Hi,
I started selling at CodeCanyon and the author fees looked a lot to me.
I am selling a product with $14 price tag. Envato gets $5 as buyer fee and gets 37.5% of the $9 left. I know Envato says the buyer fee for their services but most of the buyers don’t know this. It really does not seem fair to me. At the end, $14 is paid for my product, but I can only get $5.
On the other hand, if there will be a buyer fee, at least it can depends on the price, not category. $5 can be fair enough for a $59 product but it is too much for a product is under $15 I am giving my examples related with my product but I think these are common problems. And why buyer fee goes crazy when it comes to the Extended license? The services that Envato offers to the buyer are not changing when buyer changes the license.
And the last thing, I really do not understand why Envato getting a cut from the support sales? After they take $9 dollar from $14, just can’t they leave it to me at least?
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You should have seen this when pricing your item:
The “item price” is the only part of the purchase price that is considered your revenue. The buyer fee is never your revenue and it’s not taken from your earnings. Your price ($9) will only be subject to the author fee, which is a percent (37.5% for new authors).
Buyer fees would be a percentage of the item price, but Envato can’t do that if you’re able to choose your own item price (for complicated tax/legal reasons). So instead, they calculated $5 to be a reasonable fix based on average prices for items in that category.
It’s not going crazy – extended licenses are much more valuable than regular licenses, and fixed buyer fees are based on the average prices for your category. The buyer fee helps Envato retain revenue after reducing their base commission from 50% to 37.5%, so it only makes sense it would increase.
It’s going through their platform, and they’re a for-profit company. You can’t really call it unfair.
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You are right for all of what you say, I just had no idea that the buyer fee can not be calculated in percentage, but I still think it can be calculated in intervals instead of the average price. And we know that the item price is $9 and $5 for Envato but a buyer usually does not know that, only thing that they see is a $14 product and it forces the author to lower item price.
The point I would like to draw attention to was the explanations about the purpose of the Envato buyer fee and the application contradiction. The fact that the share has dropped from 50% to 37.5% is a pretty good improvement, but still author-oriented improvements can be made. Envato uses its leadership in the industry a bit more to its advantage. Still, Envato is the best but I just wanted to share this with the community, maybe they can note it.
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