It’s been five months since we launched author-driven pricing for the Fonts category and two since we expanded it to Add-ons and Presentation Templates. Over time, more and more authors have started to experiment with pricing, making slight adjustments up and down and, most excitingly, achieving better results overall. This is a great sign and suggests author-driven pricing was the right move for these particular categories.
Now that the pilot is completed and author-driven pricing is here to stay for these categories, we’re announcing some important changes so the system is more stable and suitable for the long term. These will be rolled out in the next week or so and we’ll update the dashboard and this post when they go live.
Fixed Buyer Fee
On Envato an item's sale price is made up of four parts:- List price: the price shown to buyers on the item page (item price plus buyer fee)
- Buyer fee: the portion of the list price that represents Envato’s fee to the buyer
- Item price: the price paid to the author for the item license
- Author fee: the portion of the item price that represents Envato’s fee to the author
Or, in simple terms, list price = buyer fee + item price (including author fee).
Up until now, the buyer fee has been calculated as a percentage of the list price for all categories on Envato Market. This system works well for categories where Envato controls pricing as the buyer fee (for Envato services to the buyer) is effectively determined by Envato and standardized at the category level, but it’s less suited to the author-driven pricing ones.
So, the first change we will be making is to fix the buyer fee for the Fonts, Add-ons and Presentation Templates categories only. The new fixed buyer fees are:
- $1 for all items in the Add-ons category;
- $2 for Fonts; and
- $3 for Presentation Templates.
Authors Control the Item Price
With a fixed buyer fee in place, Add-ons, Fonts and Presentation Templates authors will set the **item price** instead of the list price.For this release, we’ll be leaving all list prices as is, except for a very small number of items where the sum of the fixed buyer fee plus the item price exceeds the list price the author had previously selected.
In some cases, the new structure may cause a decrease or increase in the item price. If your item price changes and you wish to return it to what it was pre-launch, you will be able to do so on the edit item page.
Details of How to Price Your Items
When the changes go live, Fonts, Add-ons and Presentation Templates authors will be able to enter an item price for their item into the Price text box on the upload page, or on the Update Item page. The price change will take effect immediately. Read more about this in our [help center][1].
IMPORTANT Information About Pricing Discussions
Remember, there are strict laws governing pricing conduct. In particular, it’s strictly prohibited to have an agreement, arrangement or understanding between competing businesses (such as two authors) about what price point to sell at. Think of this as needing to avoid any discussion on the specifics of how you’re pricing your item or what you think item prices should be. How to price your work is a commercial decision you will need to make for yourself. Read more about this in our [help center][2].We will be monitoring closely this forum thread closely. If you’re an author, please don’t discuss with other authors what prices you’ll be setting on your items (either here, in other forum threads or anywhere else).
