Over the last few months we’ve been experimenting with design on category pages across different marketplaces. Initial testing has given us a lot of data and feedback to optimize the new category page layout and the next step is to roll out testing across other marketplaces, now on CodeCanyon & GraphicRiver.
Why are we doing this?
Historically we’ve been constrained to displaying a single default order on pages, such as best sellers, which limits the types of items customers are exposed to. Our aim with these experiments is to work towards improving the variety and discoverability of the items that are displayed to customers on these pages.
How will the new category page do this?
As with ThemeForest, VideoHive, and AudioJungle, the new category page includes a series of blocks giving customers the choice to explore new items, best selling items, best rated items and more. This is our first release on CodeCanyon & GraphicRiver and we plan to iterate on it as we receive data. This means the blocks you see in this test may change, or change position on the page. As this is an A/B test, you may also not see the new design yourself.
See the image below for an idea of how it will look - this is not the whole page, just an indication.
The new category page A/B test on CodeCanyon & GraphicRiver is now live! We anticipate that this test will run for approximately three weeks.
We’ll be on hand to answer questions about the CodeCanyon & GraphicRiver category page tests for the next seven days, responding in batches as necessary. Please remember our Community Guidelines as you post.
The overall idea is beautiful, and a breath of fresh air to see new items back in view! However, I must ask, can the age of the category when clicking for example “Discover Best Rated Items” or “Discover Best Selling Items” be bumped to 2 years instead of 1 year?
Some items like WP themes require massive amount of work, others do need a bit of time to liftoff. Web standards to change from year to year ( take for example the design standard changers in the case of the web, iOS and Android, they release a new design for their OS or new features in their OS roughly once every 2 year, major ones of course )
Having it set to 2 years, would be a better choice and give authors a better chance in getting in these lists, therefore, giving them a better chance with their item.
Hi, everybody. You’re saying the test will last about three weeks. What happens after three weeks? Will you return the design that you had before? Please explain!
Agree with this. Old items can be totally up-to-date as well inline with modern trends. There should be at least one block for older items as well. Additionally, people have pointed out several times how broken the rating algorithm is - an item of 4.99 with 100 ratings gets pushed to page 5 because 5.0 items have 3 ratings. Hence, the best rated block is such a waste of space.
Further it’s alarming the way you have setup the category pages right now, with the whole focus in amassing sales numbers quickly at release to reap rewards for a year before it’s time to rinse and repeat. It’s going to be continuous race to the bottom in terms of pricing.
It’s even more obvious Envato seems to be hell-bent on promoting cheaper items, when the second block on every market category promotes Under $X. That seems like a clear signal.
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@jamesgiroux Can you also get the developers to look into category pages performance? In Chrome on MacBook at least, even at idle the category pages seem to use ~30% CPU.
There is a big flaw with the search results (Best Match) feature. It is not taking into consideration when the item was last updated. Why would you show in second place of results a plugin that was last updated in 2013?
Let me give you an example, if you go to CodeCanyon and search for the keyword “events plugin” it will give you the best match but it displays plugins that are no longer relevant to the marketplace. Here’s a screenshot showing the number two spot for that result is a plugin that was last updated in 2013
here’s a screenshot:
Why would you give priority to outdated plugins when there are authors like me who update our plugins at least once a month? The results should give priority to products that are updated regularly regardless if they are new or old. This is a big flaw and I hope it will be taken into consideration by the envato team.
how devastated the market is today but new writers continue to struggle to meet the necessities of their lives, all of us in the envato market really hope that the envato will change to the system first, where new items emerge
As other topics for other categories are now closed, let me refer to the changes on Themeforest in this topic. We are the authors of the most popular medical WP theme in terms of market sales. The theme is regularly updated (also in terms of graphics so that it does not stand out from new products). At the moment, after the changes made on the category pages, this theme cannot be easily found.
Browsing WordPress / Retail we get: Weekly bestsellers, Under $49, New bestsellers, Top Medical themes, New Releases etc. The only category that should fit here is top medical themes, but when you enter it, the filter only shows items added over the past year, making a theme with 10K sales (updated to current standards) invisible.
Ok, I can try it differently, go directly to the Health & Beauty category (which appears at the top of the page) and contains all 510 items:
but again, only the newest items are filtered. This problem affects most of our top products. Hence my question @jamesgiroux is whether envato can remove the filter “date added” from “Top Medical”, “Top Gym” and other “Top items” lists to actually display ALL the best seller items by default OR please consider the item update dates in search results. Thank you.
James I am curious to know about what Envato thinks about the new items. Why new items block is almost at the end of the page. If there is no way that new items can get sale then how can new items compete with popular items.
Thanks for the suggestion! I’ve passed this along to the team for consideration. For now, the first few weeks are the starting point of data collection. After that, the plan is to make tweaks and changes to improve the experience for customers, taking on board their feedback and yours.
Yep! I’ll let them know that you’re experiencing heavy CPU usage and see if there’s anything we can do on our side to improve that.
This is absolutely something we’re conscious of. There are some limits within the codebase that we’re working through. Over time you can expect that there will be improvements to the conditions to try and provide the best experience for customers (including showcasing great content that’s been recently updated). No promises on exactly when that will happen but it’s definitely a limitation we’re aware of.
Each marketplace approaches their category pages a little differently. What we want to do is see how customers respond to a dramatic change like this and over time make changes and tweaks based on their feedback. These new designs give us the ability to showcase more items (for example, 4 items above the fold previously to many more now), and we’ll continue to move parts and pieces around to find the optimal layout for conversion.
Ah, yes! Apologies for double posting this. Is the ThemeForest layout now complete? I see it has been added to the HTML categories as well ( and it’s awesome ). My question, is it here to stay or is it still in A/B split test mode?
We think we have fixed this, please let us know if you’re still experiencing issues.
ThemeForest is showing the new Category page to 100% of users now. We have launched two new variants testing different block orders, meaning a user will see 1 of 3 different orders in this current iteration of tests.
Absolutely love it! Will this design ever be implemented in inner categories, like https://codecanyon.net/category/wordpress/seo ? Currently, only a simple list is shown but it would be really useful to have the weekly best sellers, new releases, rising stars, etc on the category pages as well. Also, increasing it to show 8 items instead of 4 (if there are enough meeting the criteria) wouldn’t hurt
How exactly is it very good for old items, when every button you push shows you the best selling items of last year, and there’s a special category at the bottom with newest files?
It’s really bad for older files! That’s why I asked for at least a 2 year grace period for older files, otherwise, you build a file, it takes you 2 years to make, and you only have a 1 year window to compete with the monsters out there!
