Author-Driven Pricing Coming to All GraphicRiver

Earlier this year, we started a project to review pricing on GraphicRiver. We felt our traditional pricing approach - very complex, fixed and Envato-controlled - was holding the marketplace back. We decided to test a more flexible approach and, in April 2015, began a phased rollout of author-driven pricing for the Fonts, Add-ons and Presentation Templates categories.

Today, after seven months of successful monitoring and positive results for both authors and buyers, we’re excited to announce that early next week we will be expanding this approach to all of GraphicRiver.

What is Author-Driven Pricing?

Historically, pricing has been the joint responsibility of our strategy and quality teams for all items available for sale on Envato Market. Our prices are designed to reflect item quality, complexity, potential demand and license type. They also take a variety of external factors such as competitor pricing, supply and demand into account.

In the new world of author-driven pricing, authors set the item price, and in doing so effectively choose the price they wish to sell at. The buyer fee also switches from being 20% of the list price to a fixed buyer fee based on item category. See the full list of fixed buyer fees

Why Are We Doing This?

We know our buyers are interested in stock graphics and templates, and that we could do more to help them find what they want on GraphicRiver. Given industry pricing approaches are highly variable, we think changing our pricing approach for GraphicRiver will improve opportunities for the entire community, and over time expect to see more higher end files and creative pricing strategies, increased responsiveness to market trends and happier customers.

In fact, we’ve already seen some of these positive changes play out. Since we launched author-driven pricing on the Fonts, Add-ons and Presentation Templates categories, more and more authors have started to experiment with pricing, making slight adjustments up and down, tailoring pricing to their work, and, most excitingly, achieving better results overall.

The icing on the cake? Faster review times. Updating and applying the GraphicRiver pricing structure (Market’s most complex) has been an incredibly time consuming process. So with author-driven pricing, we also look forward to processing your items more quickly and spending more time on other quality initiatives such as better documentation.

As always, we’ve carefully considered the commercial, community and buyer impact and we’ll be closely monitoring results. This is the only marketplace we’re changing at this time, however we’re always reviewing how pricing works on Envato Market and will announce any other changes here in Envato Announcements as usual.

Details of How to Price Your Items

When the changes go live, GraphicRiver authors will be able to enter item prices for all available license types for their item into the price text box on the upload page, or on the edit item page. Price recommendations will be shown alongside the item price field as a guide only. Once you've submitted your edits, the price change will take effect immediately. Read more about this in our [help center][2].

For this release, we’ll be leaving all list prices as is, except for a very small number of items where the sum of the fixed buyer fee plus the item price exceeds the list price the author had previously selected. Get a refresher on Envato Market pricing terminology

Although we won’t change the list price during the release, in some cases the new structure may cause a decrease or increase in the item price. If your item price changes and you wish to return it to what it was pre-launch, you will be able to do so on the edit item page.

IMPORTANT Information About Pricing Discussions

Remember, there are strict laws governing pricing conduct. In particular, it’s strictly prohibited to have an agreement, arrangement or understanding between competing businesses (such as two authors) about what price point to sell at. Think of this as needing to avoid any discussion on the specifics of how you’re pricing your item or what you think item prices should be. How to price your work is a commercial decision you will need to make for yourself. Read more about this in our [help center][4].

We will be monitoring closely this forum thread closely. If you’re an author, please don’t discuss with other authors what prices you’ll be setting on your items (either here, in other forum threads or anywhere else).

6 Likes

This is epic news! Thank you envato! :smile:

It would kill me … from 2013 sales fell, and now dumping prices. Goodbye envato

3 Likes

Hoping for better results with these changes! :slight_smile:

I’m not excited about this idea

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Quick question. Why GraphicRiver and not the rest of the marketplaces? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining… I’m not yet convinced if this is a good thing or a bad thing. Just curious at the moment why “very complex, fixed and Envato-controlled” is fine for the rest of the marketplaces, but not GraphicRiver?

7 Likes

i don’t understand any thing
is the fee will be same for all ? or what happen ?

Very bad idea.

3 Likes

I’m not GraphicRiver author but this is a bad idea.
IMO Envato should increase prices for all the items, including CodeCanyon and Themeforest.

1 Like

i don’t understand any thing, could you explain what you knew ?

“your price” is misleading here. I think you should offer a simple calculator where I write EXACTLY how much I want to earn per sale.

Hi everyone, we know people both love and hate the idea of author-driven pricing and that it could lead to various outcomes — good and bad. This is the main reason why we’ve taken a slowly slowly approach and why we have so far, and will continue to, monitor the impacts very closely.

@SpaceStockFootage the main reasons why only GraphicRiver are outlined under the “why” section of the post as well as opening para.

