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).
