Why to never sell your digital products on Creative Market

We've waited quite a while to share this, but given the circumstances it felt important that other creators be made aware of this—

tl;dr:

1. We found indisputable evidence that Creative Market's Affiliate program failed to recognize an affiliate sale referred from our site.
2. When we questioned this, Creative Market's support team deleted our shop without cause (cutting off hundreds of our customers).
3. Then, they illegally ran Google Search ads for our brand name, plus failed to send our 1099 before the tax deadline.
4. Finally, they send us cold emails inviting us back to the same Affiliate program!

1. Creative Market's affiliate system fails

At 10:09am Aug 5, we sold a pitch deck template directly via vip.graphics (not Creative Market) to Jeremy H. (name redacted for privacy).

As you can see below, Jeremy made this purchase from Long Beach, California via Google Chrome on a Mac OS X desktop, directly on our website:

Jeremy (same name, IP, location, device, etc.) returned to our website at 10:25am Aug 5 (see below)...

Jeremy was referred to CreativeMarket 3 min. later by clicking on the affiliate link at vip.graphics/shop/photorealistic-slides-mockup/ (where noted below).

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
• Introduced a membership model that creators & buyers hate
• Deleted the Shop Owner forum to silence negative feedback
• Altering the search algorithm to hide new products

Put together, all of this spells disaster for anyone selling on Creative Market.

Update (Sep 2022): since the changes above were implemented, feedback from both sellers and creators has been overwhelmingly negative. Creative Market has dropped below 2-stars across review platforms, with countless different complaints:

Due to the changes above, creators on their platform have already seen their sales falling by as much as 70-80%. Others report their products were illegally copied / pirated immediately after uploading to Creative Market.

We even found another user (a buyer, not a creator) who dealt with the same support agent as we did (Beth), who also deleted her account.

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.