Selling on Creative Fabrica: Designer Review
Today I’m sharing what I think about selling on Creative Fabrica. I have a previous post on selling on Design Bundles if you’re interested.
Related: Where to Sell Fonts and SVGs
If you’re a digital designer, thinking about where to sell your designs is a frequently asked question. Every designer will have a different opinion based on their personal experiences. I’ve been selling on Creative Fabrica for 3+ years, so I hope I can share some unbiased opinions with you today.
Uploading Process
Creative Fabrica is pretty easy to upload to. As you can see below, it’s a pretty simple page. Compared to Design Bundles and Creative Market, it’s definitely lacking in options. However, when I upload to Creative Fabrica I don’t worry as much about having a unique description, and meta data (since you can’t add that anyways). So this process is pretty quick and I can get a handful of designs uploaded in under 10 minutes.
Once you’ve submitted your product it can take 1-2 days for the product to go live on the site. Once you’ve got a few products approved, the new ones should upload automatically. Fonts take a bit longer since I believe they check the actual font files.
If you wish to remove a product it can take up to 3 months for it to be removed from the site.
You can opt in to the promotions if you’d like. I was chosen for their Pick n Mix or Discount Deals (I can’t remember) and I made an extra $70 that month. It was a nice surprise.
Fees & Payouts
Now this is where Creative Fabrica differs from their competitors. Customers can make regular purchases (a one-off purchase) or they can purchase a subscription from CF.
For one-off purchases, you can earn up to 75% on every sale. If the referral comes from you then you will get 75%, if the referral comes from CF then you will get 50%.
With the subscription plan, this is where CF gets a little shady. They don’t come out and really explain how payments work for subscription purchases. “Each month you will get paid for the downloads the customer made of your products” -Creative Fabrica. Now to me that sounds like they can pay you whatever they want and you’ll literally never know if it’s correct or not. I mean, I’m sure they’re doing things fairly, but the vagueness around it is odd to me.
I did a little bit more digging, and there is a link in the seller admin panel for more information. Creative Fabrica has asked to keep this info private, so I won’t say too much. But what I can say is the subscription payout should increase the more products you have. I’ll be testing this theory this year for sure to know if that’s accurate or not.
From my recent sales it looks like I’m getting $0.40-0.45 per sale on SVGs. This would be 10% of the listed price, but I wish there was more clarity surrounding payments.
You can request a payout at any time. There is a $0.50 charge for payouts under $10 (for the Paypal payment option). There are no fees if you wait until you’re above the $10 limit. Payout is added in 7 days from when you request it.
License
The license on Creative Fabrica isn’t one I’m as familiar with. I haven’t spent as much time looking at their license compared to Design Bundles. However the biggest takeaway I always remind people is that if you have a subscription with Creative Fabrica and you cancel it, you can no longer use the goods purchased during your subscription.
Related: 20 Digital Products to Start Selling
Affiliate Program
Earn 25% for every purchase a customer makes after clicking your link. If they buy a subscription you will get 20% every time their subscription renews. There isn’t much information on if someone is your affiliate forever, or if they click on someone else’s link they go to that affiliate.
Sharing products is easy, but there aren’t any Pin images in listings so if you’re looking to market on Pinterest their platform isn’t the best for that.
CF Fans
Similar to Patreon, there’s CF Fans where you can create your own subscription plan. I think this works for designers that are already doing well on Creative Fabrica. However, if you’re not then Patreon might be a better option. CF Fans doesn’t get talked about as much so the regular customer might trust Patreon more.
Final Thoughts
Overall if you are a designer looking for another platform to try, I say to give selling on Creative Fabrica a shot. You don’t have to post all your work, but it’s always best to not rely 100% on one platform. I recommend only submitting work you are okay with receiving pennies for. This may mean it’s your oldest work but that’s okay.