I hadn't exactly planned to start selling on Creative Fabrica (I applied last year on my own and was rejected) but I was contacted by a staff member this summer with a pre-approval for selling if I wanted to and at the time I figured, what the heck, why not.
In hindsight I'm glad I went ahead with the offer because I've come to realize that the best way forward for me as a digital seller is to have a broader range of income source points. Etsy traffic can no longer be relied upon and the digital design market is seeing some significant challenges - see my previous post about AI as a market disrupter.
So let's talk about Creative Fabrica (CF from here on).
To begin with I was already a paid subscriber and an affiliate. As a buyer I quite like the platform although I feel the navigation could use some fine tuning. I find their categories a bit weird and you're really better off using the search bar rather than just randomly browsing.
The cost is a fantastic deal and one of the cheapest subscriptions per product volume I've come across. So as a buyer, it's a win. I bought my subscription purely for the fonts but have managed to use it for a few other assets as well and easily got my money's worth out of it in no time.
As a seller... well... there are some issues. Overall I think I'm ok with things as they are for now but I definitely would like to see some improvements.
I'll cover the positives first. Customer service has been stellar. They do have an AI chat bot but it is so easy to go from that into an email to an actual human being. They reply very promptly and have been both helpful and friendly. I haven't had any actual issues to deal with but have reached out with some simple questions that needed more info than the AI bot could provide.
Whatever they have been doing to grow the marketplace in terms of both sellers and buyers it's working. They have a huge audience and I was surprised how quickly my shop took off with favs, follows and downloads. I'm sure the subscription price is a big part of their success.
Product variety on the site is pretty good. I haven't found everything I've been looking for but there is a very broad selection in certain core categories. I mentioned fonts already, the offering there is pretty diverse and I've found more than enough to keep me busy.
I also like how sellers have free reign to offer as much or as little product per listing as they want. CF doesn't have any restrictions in place in that regard so I'm free to build my listings as I choose. (by comparison Design Bundles does have restrictions on product sizing which can get a little annoying). On the buyer side of that I find bundled items much more convenient sometimes.
So what are the downsides?
The very first thing anyone needs to consider is the earnings per download. It's extremely low, a result of course of the very low subscription price. You get different rates for different types of products but we're talking a penny or two per download in most cases.
The next big issue is data. There is none. As a seller you are given zero information. In fact, so little information I wondered if their setup was even legal. Here is a screenshot of my dashboard. This is all the info you get. You don't know which products have been downloaded or how many times. You don't have a breakdown of your earnings per download or even the total number of downloads. Affiliate earnings or marketplace purchasing are rolled into the total of subscription downloads so you have absolutely no idea where the money has been earned from.
The lack of detailed information is not helpful for sellers and even a hindrance to success. There's very little way to identify what is working for you and what isn't. I contacted CF about this on day one and they said it was something they are working on. But I came across a public forum post from more than year prior where they had said the same thing. So who knows, maybe they are in fact working on it, maybe not as a priority.
As you can see from my full disclosure, I made just over $200 in three months. Bearing in mind that I have been slowly uploading my back catalog of products during that time and still have more to add, and that I think I'm getting a penny per download, it's not too bad as a start. On the other hand, it's hard to see how I'll turn this into a good earner. I'm going to need a lot more product. As I post this my shop has 1,911 listings in it and I have about 250 products queued to list. These are existing products, not newly designed products.
A couple other small negatives to mention are the lack of control over how our shop page is organized, there is no duplication feature for listing creation and you have little editing ability for listed products.
The listing creation tool is pretty simple and easy to use, but you start with a blank form for each and every product. I streamline my uploads with a few efficiency measures like pre-written descriptions and tags that can be quickly copy/pasted into place and listing like products in batches. This helps but is still a slower method.
Having a blank form for each product probably helps eliminate errors, which is problematic in general but additionally here with the inability to go back and edit all parts of a listing on your own. Listing titles and descriptions cannot be edited by the seller once posted, but customer service will do it for you if you drop them a request. I don't find that particularly ideal, especially since I'm prone to typos and mistakes. Tags, images and zip files can be edited by the seller though.
And lastly, the shop page for each seller can only be organized based on the categories that CF offers and not your own organization system (like on Etsy or Design Bundles). This would be fine if CF had a really comprehensive and logical category system. But they don't. It's inconsistent between AI categories and human made products, there are top level categories only and probably quite a few missing categories as well which forces sellers to add products where ever they might best fit. It makes for bloated shop categories that have many different types of files that wouldn't logically be grouped together.
In fairness, I'm not sure how much buyers utilize the category breakdown when shopping or if they rely solely on the search bar. From a marketing perspective though I'd love to have a more organized storefront.
Have any questions? Is there anything I didn't cover? Let me know in the comments!
Shawnna
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