Envato Author Fee Needs to be reduced same for all level of Author.

Envato Authors CodeCanyon
#1

Hi,
I think the Envato Author Fee (Cut Envato get from sale) should be reduced and the benefits should be pass on to the Author.
as from my experience, there is nothing Envato did rather than Hosting Item on a platform to make a profit for Author. and charging 37.5% + $4 for hosting projects of 50 Mb is a huge price.

There should be a fixed price Envato should charge max 20% and no hidden fee like author fee $4.

Someone tell me

  1. For what purpose Envato charges $4 additionally to those % cut.
  2. All the hard work of maintaining item, customer support, and all things handled by the author then why Envato charges this much cut (37.5%).
  3. All the marketing is done by author no sale comes from Envato marketing. in my case.
  4. Even there is no fast support or item approval. some time takes more than a week to approve the item.

one simple example with one of my items. the item cost is $10 but I do get just $3.75 on Envato whereas if I build my own site with a server that would cost $40 for a year. but I will get all the $10 for each sale. till now this item has 80 sales that’s equivalent to $800 where I should be getting $640 and Envato $160 for fair charges. but that is not the case, I only got about $300 that is less than 50% of what buyers paid.

My saying is simple to make the Envato Author Fee 20% at least or whatever the minimum possible.
No Envato Author Fee Schedule, Envato Author Fee remains the same for the entire time.

#2

It all comes down to the astronomical investment and resource required to maintain the biggest of all the marketplaces.

The % is not a million miles off similar marketplaces in return for significantly greater potential exposure and traffic

Things like support and review times are more often than not influenced by things beyond envato’s control

There’s nothing stopping any author creating their own website and selling from there but you have to consider the difference in things like traffic, potential buyers,

3 Likes
#3

Beside @charlie4282 amazing point of view, I’d also like to add the following. If Envato does nothing but host the items, why can’t you host them yourself and make sales in the same volume?

The answer is simple. Salaries, Taxes, Branding, Marketing, Maintenance Costs, Development Costs, New Ventures, New Technolgies, etc etc.

For what purpose does anyone tax you when you purchase something? Interal costs. ( more in the next point )

What about accounting? Paying staff? Managing the sites? Marketing? Advertising campaigns? Hosting costs? I can keep on extending the list here. Customer support is our part of the job for our item that we are selling. Envato has nothing to do with that.

There’s no obligation to review an item in 15 seconds. If you want that to happen you’re contradicting yourself by saying the taxes are too high. Taxes are also use to pay wages to reviewers and community staff ( not us, we volunteer ), you want more reviewers? Faster times? More taxes will be needed to cover those expenses as well. Fairly simple.

The taxes are held at a point where Envato can have a profit to expand and evolve, the whole purpose of a business is to make profit in the end. Envato can’t just say, we’ll do this with 10% tax and pay from our pockets, we’re doing this out of love.

Love is a big part of it, making money, as for you, is a big part of it too! You have to be reasonable in your perspective. A multi-national company with hundreds of employees and hundreds of payments to send out + maintenance + marketing… the taxes are quite normal to be honest.

#4

Hi @charlie4282 ,
yes, I accept that the Envato is the largest marketplace for digital content and that’s why I choose this for Exclusive selling of my product.

yes there is huge difference between other marketplace and this. as Fiver - takes 20%, Freelancer - 10%, Upwork - 5% - 20% so you can’t say that it does not have “The % is not a million miles off similar marketplaces”

yes, I accept that with huge size Envato has a large investment but now Envato is at the point where it will be in profit with 5% of the commission.

where for creating a site and selling there base on Envato policy I cant do that as I am an exclusive author.

#5

None of which are the same as envato - these are service provider sites, not digital downloads.

I’m not going to link to competitor sites but if you look at closer ones it’s much more 30-50% and for stronger elites envato is actually better than most

#6

Hi @Enabled ,

  1. Because i am here to sale items which i have develop over the time, creating similar site like Envato is not going to happen in a day it takes years and Envato is already establish as largest marketplace and there is no point in creating another. and the things you mention Salaries, Taxes then that’s all part of business.
  2. So you think the 37.5% or 55% commission is OK and there is nothing wrong with that. i don’t think so as when we pay for anything then we expect to get thing equivalent to the paid cost.
  3. i was asking why charge in 2 different terms when you can include in single like just % or single fixed amount like $10. no need of $4 + 37.5%
  4. I am also in IT business so i know how much the Managing site and Hosting and other stuff cost and for that this much of % are too high. at the end Envato is community driven if no author publish here then envato will not be able to manage there expenditures.
  5. Yes customer support is our part and we are doing that but for what $3.75?
  6. Yes increasing staff will increase envato cost and that will affect the higher tax. but what if the right balance maintain between community and expenditure.
  7. Envato is maintaining and marketing there site Envato marketplace but that because of Authors like you and me are willing to sell on this platform.
#7

Hi,
in my view there is no other digital content marketplace is near to compete with envato and that’s the reason for higher %.

i don’t know much of other competitor but 1 or 2 i know are not even close to codecanyon and that’s just one part of envato market.

yes the site i mention are service base but when it come to main point selling. there is not much difference rather than on envato sale get made without any effort from seller where as on those platform you need to represent them directly to client and accept the sale.

