Please stop ADP madness

exactly, authors were thrown into this (imho) without some education by Envato

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@MNKY completly agree! The market look like to big outlet. It really influence to Themeforest reputation. Hopefully they will cancel this nonsense very soon.

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Just one brain surfā€¦ what if envato focused more on growing current markets insted of elements, sites etc. More features, options or maybe insted of elements make a yearly subcription for entire portfolio etc.

ADP wars are great for envato for now. Fixed fee gets them that.

And you cannot compare iphone vs cheap phones. Apple sells the way of life its a status. Themes are not there.

ADP is bad, period.

If there were rules which would be controled and limited. Missleading advertising punished. Then maybe it would be usefull.

Pre ADP was better. But envato as it was said needed to show growth and this was the simplest way. The proof is cyber monday on which they did not discount the envato fee. A very nasty move.

I really hope ADP gets shut down, but i really doubt it.

Cheers

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The big thing that people are not noticing with ADP is that with the fixed ā€œauthor feeā€ of $12 for WordPress themes, the lower the price is for the item, the less percentage of the sale you make. Elite authors are supposed to make 70% of the sale, but that only happens if you set your price at $59. If you set the price to $30, you only make 52.5% of the sale, and I donā€™t know how thatā€™s not a breach of our agreement with Envato.

My sales have absolutely tanked since Black Friday with all of the discounts, and they havenā€™t really come back at all, even though most authors have stopped the discounts. Iā€™ve been forced to lower my prices by $10-$15 just to try and compete at this point, and I might have to drop them even further. This is absolutely a race to the bottom, and I understand this is how a free market works, and that things may level out at some point, but for now, this is pretty insane.

Prices were already too low on the marketplace, and I had hoped that ADP would finally allow the top themes to RAISE their prices to more appropriate levels (which would, in turn, help the lower priced themes), but that has only happened with a handful of themes, and the rest have actually dropped theirs, some significantly. And at that point, the lower items have to drastically lower their prices just to get any sales. And they get a much smaller cut of each sale with the fixed author fee.

Iā€™m not saying ADP should go (even though it stinks for authors while we figure out how the market is going to settle), but the fixed buyers fee absolutely needs to. Not only are we being forced to lower prices, but as we lower them, we get a smaller percentage of the sale, and that canā€™t happen. If you sell a WordPress item for $19, you literally only make $6.12 as an elite author. Thatā€™s 32% of the sale, and I might as well be a non-exclusive author at that point.

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In ideal world the base minimum price should had been set by Envato, like it always was, and ADP should just provide authors opportunity to increase the price.

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I would rather sell 10 items at $100 each then 100 at $10, less support (less time wasted) which means more time on other items to make even more money, unfortunately a minority havenā€™t realised that the numbers will not add up in the long term, they are after short term gains and after a while they will soon bump their prices upto a proper level.

@Gareth_Gillman Supply and demand doesnā€™t really work like that with the 100 themes at $10 or 10 themes at $100. In reality, youā€™d probably sell 400 themes at $10 and one or zero at $100.

In this marketplace, setting your theme even at the standard $59 can price you out of the market, no matter how good it is.

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I believe they arenā€™t allowed too as that would be price collusion, inflating prices etcā€¦ They do set a minimum price with their fee having to be covered in every sale but every seller should have the right to sell at a price they are happy with, Envato set recommended prices but unfortunately a few authors are out just for a quick buck and have set their prices to the lowest possible to get the sales.

All the top themes still sell at the $59 price, sales are more scattered but over time authors will realise you have to set your price high and get less sales, there is no point chasing the bottom price as it only increases your workload which costs you more money.

You can blame ADP, holidays, the weather or Envato for lack of sales but at the end of the day itā€™s economies of scale, more items = more buyers but that means less sales per item. You donā€™t like it but you need to be more than just a theme builder, you will have to do your own marketing to get your items seen or you are going to be left in the dark. As the marketplaces continue to evolve, you will have to become smarter to generate sales.

As you may have read in my previous post, Iā€™m not anti-ADP. I realize this is just the way of the market.

My only point was with my last comment that your math was off and itā€™s not as if youā€™ll make the same amount of money no matter what your price like you were saying with the 100 for $10 or 10 for $100 example.

Economics of scale would hit gradually. We experienced a massive drop in a matter of 3 days once ADP was implemented and discounts started to fly in. We stayed away from the discount frenzy. For now, we are at a level which is tolerable. But we have to put in a lot more effort in marketing then we used to.

This changes had the direct impact it is undeniable and that is statistics talking. And i am not only talking about ADP.

That was going to happen and it should have started to go back to normal now (everyone testing out lower prices to see if they mean more sales).

