Category page experiment update & new Category page design for WordPress

Envato Announcements
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That was 2006. The internet was young, WordPress was even younger and merely a basic blogging cms. In our times ads are the biggest way to get audience and revenue, and i am talking about any product, digital or not.

If you don’t spend money, you don’t make money.

Again, you can promote your products on FB and Google and have great numbers in sale and traffic but why keep it on envato? Why should they take a big piece of the pie?

Anyway, i suggest you guys to continue working and sell your items trough your website, because this ship is sinking.

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At least to be fair to authors, make that sort more visible, cause new customers even don’t see it! Like this:

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Perfect !!!

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It’s funny that title in WordPress is “2019’s Newest Premium WordPress themes from ThemeForest” :joy:

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All you need is a credits system, happy affiliate authors and some legal advice from Saul Goodman… If you are struggling financially just add a sponsored banner to Envato Elements and the advertising revenue will rain from the sky.

No but seriously, I am very sorry to read about how insensitive these decisions are and how many authors and products it affects negatively. As many changes Envato has done the last year it seems rushed and certainly comes with a big cost of unwanted repercussions in the long run.

Just imagine if the top decision makers actually listened and involved several experienced authors who actually knows in detail whats going on in the alleys of the marketplaces. Just imagine if better preparation to changes could be made together with the community. Is it so much to ask for? Are the top decision makers to insecure to ask questions and communicate with those who create their salaries? Could it be a win win to to actually communicate with the community? So many questions… I just really struggle to understand why silence treatment and sudden major changes are the norm around here. I think it is very unnecessary and counterproductive.

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Won’t buyers get tired from seeing the best selling items over and over?

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Seeing that this changes seem here to stay, we are suggesting some design changes around this that could work to increase traffic for new items and also shine light on some hidden gems:

https://forums.envato.com/t/petition-to-envato-new-category-pages-design

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To be honest if we going to stay silent about those changes that we didn’t want, they will become more corporate greedy and make more experiments that hurts authors. Plus i don’t think we are a community-driven market, we are completely ignored by Envato, they haven’t even replied to this topic with more feedback. let’s rise our voices in a polite way.

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@Exill Yes, exactly. They’re beginning to act as a monopoly doing whatever they wish without caring about authors cause they know there’s simply no other marketplace as big and well known as theirs.

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I’m fine with changes as long as they don’t hurt us authors, giving 0 exposure to our new items is just disrespectful.

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Before a year ago Envato model is community centric. They took decision equivalent to all community members even if Authors OR Buyers. BUT what happen after 2018, the whole model is changed to customer centric.

They forgot the Community definition completely. Community means equal decision for every one instead of filter the Authors as types wise. Best seller always be Best even after years pass on… Newest Authors/Products never being in Best seller category after this decision.

Request to do not treat or partition Authors as just of your 5% profit margin increase. Treat us Equally and save the whole Authors community.

We all Authors seeing each other equally, after this decision its complete chance to confliction between Author community members.

No one value the new Authors and that trends to effect the Newest Item quality and pricing too. Nowadays we seen that the Item Approval rate is high and misuse of Author Driven Pricing model also in top-notch.

From last 2 years we all seen that Envato doesn’t look further on Authors and going to make the entire marketplace for Business perspective model. Its good for you but what about the Authors, who blindly trust you and working full time just for this community?

My Advise :-1:
Next time before take any decision for this community just put yourself as a New Author and think twice.

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They should let us know when will they extend the new category design to the rest of the categories and markets? at least it gives new items a bit of exposure…

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@trent-aus Hey, thanks for the update! I have 2 questions:

  1. Has Envato ever taken into a consideration to A/B test something like creating a slightly advanced algorithm to show the default ordering for both category pages and search results? This can be similar to what wordpress.org does with the plugins. As an example, it could be using various factors altogether to calculate the “best” items, based on number of total sales, last updated/publish date, number of ratings, average rating, etc…

  2. Can you share with us the percentage of people which come to items from category pages comparing to percentage of people which come to items from search result pages?

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Thanks everyone for your feedback. We know that for some of you this change is unwelcome. We recognize that the way our ecosystem is setup, new items are the quickest way to gain exposure and sales for author items and that by making these changes we are having a negative impact for those of you who are accustomed to this type of workflow.

