I think we need staff official response rather than sporadic report.
I also heard that we cannot offer sale off if the item has not been release at certain time but I can see that some of the top popular items are on sale with prominent badge INTRO Price or so.
I myself actual got question “Can you offer a discount at launch like many authors/developers do?” when my items are released.
This is so dangerous for the market.
This really requires a regulation or even a clear law about this so everybody should read and obey.
‘Intro price’ is no problem. It’s when you say 50% off when it’s never actually been sold at 100% that’s the problem. It falsely gives the impression that you’re getting something at half the original price when it;s never actually been the original price… or has only been at 100% for such a short time that the 50% off doesn’t really mean much. An intro price is no problem, as nobody is being ‘deceived’… it is the price that it’s being introduced at.
Yes those are the rules. I know the following is not in the rule book. But there should be some limitations on discounting. For example the price battle in the top is getting more and more tuff.
Meaning, authors give a discount and they remove it and couple of days later on again a discount depending on the competition… or they randomly put a discount for a day just to boost sales to keep them high for the top list.
I presume this is not against the rules but in my eyes there should be some limitation to keep the market healthy.
I was always against ADP but was advocating the segmented pricing system, meaning the price adapts depending on the features, for example up to 10 demos this price between 10 and 50 this price 50+ this price. Plugins, features etc also add to the price. ADP could be to a certain point, meaning couple of times a year you would be allowed to have discounts and there would be a group discount when Envato unlocks it for a period of time etc. Implementing this kind of system would give plenty of options but would be controlled and not messy.
Actually I do not know the current stats what ADP brought but from our perspective a drop in sales. Adding features does not cut it as it used to. We are for example testing discounting on a theme, we are running a sale and sales went up. we will be ending it on Monday and we will see how much this will affect the item in the following week.
By the looks on top items price actually is the leading factor for higher sales and manipulation of top numbers.
That is why a controlled system is a must, things are just getting out of control.
And with additional popular categories getting tested, it is getting even worst. Again it is bringing more power to the top again.
If Envato would just disabled the items who are breaking the rules and placed the info on author dashboard then pretty soon everything would be like it should.
If we are reporting each item then why are we giving 30% to Envato?
Actually, no… to regularly check everyday newcomers, you do not need that many resources, you would cover majority and send a good statement, every once a while an email notification etc. Or at least random checks.
But in the end actually, why should we care, as DJMiMi sad we pay them for that and Envato decided to go with ADP. There are many ways to limit ADP so this kind of things would go to the minimum.
Leave them to do what ever they want.
Best case scenarion, for everyone is to look their selfs and not what others do.
There are Authros ( top Elite Authors ), who keep their position for 3+ years and they do not give a damn, what others do.
They are even selling without a discount, when everyone else is discounting…
You’re right, it’s probably not. Although these issues can’t be that big of a deal for you either, or you’d report them, right? I mean, in the time it took you to reply, you could have reported an author who was breaking the rules… but you decided to post here instead. So as a result of that, one can only assume that’s it’s more important to you to complain about the issue, than it is to actually do anything about the issue. Would that be a fair assessment?
As for checking newcomers, that’s easier, and is probably being done currently (in most cases)… I think we’re mainly on about people who add/alter such information once the item is live. Then nit becomes virtually impossible to police 100%.
Actually it is a huge deal since right now it is slap in the face to all authors who follow the rules. I have reported items ( about 50 of them to stuff ) and then went back and forth with Envato for 60 DAYS and still no action what so ever even though in guideline you see that new items can not have discount advertise ( at the end they’ve said that they will do something about it in early 2017 ). We pay for usage of Envato’s platform and we want that they carry out the rules which they have wrote and nothing more.
Let’s say you must offer item at original price for 3 months. Envato should create one function which will tag every update of item which is approved less than 3 months ago ( only tag so automatic updates function properly ). Reviewer visits list checks each item if the discount is advertised ( since it is enough to see the preview image then this list can be same as public listing of items where image is accessible via hover ). If it is advertised then disable if not remove from the list and everyone is happy ( two button on same list so everything is done fast ).
I’m not saying it’s not a big deal, I’m just pointing out that Anps likes to complain, but isn’t willing to do anything about it. You have at least reported offending items and suggested a potential solution, one which wouldn’t require thousands of additional members of staff. For that, I salute you.
One thing to keep in mind, not sure if this applies to the items you reported… people are well within their rights to change the price of their items any time they like. The issue arises when you start comparing the current price to what it was before. So you’re more than welcome to set your price at $38 and then one day after it’s approved, change it to $19… but you can’t then say “50% off!”.
Yes people can change price as they want but they can not advertise discount on new items since items are not offered at original price for decent amount of time as stated here http://prnt.sc/cz87tk
I also reported and opened this forum topic… so your allegations are not true it seems
But it is still not our job to do that. And even if I would not report it, the author removed one thing but the discounts on new item stayed and new are just popping out.
This kind of issues can be addressed but if you just check few new items you will see that most of them do not abide by it…
For example, after the initial upload, for the first 90 day’s you cannot change the price after you set it initially.
But having 1 person to check new items with a delay of a couple of days would also solve quite a few issues.
And of course notifications and reminders, they can pop up everywhere when they need to advertise something for elements or whatever, but this kind of things could be shown only to authors.
They implemented ADP without any limitations or systems to enforce them.
And now you say, along with all other additional work we have to do, we also are in charge to control the market and report the violations?
There is a lot of things and suggestions I gave in the skype chat I had with Envato staff. The only thing that was among those suggestions is the new categories in the popular section which is still in testing mode, which i praised right away!
It’s not the best way. It’s against ADP. The better way is lock the ability to set the minimum price which depends of the theme type. I.e. if it’s the simple blog - you can’t set the price lower than $39 for the first 30 days. If it’s multipurpose theme with WooCommerce - the price can’t be lower than $59 for the first 30 days. I think it’s the win/win : you can’t dumping the market, but if you think the price is low on start - you can set higher price. After 30 days you can make discounts.
P.S. BTW, I think everyone saw the theme which is priced $14.
Well, I went on exchanging emails with support and I reported few items with new themes on sales/discounts, some of them are on sales for the second month from creation now and advertising it as such.
Started this conversation last week and about those discounts, nothing has changed… so even in reporting violations, rules are not followed and action is not taken. So I guess the message is clear, do whatever you want.
Surfing the items a bit, I saw more authors offering the money back guaranty in one or other form, some of them are doing it trough landing pages and not directly on TF profiles. Do we have to report all of them?
There are serious breaches in conduct. The issue is that ADP opened up sales wars… in early good old days if sales went down you would have to bump up your products now all that is left is the discount.
For example, we had an item that until 15 December had great sales then all of the sudden it went down 90% from one week to another. Checked the item and the competition and there was one for example that is in constant discount from the day 1.
Then tested it out banged 33% off the item for a week, sales went up drastically. Things just need to get under control somehow this is too much!
All these years Envato raised the prices gradually and now we have to lower them down again and pump up more features.
The interesting thing is we actually get inquiries fro clients if or when are we going to have any discounts on certain items.