#8

You are right that the lack of serious competition is precisely the reason for them charging what they do, partly due to bigger exposure, but also because of the significantly greater costs to envato to cater for the bigger volumes. This kind of answers your original question.

The point about the other marketplaces is because there is one major difference - economies of scale i.e. it’s typical for items to sell multiple times to multiple people. In those service sites, it’s usually a one-off job so there has to be greater scope for earning

#9

Wow! So it’s true that they charge more than 50% from author?? Wow! That’s malpractice in some countries to charge anything close to 40% as any platform hosting hard works of other people…
And on top of all these charges, they also do nothing to reduce the ease of chargeback fraud.
Anybody can buy your item and tell their bank to return the money. And envato will not submit details to the dispute…

#10

Again, Envato are within 5 - 15% max of the obvious competition for exclusive authors, and are certainly on a par, if not actually better (significantly on some cases) than much of the competition for exclusive authors.

This is despite of the considerably greater level of resource and investment required from envato compared to others.

This is not an issue faced only by envato authors. It happens on every digital marketplace out there, and I am yet to ever see one who would pursue/provide details for each. Can anyone share an example of this?

I don’t know if there is a legal reason for this, or if it is simply a case of being more realistic about the potential to resolve the bigger picture problems and the reality of what would be required and the knock-on impact of delivering that.

No one is pretending that everything here is ideal - but it is naive to think that any of the things that people would like to see changed are in any way exclusive to envato, or that if there was a feasible solution, that an organization as successful as envato would not have implemented it.

As previously discussed - if things are genuinely being managed badly, then it should be very easy to share examples of similar marketplaces that do things differently , and without doubt envato would be keen to explore that.

#11

Check out [link removed]

It’s more difficult create fake buyer account and use credit card to buy directly and issue chargeback after…
Maybe envato can learn from them

1 Like
#12

You are right that generally they offer higher commission (unless you are a successful exclusive author on envato when it becomes better here).

It’s unfortunate that they do not list how many sales items have had but I think this would come back to the point above that the sheer difference in volume of items and traffic which would rightfully allow and require envato to expect more, and imapct their internal processes

It would be interesting to see how long this site can retain that rate if they were to grow significantly.

What makes it harder to create a fake account and use a credit card or issue a chargeback? What do they do differently?

#13

Hi,
yes its true that they charge more than 50% if your item price low in case of $10 item. but you wont notice same 50% difference if your item cost $100.
and yes the refund using credit card or paypall has happen with me too and with response envator support say that they have no control over that. at the end customer like that who request refund to paypal/credit card and not on platform takes the item and also money back.

even i ask this question in live stream of envato event held in Australia (not sure exactly) and response is simple we don’t have control over transaction made using credit card. in my case the refund was taken after 6 months. if see any online selling site then you want see the money back guaranty for more than 30 days.

1 Like
#14

They don’t allow buyers to do a “Guest checkout” as a buyer and be able to buy with a fake identity with credit card without verifying your account…

Envato on the other hand just accepts ANY MONEY even if we the buyers create fake account without verifying buyer well and also have guest checkouts… this makes envato RIPE for chargeback fraud.

That codester store also use stripe as their processor and stripe also offers chargeback protection to merchants… and have better unique varieties of items… they don’t fill their homepage with items that do the SAME thing…

These small details of making it HARD for buyers to do chargeback fraud is the key to reducing fraud… If envato codecanyon are going to take anything close to 40% or more of these author items, they should be ready to also take some accountability for the leaking too and stop it… Envato should have issue DMCA takedown of this codelist.cc website by now

#15

Hi,
can you tell me the reason for you supporting the higher charges on sale by envato.?

at the end your also author like thousands other and the lower charges are good for all of us buyers and sellers.

#16

From what I see these days on the store, I doubt envato codecanyon will be able to last and truely grow in the next 10 years even without competition

And the moment a silicon valley company starts something similar, Envato will be dead before we know it.
I pray the management does something and we don’t see the death of this store. I really was getting some very good stuff to buy back then

#17

I see “moderator” written under his account. So I don’t expect anything less… be careful your topic isn’t banned for being unpopular or a “painful truth”.

1 Like
#18

Hi,
yes you are right about null / crack script if you search then you will find that any theme or plugin with more than 200 sale is on null sites and envato takes no action against theme. its all comes to author for taking down that script using DMCA.

#19

Hi,
yes but they say they are not getting paid for this moderator thing. so i don’t get the reason for this high charge support.
and yes i was also surprise about this post approval. that they are letting us discuss about higher charges on this platform.

#20

Hi,
due the the structure of envato charges the successful author who made sale over $80000 will never going to choose the other platform as that author is paying just 12.5% fee. but why this difference 12.5% - 37.5% for same type of author ie. Exclusive. Why cant it be simple like 20% to all no matter what the sales are. and if we check the number of author base on sale then i guess 80% author are paying more than 30% charges.

It’s unfortunate that they do not list how many sales items have had

as far I know about this case it’s just due to they have a very low sales in single or double-digit which are not going to make good impression.

whereas i said my previous comment that another platform is not even at the level of codecanyon and also that platform is relatively new in the market so there is no comparison of codester with envato. if you want to compare envato with any other then they are fiver, freelancer and upwork