Hypothesis-driven testing on Envato Market: Item Page tests

As we only see our own situation and the ones of those who are screaming in the forums (remember, nobody comes to the forums to say he has great sales) we might feel that way, but most probably this is not true.

Envato’s testing is - at least at the time of testing and short term after that - aimed at increasing conversions. They will not do something that will lower their income every time they do it.

It might be that it is always a certain type of author that benefits of these tests, and that is why some feel these tests and changes only make sales go down.

But overall market performance will not be directly affected by it, else they wouldn’t do it.
Just like they wouldn’t put the elements banner everywhere if people wouldn’t click on it.

We authors should not think that we have a clue about market performance just because we can see a tiiiiny percentage of the data with our own sales.

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Probably is true but what I have said is my experience in the last 8 years…

Since the Elements were opened and with any change in terms of testing and similar sales are always drops, in a few months it returns to some normal but never anything more no matter what until the next test of something… this latest testing has reduced sales for many by 50% and more.

I don’t know how some author with statistics like this can be satisfied except he can wait to Envato do something again that will reduce his sales, besides they are all there for some profit.

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In our case, the conversion rates have declined to 1/3rd of regular conversion rates. Yes, I agree, customers only see design.

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I am just wondering what is going on with the new CEO and management, all the decisions that were made in the past three years were against us authors and now everything is about Elements, maybe in the near future we will receive a message," if you still want to sell on Envato, your entire portfolio has to be part of Elements and also offer support".

You do realize that all good developers who made Envato what it is today will be out of here in a split right? Even if that means our income will be nothing for some time, but we will find a way to sell our hard-worked items, you can bet on that, so if this is the case please think again about this…

Maybe I am taking this to the extreme but boy when I see that Elements banner all over the place it is driving me crazy…

I really hope I am wrong :slight_smile: still loving this place!

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It’s definitely not you who’s taking this to the extreme.

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Dose anybody in the management cares that we are unhappy lately about what is going on here?

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@BenLeong @sunnicee

Could you consider removing elements bar from checkout/cart pages? We use on our landing pages checkout and “add to cart” URL/shortcuts. They redirect to the checkout/cart however there’s distracting “elements” advertising top bar.

It shouldn’t be on those pages specifically. It’s against good ecommerce practices, isn’t it? :slight_smile:

I believe it has negative impact on conversion from the traffic that we bring ourselves to our landing pages. People without envato account get distracted with “unlimited download” offer and they may interrupted checkout process.

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+They should also remove Elements banners from authors’ products’ pages.
With the way things stand right now, there is no point in marketing.

On top of every single page, we have that banner.
At the bottom of every single page, we have Elements again.
On the check out page, guess what we do have.

Envato is literally spamming.
(+ if that’s not spamming, I don’t know what is)

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This. Why do the banners need to be displayed on the Item’s page? It’s like they’re advertising someone else on our product pages. I understand it to be shown on the search pages, home page, etc. but for so long they’ve been pushing this Elements thing that it has come to the point where it really looks like spam.

I always thought that the banner situation is temporary, to get the Elements a bit of traction, but it’s been years since they’ve been pushing this service trough the marketplaces.

Also, the banner showing up on the Checkout / Cart is ridiculous.

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Hi!

One thing that I’m feeling after these changes, is that earlier, I tracked new items, was pretty aware of what’s going on, what’s new, new ideas, great works and such, today? 0 (ZERO) have no idea what’s new on the market, what’s coming out, what’s hot. I think that many authors can relate. So, consider that too. I guess that earlier it just worked good. Thanks.

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The objective of these tests is to increase conversion rates, can we get a response from any author for which these changes have worked so far ?

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I have my doubts, that the little conversion rate should be the problem of the actual situation.
There started tons of competitive platforms on the market in the last few years and all of these platforms share now a more or less fixed amount of customers.
Today I had a talk with one of my Audiojungle customers. Her original words:“I just spend so much time looking for music that fits my videos and to be honest, there is so much cheap crap on audiojungle.”

That’s the problem! Customers conversion rate is so low, because they give up for searching good items. They possibly find one good track in hundreds of search results full of cheap crap. Thanks to the “very good” Envato search engine. AJ desperately tried to keep the head up with a mass of new authors and hundreds of thousands new tracks. Everyone was able to sign up to AJ, without any check of music quality. Yes, AJ has a review process on every single item, but honestly the results speak for itself. Customers are annoyed because of the bad item quality and change to competitors with better items. It’s simply too late now.

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The tests started from Dec 2020 and these are our results : Screenshot by Lightshot , even though traffic drop has not been this big the conversion rates have gone down ! Do we have authors who have their conversion rates increased ?

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Hi all. Sorry for the late reply - I’ve been out of action for the last few days, and I can see there have been a lot of comments in this thread over the weekend.

I’d like to clarify the scope of the item page experiments in this thread. The tests discussed here have been specifically focused on conversion and bounce rates, and do not represent the full scope of work being conducted across Envato Market. Many other teams at Envato contribute to bringing customer traffic on site, from SEO and our many marketing channels, to paid growth channels that include our affiliates, search and display advertising.

I started this thread so we had a place to provide more transparency about the process of iterative testing that leads to changes you can see on Envato Market item pages: multiple variants, grouped to explore different aspects of the design of these pages, tested against baseline data. Those changes contribute to future page designs when testing and analysis has shown a significant benefit - in this case, changes that contribute to improvements in conversion rates, and a reduction in exit rates.

It’s important to understand that process, as there are often several variants being tested (so people may report seeing different item page versions during a test), and many opinions on which are the best changes to make.

Please keep this thread focused on the item page tests, where feedback or clarification are needed. I recommend creating new threads in the Author Hangout or marketplace-specific forum areas to discuss other topics.

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A suggestion for the top pages / category pages:

Please consider adding some promotion / highlighting / filters / ways to discover items that are top earners (because of high price but lower sales numbers)

Bestsellers are always counted strictly based on sales numbers, with no weight given to item price. We feel this does not make sense: often our items are actually earning more than the “bestsellers”, but since the absolute sales numbers are lower, are not actually shown or promoted anywhere.

Imagine a store that sells $1 little trinkets and $10,000 TVs. The TVs make up for 90% of the store’s revenue. However, the store only promotes the trinkets - front page, category pages, trinkets everywhere - customers don’t even know there are TVs for sale unless they specifically search for them. Is that a good strategy for the store?

Our suggestion is to add some options / pages / filters / buttons for “Items our customers love”, where top earners are also promoted.

This absolutely makes sense for everyone: it’s useful for customers, it brings more revenue to Envato and authors, and it incentivizes the correct thing, which is the total revenue ( = value generated).

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If moving everything on top helps, good. But please improve the design, now it looks like an amatorial design from the 90’.

Also I don’t understand why you’re removing features related to ratings(users can no longer view ratings count by rating or see reviews of a rating only), and making rating, comments and sales count less visible. You wrote that the results show that moving such info on top bring more sales, you should increase their visibility, not reducing it.

In the past the info were well presented and big, now they looks like basic texts only, and they are much smaller…why?

Thank you!

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Also there are basic UI issues like the rating count more visible than the rating itself…now the info are much less readable

Also IMDB made the same, you can take a look at their design as inspiration(they improved the design):

Ex. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110912

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A post was split to a new topic: Item creation date is more recent than the Last Update

Totally agree.

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