Category Page Experiments

As the author with best selling PHP script in Codecanyon, having a whooping 12 sales this week so far, i can def. tell you that your changes are killing the sales.

I have no idea what you are after, i’m trying to understand Envato but i just can’t come up with any logical explanation for what you’re doing. Sure, you’ll say that your changes have increased sales across the market, but we will never know if that’s true because Envato is everything but transparent with us, the authors.

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Here is the Problem,
Sellers can blame Envato in part for dwindling sales which cause them to cut price.
Here’s why… Many buyers (including myself) use to by hundreds of dollars of stuff per month,
Not because we need it now, but because we anticipated needing it in the future.
What we normally did was to keep a credit balance on our account, and this way, if we saw something we liked, we’d simply select it. In some places this is called impulse buying. Recently Envato eliminated the practice of allowing buyers to keep credit balances on their account. And now buyers must pay a transaction to PayPal every time they see something they like.
This had two effects on the market. First it eliminated the impulse buying behavior. So now, we only buy what we need right now. And secondly, this increased PayPal’s profits, because now PayPal makes money on every Envato transaction on the market.

All of this means is the following:
a) buyers have become more cautious and thus buy less product,
b) sellers sell less product and thus much engage in price cutting activities just to stay in business,
c) Envato makes less money from sales because sales volume decreases, and
d) PayPal (and others) makes out like a bandit because get to charge a transaction fee on every sale made (no matter how small).

And think about. If an item cost $5, do I really want to pay a 25% transaction fee on the item?
Not really, Instead you’re likely to visit another online market where you’ve prepaid and can simply select what I need.

Price cutting, increase competition, and decreasing profit margins is simply the result of bad decisions and bad policies implemented by Envato last year.

9 Likes

Here is the Problem,
Sellers can blame Envato in part for dwindling sales which cause them to cut price.
Here’s why… Many buyers (including myself) use to by hundreds of dollars of stuff per month,
Not because we need it now, but because we anticipated needing it in the future.
What we normally did was to keep a credit balance on our account, and this way, if we saw something we liked, we’d simply select it. In some places this is called impulse buying. Recently Envato eliminated the practice of allowing buyers to keep credit balances on their account. And now buyers must pay a transaction to PayPal every time they see something they like.
This had two effects on the market. First it eliminated the impulse buying behavior. So now, we only buy what we need right now. And secondly, this increased PayPal’s profits, because now PayPal makes money on every Envato transaction on the market.

All of this means is the following:
a) buyers have become more cautious and thus buy less product,
b) sellers sell less product and thus much engage in price cutting activities just to stay in business,
c) Envato makes less money from sales because sales volume decreases, and
d) PayPal (and others) makes out like a bandit because get to charge a transaction fee on every sale made (no matter how small).

And think about. If an item cost $5, do I really want to pay a 25% transaction fee on the item?
Not really, Instead you’re likely to visit another online market where you’ve prepaid and can simply select what I need.

Price cutting, increase competition, and decreasing profit margins is simply the result of bad decisions and bad policies implemented by Envato last year.

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The transaction fee is being charged by Envato and it’s much higher than what Paypal is charging. This is entirely another one of their own bad decisions and bad policies.

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This week we temporarily suspended the experiment to adjust it. These changes have now been made and from today the experiment is once again live. There are many factors that can impact sales performance and it can be challenging when things aren’t where you would expect. I hope things will improve for you in the future.

We’re close to the end of the experiment and expect to wrap up around mid to late March. It depends on the volume of traffic that comes through to Envato Market. Higher traffic marketplaces will finish first with other marketplaces finishing soon after.

The experiment randomly assigns customers to one of four default starting points on category pages. It does not prevent customers from changing the sorting options to newest items.

I am sorry to hear that your February performance isn’t where you’d hoped it would be. I can confirm that the early results of the experiment are pointing to a higher conversion and more overall sales than before. We’re continuing to monitor things very closely.

This wraps up our active monitoring of this thread. If you have more questions that have not yet been answered here, please open a ticket and our Author Support team will be happy to assist. Thanks.

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Hah, very interesting. First part of the week was kinda strange regarding to sales (experiment was temporarily suspended). And today sales are good (after experiment back to live). Interesting

Nice to hear that there are improvements coming to the results listings, I hope the general increase in conversion will push the whole market!

