, then, why are you asking for my ip then? LOL, the fact that they can't tell what your ip is in the first place when you contact them tells me they are also technically incompetent.

8. Unless you are big box seller like Disney or South Park you can't rely on them for anything. I went through 3 different major recodings of my custom store, and spent money on hostings services only to have them throw all this work down the drain. Now I am faced with having to redo thousands of product pages once again, but why bother because they will once again change their site in another 6 months and I'll have to do it all over again. Another big question here is why are big brand like Disney and South Park supporting a site that hammers small time artists?