The maths in my post were correct, you will make the same money if you sold 10 things at $10 or 1 thing at $100, you would still get $100ā€¦ but there would be less effort on your part on the 1 sale, so there is more ā€œprofitā€ (when you count in time etc). You just need to work out what your ideal price point is and set your price, then work to generate sales at that price.

How can you say the math in your post is correct when you have themes that exploded when they reduced the price by 50% last week, while the others stayed the same and saw a massive drop in sales? I think youā€™re also forgetting that your price and demand is dependent on the rest of the market. There are probably only 5 themes that actually sell AT ALL if they raised their price to $100, and thereā€™s no way they would make the same amount of money that they would if they set the price to $50. Thatā€™s not the way economics works.

The only solution for you guys is to become non-exclusive authors and move your stuff on a personal website. If youā€™re going to spend money on advertising, at least spend it for your website :slight_smile: youā€™ll get more revenue this way and youā€™re not dependent on TF changes.

I think itā€™s time to move on, the good all days are just a sweet memory.

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You are thinking about sales that actually happen on the market where I am not, i am talking purely about numbers and they are just as an indicator.

You can sell 10 items for $10 each and make $100, or you can sell 1 item at $100ā€¦ both make the same money ($100) but you only have the support for the 1 item rather than 10.

Purely financial, work out what you need to earn per month per theme to do well, e.g. $1500 per month, then work out how many sales you need at each price bracket e.g. $19, $29, $39, $49, $59 etc, work out which is more realistic e.g. 50 sales at $49 or 30 sales at $59 and then implement that pricingā€¦ Keep an eye on your sales and then amend the pricing if itā€™s not working e.g. drop down $10 and test that until you find the right price for your individual items.

yes, the math is not correct. People actually are drawn to low prices. The sweet spot is everything more than 50%. Actually, i do not know how much you are on it, but Avada itself went down with sales until they launched the new update.

Check the current sales of the top players. While the discount was up on cyber Monday sales went trough the roof. Even Avada had a day of discount and look at the number.

Digital products are not physical and clients want low prices, this will lead to the overall reduction of prices. Do check https://themeforest.net/category/wordpress and you will see which themes sell the most. And that is just the first page.

What will happen authors will compete at low prices and sooner or later it will become a standard. In my book this implementation was set to lower overall prices of the market, bringing more sales and with fixed Envato fee boosting up Envatoā€™s growth.

And there is one more factor, once Envato decides to go up with prices, they just need to raise the fee and itā€™s up to us to raise the prices if we want. For example, the current fee requires raising the price to 60$ to have the same income and how many themes did that?

In the long run, it will hurt the market badly.
You cannot compare Envato market with other types of business. In other physical supermarkets, for example, suppliers are negotiating the price individually and adjusting it also and rarely have exclusivity agreements. Stores do discounts usually on their profits and not so much on suppliers and if they do again individual negotiations.

And local market laws inspect, campaigns misleading advertising etc. Envato has absolutely no control nor rules they do what they please without any consequences.

The complaints and anger are piling up on forums, once it reaches more mainstream internet world news it will explode.

There are tons of laws that prohibit certain behavior and Envato dumped all that responsibilities on us but does not control nor prohibit anything. Someone will pay the price sooner or later.

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Have you contacted the Envato support?

I sent a message to Collis directly, but I plan on submitting a support ticket, too.

There are no more 70% of sale price since ADP, only author fee %: https://themeforest.net/become-an-author

What is fixed is a buyer fee and rates are here: https://help.market.envato.com/hc/en-us/articles/213819903-Fixed-Buyer-Fees-for-Author-Driven-Pricing-Categories

But for some reason the buyer fee is also paid by an author and not a buyer, not sure why they call it buyer fee then. Yes, it is included in itemā€™s price, but in reality it is just a way to charge author the fixed minimum fee. As a buyer I do not see any buyer fee mentioned in my invoices or during checkout, so this is just playing with terms.

Interesting how easy it is to just change agrements on which we agreed before :slight_smile:

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Exactly. The exclusive agreement was based on the 70% of the total price. And even after the tax issue changed the structure and verbiage of the breakdown, Elite Authors still got the 70%. It wasnā€™t until recently when ADP went into effect that the fixed buyer fee came into the picture that changed the 50-70% issue. And there was no clear indication that that was the case from Envato, nor was there anything that we officially signed off on. I realize that our continued use of the site serves as our continued ā€œagreementā€, but the sly way this was done is pretty underhanded from Envato.

Thereā€™s absolutely no reason authors shouldnā€™t still get 50-70% of the sale just because weā€™re setting our own prices.