Still I think the final solution needs to go a bit deeper and requires more work on the core…

The point is: None of these four listings is optimal. Instead there should be a more intelligent “best match” listing. To make this happen, tagging and categorization require more information. For example music items should not only have tags and category, but also mood, instruments, usage, etc.

Also I think that it is worth to spend a lot more efforts in curated collections. When dealing with creative content, an algorithm just can’t return results of the same quality as a handpicked selection.

Sure it’s worth to experiment a bit in the front end … but in long term some listing tests will not compensate what is really missing. That’s just my opinion :slight_smile:

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@jamesgiroux Could you also look at https://forums.envato.com/t/are-reviews-older-than-4-years-relevant/223363. Would love to get your feedback.

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eh Envato how did you complicate the lives of simple authors (((

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It may be helpful for conversion rate temporarily but will break the entire community who contributed Envato’s success so far. New themes and new authors have already few chances to climb up, but your experiment will simply ‘kill’ all of them. If you just like temporary earning boost, you can continue this strategy, but stop it if you want to keep the royal community.

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You start again this experiment without saying nothing to us…
If you are not logged into your account you display the best sellers. How fair is this?
If you are logged you display the best rated. Also there is no change into your algorithm code…
It is time for authors who do not invest in paid marketing to choose another market? What intention do you have to protect us? We release new items periodically which make your market grow and you kill our sales. I hope this time at least you will give us an answer…

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I have new item to upload, but I wont until all this ‘nightmare’ is ended. Our latest item in HTML category only get max 100 unique page views in first day (What!?)… yeah only 100 views, and that’s 100 views is combined number between authors (sellers) and buyers… I’m not talking about sales, sales will be depend on lots of factors, but I’m talking about page views for new item.

Well, I prefer to have no sales at all instead wasting my time creating a new item and upload it to this site for nothing!

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one word, a disaster.

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for who? Envato as company? or authors as individuals? We had quite a good week when default rating was by “Best rated” ( finally over all this years providing best support we can we felt appreciated :smiley: ) - but now I see Best Sellers are default sorting and which basically kills our new theme we just released.

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It is not surprising to get higher conversion rates?!?

You are displaying already established items or high-rated items, of course they are going to convert better than new items :smiley:

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Yes, but in terms of design many of them are outdated!

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New projects are no longer sold, users simply can not find them :slightly_frowning_face: Why should users show old projects on the main page? Very waiting for when you return to the old settings.

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Unfortunately you believe that the sales affected by the worst decision called Author-Driven Pricing BUT you hate to admit it so you need to increase sales and traffic again without admitting that you made a very bad decision in 2016 although with a lot of complaints and suggested solutions provided by Elite and non-Elite authors in the forum.

It doesn’t make sense for anyone that someone be a part of popular items because he sell his item with $13 ( $12 for Envato and he takes 0.75 cents ) and be one of the best sellers as well :upside_down_face::upside_down_face:.

A lot of bad scenarios done in the last 3 years because of this decision, Why you don’t listen? We all do our business here, working hard to make money and you as well … it was the best market over the web.

Unfortunately the solution is NOT to kill new items but by removing this Author-Driven Pricing, You can enable it in Holidays but you must make all items’ prices the same like before when was all authors get money according to the project’s design and features not price … This is the real competition.

Now you help the PowerElite millionaires to increase their millions!!! :grinning::grinning: Very Weird.

Hope to be Envato again like 3 years ago.

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Working close to 60 hours a week and earning about $20 a week for my work. I may not be the most talented guy but all these “experiments” are helping to ruin my dream of making this my day job.

I know the people at the top wont get this message but it would be nice if envato stopped “experimenting” with peoples dreams and lives for the sake of a bit of extra corporate profit.

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@jamesgiroux Great job ignoring all our questions and concerns for the second time in this topic!! Lately it seems that Envato doesn’t care about Authors feedback at all because you completely ignore us, and it’s not only in this topic…

We raise again our concerns hoping that you can give us an answer:

1-

2-

3- What is Envato actively doing to promote new items? We’ve heard again and again in this topic of authors who are holding to publish new items because of this terrible experiment. Again, with this it only seems that you care for a small group of best sellers, not the entire community…

4- Now categories are showing “best sellers” by default. Envato already has a “Popular items” category, which has almost exactly the same items that are shown is best sellers, so what is the point of this? Again, redoubling efforts on showing items that are already best sellers instead of worrying about tryeng to help new great items gain well deserved exposure…

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