This is a good news if the price has increased. for example
Flyer price now ( $6) normal price, At Author- Driven pricing it will looks like this
Price item (5$) + Buyer fee (1$) = 5X0.63 = 3.15$ ==>> (“12.5-37.5%” for exclusive author depending in your sales volume).
Price item (5$) + Buyer fee (1$) = 5X0.45 = 2.25$ ==>> (“55%” for Non-exclusive author ).

Not bad idea if the item price option is increased above normal price. for example if the flyer price become 7$
Apologize for my bad language, this is what i understood :smile:

Hey flyersking, that’s right, I wrote up an example which is in the Help Center on author earnings which I think is helpful! Here it is:

Take an author selling a Photoshop add-on. Envato’s fixed buyer fee for this category is $1. The remainder of the total list price is the author’s item price, on which we’ll charge an author fee. Let’s assume the author is an exclusive author who has made it to the lowest fee (12.5%). Here’s how different pricing decisions would play out:

Here’s how different pricing decisions would play out:

  • Author sets the item price at $1, it’ll be listed at $2, author earnings will be 87.5% x $1 = $0.88 (or you can think of it as 43.75% of the total list price).
  • Author sets the item price at $4, it’ll be listed at $5, author earnings will be 87.5% x $4 = $3.50 (or you can think of it as 70% of the total list price).
  • Author sets the item price at $9, it’ll be listed at $10, author earnings will be 87.5% x $9 = $7.88 (or you can think of it as 78% of the total list price).
  • Author sets the item price at $19, it’ll be listed at $20, author earnings will be 87.5% x $19 = $16.63 (or you can think of it as 83% of the total list price).

Of course you can raise the price … but it would reduce purchasing power.
All innovations envato lead to an indirect or direct losses authors

Correct me pls if I’m wrong.

5 Likes

that is mean all authors will take 70% of all price ?
there is no 50% to 70% depended on sale value ?

Has anything changed yet? I just got $1.91 earnings for a $4 item instead of the usual $2.04 that I get (51%). It’s an add-on item. What’s all that about?

Hi Toivo,

Because we’ve switched to a fixed buyer fee, we’ve placed them all at whole dollar amounts. We’ve left the total price the same, and the item price has then varied. Here’s an example:

3 ITEMS BEFORE THE CHANGE
$6 add-on = $1.25 buyer fee + $4.75 item price
$5 add-on = $1 buyer fee + $4 item price
$4 add-on = $.75 buyer fee + $3.25 item price

AFTER THE CHANGE
$6 add-on = $1 buyer fee + $5 item price
$5 add-on = $1 buyer fee + $4 item price
$4 add-on = $1 buyer fee + $3 item price

Depending on the previous prices of your items you may have gone up or down. Fwiw we modelled overall so that it came out in favour of authors more often than Envato.

In any case, you are free to change your item price now as you wish :slight_smile:

Hi far_star60, good question. We still decrease our author fees over time. For an exclusive author, we charge 37.5% of the item price, but over time that will decrease to 12.5%.

The math takes a bit of time to get used to! So here’s two examples, one for a starting exclusive author getting the 37.5% fee (who therefore gets left with 62.5% of the item price):

  • Author sets the item price at $1, it’ll be listed at $2, author earnings will be 62.5% x $1 = $0.63 (or you can think of it as 31.25% of the total list price).
  • Author sets the item price at $4, it’ll be listed at $5, author earnings will be 62.5% x $4 = $3.50 (or you can think of it as 50% of the total list price).
  • Author sets the item price at $9, it’ll be listed at $10, author earnings will be 62.5% x $9 = $7.88 (or you can think of it as 56% of the total list price).
  • Author sets the item price at $19, it’ll be listed at $20, author earnings will be 62.5% x $19 = $11.88 (or you can think of it as 59% of the total list price).

And then the same one for an author who has made $75k of sales and whose fee is 12.5% (who therefore gets left with 87.5% of the item price)

  • Author sets the item price at $1, it’ll be listed at $2, author earnings will be 87.5% x $1 = $0.88 (or you can think of it as 43.75% of the total list price).
  • Author sets the item price at $4, it’ll be listed at $5, author earnings will be 87.5% x $4 = $3.50 (or you can think of it as 70% of the total list price).
  • Author sets the item price at $9, it’ll be listed at $10, author earnings will be 87.5% x $9 = $7.88 (or you can think of it as 78% of the total list price).
  • Author sets the item price at $19, it’ll be listed at $20, author earnings will be 87.5% x $19 = $16.63 (or you can think of it as 83% of the total list price).

Thanks Collis, interesting stuff. I think I’ll just put the price to max on all my items and take it from there. :stuck_out_tongue: