As we roll Author Driven Pricing (ADP) out to more and more areas of the marketplace, some questions have come up around pricing and how it relates to discounting practices and policies in our Item Promotion Guidelines.
In the past, before ADP, our promotion policy specifically restricted advertising or promoting discounts relating to your items. This made perfect sense when Envato was the party that determined the pricing.
Now that ADP has arrived, and in keeping with our direction of providing authors more tools and greater control over their items, we’ve updated the Item Promotion Guidelines to clarify and open up this discounting policy for ADP items.
A few things to keep in mind:
As always, for categories where ADP applies, authors are allowed to set and change prices for their items at their own discretion.
For categories where ADP applies, this now officially includes the permission to promote temporary prices changes as a sale/discount, if the author chooses to do so.
Please keep in mind that there are strict laws governing pricing conduct, including consumer law protections against misleading/deceptive pricing and discounting practices that you should be aware of. To make sure you don’t step over any lines, it’s worth checking out our “Setting Prices Responsibly” article below.
Policy and pricing conduct violations that are brought to our attention may result in your account being suspended or permanently disabled.
Ultimately we trust authors to do what’s best and sustainable for themselves and their businesses here, be respectful of their fellow authors and customers, and not engage in any misleading pricing or discounting practices.
For more information please see the following Help Center articles:
Just read the “Setting Prices Responsibly” article. What is “reasonable period”? I guess I’m wondering if month-long discounts will become commonplace
So, how this is really different from “Author’s Setting Their Own Prices” ?
Author’s already can set their own prices, so surely they can do a discount (if they really think their hardwork is not already extremely CHEAP here), or they can do the opposite.
So, what really matters? How this is really different from “Author’s Setting Their Own Prices” ?
The difference is not in an authors ability to set prices, but rather to promote the prices that they set as being discounted from a standard price.
Authors in ADP categories can set prices as they wish, but until this change the guidelines did not allow authors to actually communicate that they were discounting them for finite periods of time.
^ Not good.
But as a wise person, I will not waste my precious time to point the reasons.
Even though I am a slow learner, I have learned my lessons well.
Can we also give our items for free? (after all, who needs money, right?)
As always, as an author, I am speechless.
Why don’t you integrate the discount/coupon system? Let the authors generate the promo codes, for example max. discount 20% and once its used you will deduct the difference from authors commissions. Its much better than changing the prices.
^ THIS. It may indeed, lead to abuses, but i’m thinking of a limited numbers of monthly coupons or as @mad_dog pointed, we authors can handle those fees . I often want to discount loyal buyers and who knows, maybe contests etc.
Thanks for the update @matthewcoxy , good to know the guidelines are updated.
I don’t think that it may lead to any kind of abuses. You provide your long history client with the coupon code, he makes the purchase directly at themeforest, that’s it.
Are we allowed to tell people “But wait… there’s more! Order now and we’ll throw in this deluxe set of kitchen knives absolutely free! A $100 value.”
For those thinking this is a serious question: The answer is “no” because you are advertising extra services/value that is not really part of the product. (help article)
But if I understood Matthew correctly you are now allowed to say this:
“But wait… there’s more! Order now and you will get a 50% discount!”
Okay, If I set a discounted price for an item, would that reflect in the category page - visually communicating that the item is currently in promotion?
Discounting was already (and naturally) part of Author Driven Pricing. You just weren’t allowed to promote it as “discount” to your customers because of an old rule that was now changed to reflect the new Author Driven Pricing.
Seems like there is a lot of confusion in this thread about what this announcement is really about… Basically: You can now say to your customers “Hey! There is a discount on this item!”. You were not allowed to say this before this change in “item promotion guidelines”. It’s just a small detail.
I’m not planning to discount anything yet though.