We’ve been an affiliate of Envato for a while, purely because we had a few sites that we could monetise.
However, we don’t continue to push it, nor are we actively setting up new sites to bring in sales to Envato or help get extra sales to awesome themes that have been lost due to the loop hole in the search system. Because of a single reason…
Envato only give you commission for NEW USERS, not existing users like ever other affiliate program does, on a per sale basis. I.e, if a person already has an account with Envato (as 7,120,701 people already do) your commissions are thin and far. Bit of a kick in the balls for the efforts affiliates put in to actually make any money, let alone push sales across.
To Envato: Instead of creating a big prize giveaway to try to get affiliates to push more new users into the site, reward existing affiliates and open up the affiliate program to how it should be.
Reasons why this need to happen:
- We will push for sales of ‘lost items’ that are awesome but no one knows about (not everyone wants to buy from the popular list)
- Individual item owners will get more sales and gain more traction (rewarding smaller and veteran authors)
- Envato traffic would go through the roof
- Envato would make a bucket load more cash!
- Affiliates are 10000x more likely to push the brand and products authors spend hours creating.
Apologies for the rant, however it needs to happen.
Bring indie Envato back, it’s becoming too corporate!
Please post below if you agree with us and if you have any further suggestions to this. Would love to hear the communities response.
Thank you.
8 Likes
Agree. It’s hard to find someone in this industry does not know Envato market 
And affiliate program is good for all, we should improve it
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Totally agree with you.
Commission for only NEW USERS is really a bad idea.
This is pushing other markets like ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ “10% of every purchase for an entire year”. Other markets have a better system than envato…
Few peoples now think to engage with envato affiliate program.
A big problem was the freedom to set prices. I am glad that this is fixed now and authors are free to set prices that want (set discount, more value, …) and I wish that envato team can fix the affiliate policy.
A company can die when it doesn’t listen to their consumers.
The thing is, the affiliate cut is 30%, and on the most popular items, Envato pays out 70% to the authors. So they don’t make anything.
They’re probably happy to lose their commission on the first sale, to get the new buyer through the door, but they’re not going to want to get zero revenue for all the rest of the sales made by a referred buyer.
I guess 10% for a year would be a pretty good compromise though.
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why would they want to reward people who come back? they aren’t going to spend a huge amount (under $100 mostly) and already know of Envato so will go there when they need something.
Most other affiliates don’t give upto 70% of their income away to authors, as SSF said, Envato don’t make any money if a new user buys an item from an elite author once commission is paid.
There are affiliates who are making a good income so either they are cheating the system or yours isn’t very good, you have to be different with Envato affiliates due to the way they share the affiliate. It’s been the same way since Envato started (i may well be wrong though) so you need to optimise your affililiate pages to be more creative to find the people who don’t know of Envato e.g. try to promote a specific WordPress category, get your page ranking in Google for keywords such as “category WordPress theme” or “WordPress themes for category”… what category you choose depends on what you find is a good chance of getting clicks from. Think outside of the box.
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