We also recognize that there have been some bugs and challenges with our A/B/C/D experiment, especially in categories where some sorting styles don’t match customer purchasing behaviors.

We have been conducting these experiments and are now launching a brand new category page design because we want to rebalance the ecosystem to give new authors and new items an opportunity to be seen while also giving trending items and best selling items an opportunity to be presented to customers.

When a customer finds what they are looking for, whether new, best rated or trending, authors earn and customers have a great outcome. We want to continue to put effort into making Market a great place to sell and that means creating more ways to expose all types of content to customers for them to browse.

We do not plan to leave category pages as they have always been because we want to improve the discovery experience for customers, something they consistently tell us needs to be improved. In particular, we’re looking to add more sections that include things like items on sale, hand picked items and seasonal items.

We’ve also seen your recommendations and ideas for how to improve category pages and search results and we are feeding that into our design and UX research process to test them out. Thank you for taking the time to share them with us. We cannot guarantee every idea will make it to the experiment stage but we really value the expertise and insight you consistently share with us.

We want to test the new category page on a high traffic category to help us get results and reactions quickly which is why we’ve chosen to begin with WordPress. Our plan at the moment is to feed the learnings from this experiment into the launch plans for more categories. The approach will likely be similar to how we’ve rolled out redesign projects in the past, staggering launches in phases across marketplaces to ensure no negative impact to conversion and applying new learnings as quickly as we can to the design and layout.

Thanks again for your comments and feedback, we really appreciate the ideas you’ve brought forward. We’ll update you as soon as we can with details about our next steps on the new category page designs.

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Meanwhile I saw the new category page. Selling fast - it’s a best selling themes that was added in this year. I thought this category will display themes that have best sales ratio of the previous day/hour/min/etc. Nope, again best sellers.

Highest rated - higest rated themes added in this year (where 3 stars theme (5 overall) has better rank than theme with 100 stars (overall 4.99).

Weekly best sellers = popular items.

Nothing to say.

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Interesting decision. I hope niche themes can get more exposure than multi-monster-1000demo-themes at $19.

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I agree with @meks You should give more information about which customer comes where.

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So Envato aware of the negative impact for such experiment on new authors, Good to hear you have planes for new items too… Hope to see more updates and numbers from you.

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It’s not some of us good sir, it’s the absolute majority! And how exactly are the new items going to get exposure with all this changes?

You know, I’ve been here for quite a while (just got my 10 years badge) and from time to time I would see a well established author leaving the marketplace my reaction was “This guy is insane, why would he leave so much money on table for the miserable chance to succeed on his own?”.

Then I slowly started to realize… they are not the ones with sanity issues. These people just saw it coming, seeing earlier than everyone how little by little you guys are screwing us as authors, initiating discussions for the sake of discussion, manipulating facts (yes, this very thread IS a pure facts manipulation, "We saw better conversions throughout marketplaces… who we? Is this how statistics work now?) and by alienating the authors.

Envato community is becoming an oxymoron now. There’s no sense of community any more, just “we do what we want, adapt or get the hell out” attitude from Envato officials, with a bit of sugar coating, because we are the civilized nice guys, aren’t we?

I understand that a big part of your bet for growing the product base is still on people who have no other choice, no backup, but merely a hope that some day, it will be better. The bad news is, there’s no “some day” any more, it is just getting worse with each year.

Soon you will be left with dozen authors with best selling items and plethora of authors from the countries where $500 month income is still considered something. Because everyone else will slowly leave, this is no more a sustainable business, people can’t feed families and nobody can rely on a chance for any good decision from you any more.

This is so, so frustrating! I loved what Envato used to be. Heck, I was so grateful that you guys exist as you empowered so many people who started making living with you. Guess it’s time to just move on.

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Hi

I think current display best sellers not in the correct way. In best sellers I can see in First page
most Items which are Last updated: before 2016. Also in some category some Items showing which are Last updated: before 2012. I am very much surprised how those so much back dated Items can be best recommendation where our experts Auhtor creating more modern Item with most latest technology. If you really love to show best Item to customers then I think have to consider (algorithm) most sell, most rated, latest updated, avg. ratings etc. Also I think in some way Envato should to represent New Items to customers. New items can run any market smoothly and can attract customers.

Thanks

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