However, we received no referral commission (see below); instead only getting the standard 60% cut rather than the expected 75%.
We have name, email, IP, and timestamp confirmation: this is indisputable evidence that Creative Market failed to detect & pay out affiliate sales properly — yet their team chose to delete our account rather than properly investigate this severely-concerning bug.
This evidence strongly suggests Creative Market is not paying Shop Owners their duly-owed profits, and instead siphoning the funds to their own business.
2. The support team deletes our account
We contacted Creative Market support the very same day (Aug 5), received no reply for 5 days, and after much follow-up they finally redirected us to their engineering team.
After that, we received no reply for over a month; when I followed up with Creative Market support in the first week of September, they responded abusively and then abruptly deleted our Shop, and one day later, deleted our entire account.
Creative Market usually only suspends shops due to payment fraud or chargebacks (even suspension does not entail full account deletion, in order to prevent past customers from losing access to their purchases from said Shop) — this peculiar course of action would seem to suggest Creative Market was trying to hide the evidence of their wrongdoing.
3. The aftermath: Creative Market's abusive behavior
As mentioned earlier, Creative Market followed this up by continuing to illegally run Google Search ads for our brand name, plus entirely neglected to send our 1099 before the tax deadline (both of which were only remedied after we reached out to the Support team).
Finally, to add insult to injury, months later "Berry" from Dribbble (who acquired Creative Market) repeatedly cold emails us (with no unsubscribe link, a blatant CAN-SPAM violation) inviting us to join the VERY SAME affiliate program that started this whole ordeal.
As evidenced here, the Creative Market's flagrant & abusive behavior shows absolutely no regard for creators, nor the terms of their User Agreement.
Since being acquired by Dribbble, they have rolled out a whole slew of creator-unfriendly updates, including:
Reducing the cookie window from 1 year to 30 days for Affiliate sales
Increasing their (already very high) take rate on sales from 30% to 40%
Introduced a new "Platform Fee" added to all purchases
Deleted the Shop Owner forum to silence negative feedback
Put together, all of this spells disaster for anyone selling on Creative Market. Due to the changes above, creators on their platform have already seen their sales falling by as much as 70-80%.
If you're just getting started as a creator, you're probably much better off listing your products on a different marketplace (ie. Gumroad, Sellfy, Flurly). We hope sharing this story helps to inform and educate other creators when choosing where to sell their digital products.
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