Actually no, it’s not his fault or responsibility.
You are the one that needs the customizations and seller is not required to help you out with that as that costs him time (and time = money); and money that he loses by helping you with customizations is definitely not included in the cheap prices Envato sets.
I know it seems to you like it’s a quick job for the author to help you with your customizations, but multiply that with the number of people asking for support and it comes down to him doing freelance work for free for the whole day instead of working on improving his current products or creating new ones.
If you want to customize a product bought here, and you don’t have a sufficient knowledge to do it yourself, be fair towards the author and hire a freelancer to help you out. I sure hope you realize that freelancing can’t be included in the average price of $45 for the WordPress themes sold here.
I for one have decided not to purchase anything further from Envato.
All the other marketplaces where I buy offer lifetime support and often even a full refund if not satisfied.
I’ll be sticking with them from now on.
Shame, because a few authors here are AWESOME SAUCE.
I have many more pleasant experiences in the past with those authors than bad ones.
Some have their own sites thankfully, I’ll be buying direct with no middle man in future.
Looking at my statement page I have to laugh. As an author, if I decide to offer support for my item, you are “including” 6 months of support, but yet in the statement page you are dropping the price of my item!!! Let’s say my item is $10 and I get 50%…you are now giving me only $3.00 for the item and then $2.00 for the “support” that is included. WHAT!!!
Please explain why you would drop the price of my item since I am supporting it??? 6 months of support is “INCLUDED”, but yet in the statement page they are separate charges and you lower the item price. This looks very sneaky and I would like an explanation…
What happens after support has expired? Is the buyer able to purchase additional support, or do they have to purchase the product again? Or has this not been determined yet?
To be honest, other marketplaces are quite small in comparison to Envato and in their growth quest they allow this, but eventually they will restrict so called Lifetime support. Without a doubt, lifetime sounds unsustainable.
So you think a website template and an Iphone are the same thing? Dude I want to say so many things to you but I think you ignored the YELLOW POPUP that I can when typing this comment. So all I will say is you are violating the community rules.
Just to address your useless comment. When a seller changes a framework in a template that A buyer is using on a live website and not give a detailed list of what exactly has been changed. I think it is the seller’s fault. What I meant by reverse engineering is that I have to go through tones of code and firebug to find out what he changed is not practical. When the seller can provide me that information very easily cause he knows exactly what He changed on his template.
No the problem here is what i figured out. Envato have become greedy. You see envato is not being an angel to sellers saying they need to get paid for support. Envato is looking at the 50% to 30% commission they are going to get on this support.
its very simple I figured it out What Envato is doing is they are looking at how much money they will make in the long run. They are expecting buyers to take support packs more than just six months. They must have done the calculations and found that this will get them more revenue. This is nothing about giving the rightful money for support to the seller this is about using the seller to shoot the buyer and earn more while sellers don’t benefit as much if at all. Atleast not initially.
You are totally misconstruing my comment. I am not asking the seller for help in customization. I don’t think any seller does that. I have already customized the template… I REPEAT I have already customized the template. The customization are CSS which are saved in the custom.css file.
Everytime I update the template I take a backup of the custom.css and then when I replace it VIOLA! I get all my customizations back.
This time it did not work that way. like it should Because the author decided to use a different framework and rename certain css selectors. For some reasons maybe not many people were customizing those.
Who knows
But he did so this time when I do the upgrade like the way it should be done It does not work my website is broken.
So how is it my fault All I am asking him is a list of stuff that he changed.
Or can he pin point why even after updating the css it is not showing. I can give an example of another template website one of the widths was being assigned through javascript directly to the element. So thats why my custom css was not working. When the support saw the website online they immediately realized the problem and then gave me a solution
I have been in this scene long enough to tell you that no template author of website offers customizations for free. So I am not stupid to expect that but I guess you are even more so to assume I was expecting that.
@graphic4444 Don’t want to start any fight or whatever, i respect your opinion and you have all the right in the world to be angry. Absolutely nothing to comment about that!
What i’d like to point out though, is that, this change doesn’t have a precedent, it’s one of the biggest changes Envato has brought on the table. They will monitor every movement and most likely everything is precisely calculated. It’s a bold move, but if all this will fail, they’ll most likely revert the changes. There’s no shame in admitting a mistake and for the business’s sake, they will try to repair it.
For the moment all that i can say is: we’ll see. It might be one of the best decisions ever, it might not be, so, we’ll see.
What about the total earnings of an item? Currently it does not show the total earned amount of an item. It only shows the item price without the included support. The total earned amount of an item right now does not mean anything, as it shows the amount before the support policy + amount we have earned after the support policy without the support pack. Which is totaly invalid.
I cant believe this new policy. What is the value of themes i paid 58 dollars for, when the support is denied after 6 month. Lower value, so the price on the item must go down. Cut 10-15 dollars of the item price.
What about the items that was sold with lifetime support ?
And for me, I only use 1 out of 3 of the themes i buy within the first 6 month. I buy xtra themes to get to know them before I choose.
I think this will mean, that I will, and the customers I ask to buy themes (I dont even use the the referring or affiliated ways to get money out of this), will buy less themes in the future and sometimes look to other platforms.
No personal offence, but what you say is the perfect explanation why new support policy is a problem.
I alway was amazed how people that are purchasing items that costs tenth and sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop for $50 dare to demand something from authors.
And that’s basically the problem: new Envato support policy encourages such people to sit on authors heads.
Also, lack of proper modern support/developing tools such as, issue tracking tools, “branches”, major versioning, or direct communication/mailing to own customers; are holding authors back to fully rewrite a trash code that was written few years back. Yes there might be hard solutions and pain, but that doesn’t mean it should be like this. We need them!
Otherwise you end up with holding breath for releasing a non-backwards compatible version of your item. Thus, pain, sweat, depression etc etc. and cases that @rajsanand is currently having.
I’m totally not understanding this new support policy. As an author, should I now be making “less”, “more”, or the “same” as before for each sale?
One would think since the customer is paying a bit more for support, that I would also make more per sale, but I’m making less! Could this be a bug, or is this normal?
As an example, my theme costs $49. After my 70% cut, I used to make $34. But now I’m making … just $21.44 each. What’s going on?.. shouldn’t authors be making the same or more than before, and not less? I sent a message to Envato Support but no reply from them in a while.
Is Envato using this convoluted method to reduce their VAT bill?
The whole EU VATMOSS mess applies to digital products where there is “minimal human intervention”, like apps, ebooks etc - it does not apply to services that requires human intervention, like paid support services.
By saying that the price of an item now includes 6 months support, they can reduce the amount of VAT they have to pay on the digital product, while claiming (for VAT purposes) that the rest of the price is for the support service.
