Hello everyone,
few days ago I created to ask whether is it more profitable to sell my WordPress plugin on Envato or individually. I got some feedback and gave Envato a go, here are the details:
First, to understand their business modal you need to read Envato Author Fee Schedule.
I joined as Exclusive Author (37.5% fee for every sale + $4 buyer fee), a lot of fees aren’t they, wait for it, that’s just the start.
I submitted my plugin, and made it available for $29.
The plugin was accepted 25th October, the same day I notified subscribers on my mailing list and got 3 sales, to this point all sales are from me, 4 days later I have a total of 5 sales. So basically 2 sales from envato, or even none as I have driven a lot of traffic from facebook to the plugin’s page.
Now let’s see how much I earned
Total value of your sales, before taxes: $145.00
Sales earnings this month (October), after associated author fees, & before taxes: $78.10
My balance after taxes (not talking about my country taxes, to this point the money is still with them): $58.10
So basically they took around 60% of all profit. Why? They have some rule that says if a buyer is from the US, unless my country have a tax treaty with the latter, I have to pay an additional 30% (US Royalty Withholding Tax) per order, Basically the author pays Envato taxes while they expand. Great deal isn’t it?
It’s been 4 days and I can’t see what justifies this huge cut, but as I said, it’s just 4 days, can’t completely judge without spending some time with them and see if their platform will drive an amount of sales that will justify all these fees. If there isn’t an improvement in sales and profit in the near future, I’ll probably move on to selling any new plugins independently.