We are not authors but an agency. We use a custom demo bar to showcase hand-picked theme demos to our prospect clients. They choose between 4 or 5 themes specially selected for their project and then we proceed to buy and customize and add all possible values to the project.
I’m pretty sure many agencies and developers do this in a similar way.
However every time more and more demos come full of buy me now buttons and similar call to action info. This is far from desirable for us. We do not need our customers to know the price of our raw materials. Is not that we don’t like transparency but we offer a price for a web development package that includes many things has nothing to with theme price and having the customer look at the theme price brings nothing but confusion.
We’ve been selecting only themes that don’t have this links, so our customers are missing on some great themes and of course this does not benefit the theme author either.
I remember this wasn’t like this back in the day, and I feel more and more this has become a normal practice.
It would be great to start a discussion on this. Either have two different demos, one more “white label” without buy me buttons or directly get rid of this. I’m pretty sure those buttons are taking more sales away than the other way around.
For example, template monster (used to buy from them) takes this very seriously, even having a different domain for demos which is very white label and makes it hard for customers to find out who our provider is, which is not bad at all.
The way I see it, the best option would be to have a copy of the demo without those call to action buttons for industry people like you guys.
Getting rid of them is bad for authors because authors advertise their landing pages outside of Themeforest so when a user sees the landing page without a call to action he has no idea how and where to buy it or even if the thing is for sale.
Let me assume: you are regular buyer of “1000-in-1” themes. But it isn’t enough for $59. Lol.
not really. I’m a regular buyer of themes period. I buy one for every web project I get. I do not just simply resell themes, I customize them for my customers. I’m pretty sure a lot of your customers make money customizing your themes, but hey, you probably know your customers. Lol
I don’t think so. I can’t understand why you simply can’t explain your customers that they are paying for YOUR services. Instead this, you ask authors to remove call-to-action buttons. I.e. ‘I can’t sell my services because these call-to-action buttons prevent me. Authors, you must do something! Remove these buttons’. I think you understand now my point of view.
I do understand it. And of course I can sell my services even with those buttons. It only does not look as professional as it could and there are explanations to be made that could be spared.
The idea of having a separate demo without call-to-actions seems to be worth a thought.
It seems like a reasonable enough request on your part. But I agree with what’s been mentioned above, the Author needs a call to action in order to point their own customers where to buy.
I’m not sure what the perfect solution here is, maybe some code tinkering to allow you to toggle the buy button on/off in certain situations but it does sound like a bit of a hassle.
