It’s a challenge right? Because what you’ve essentially described is a situation in which your item had just over 40 errors.
The issue with this is that for all of those errors to be identified in the one review, a reviewer would need to spend a disproportionate amount of time with your theme. Lets say that each error takes 60 seconds to identify, and then write a comment on. Very quickly a reviewer has spent 40 minutes with your theme instead of moving on to the next one.
Granted, it’s not a perfect system. What you are describing is absolutely right in an ideal world where a reviewer has unlimited time, unfortunately the reality of the situation is that a reviewer doesn’t have that luxury. They identify the most important issues and then move on to the next item.
I do genuinely understand the frustration though. Pouring your heart and soul into something only to have errors identified over and over again is annoying. I think there is much we at Envato can do to make the submission requirements clearer so that it’s obvious to the authors what they need to do before they submit (as this will ultimately save reviewers and authors a lot of time).
Whilst the system might not be perfect, the reviewers do genuinely want to work with you to get the item to market. That’s why they have gone through this process with you, tedious though it may seem. I can tell you from personal experience that some of the best selling themes on the market went through a lot more soft rejections than you’ve gone through before they arrived at the best-sellers list where they are today.
Let me jump in here (since i know how much you love me matthew )
I don’t know this specific case, but in my eyes things are a bit different. There are cases with us when 2 different reviewers report different issues and do not report the same. The point is, that once you get those 12 points in first review (which took 70 days btw) and you go trough them and then you get 4 and then 2 and then 6 again, that jump back frustrates you. And we have had instances were things were reported which did not exist and in the second resubmition approved. This kind of issues cause income dropout.
And all of that is great if those initial reviews were close to what they were.
Now whats done is done, the anger and frustration has diminished to posting our frustration here but that’s about all.
Now what we care about is this situation going to rectify or not. Is the end of the year plan to get us down were we use to be or is this standard here to stay?
I am sure you see that we need to know that, to adjust our work process for the future. The falling conversions and sales force us to find another alternative source of income, which we overcame by publishing fresh themes on reasonable paste and could predict outcomes at a certain margin of error, but it was sustainable and was a steady growth.
This is the first year since 2012, from our first product that, we will not experience yearly growth.
lol, you know I love you dearly @anps. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
There are a few things here:
Different reviewers identify different things (they are human, after all). But I know this can be a point of frustration.
Is this the new standard? Not at all, review queues are a long way from where we want them to be, but they are decreasing, it will however be some time before the queues arrive at where we’re happy with them being.
I fully agree with you, and because of this we need to endeavour to be as transparent as possible with our authors so that they can make business decisions for themselves. However, authors who have experienced the greatest success in the long term are those that strategically market their existing items rather than placing a heavy reliance on the constant submission of new ones.
About the point 4. I think you realise that those items had quite a huge amount of luck to get were they are. And before they got there they had a lot of items and were producing a lot of them until they got that one sweet one. We are constantly updating our items, those that we do not eventually we remove from sales. But that 5 % that have few successful items has as i sad more to do with luck and gaining critical mass at the right moment.
For the rest of us mortals, we have to do with what we have. And updating hole bunch of items and market them is much harder then taking care of one, from marketing and logistical aspect and i do not even want to go on support.
And a while a go we did not need to worry about a lot of things that we do now… envato took care of that for those 30%. Now sadly 20% of time marketing, 30% of time support, 20% of time logistics (withdraws, explanations, finances, piracy etc.) the rest updates and in the end how much is left for developing new themes? you need a team to sustain this. And when you put on top review times, we are sadly near to the breaking point.
This is the reason why quite a few of elite and power elites will leave as Orman Clark did. If you do not hit that sweet popular list in the top 20 or 30 its just a very unsustainable market for serious business.
In the end my prognosis is that envato markets will go down back to hobby developers and side earnings, besides of that top cream which will start experience diminishing sales. Just check avada before new years they got to 2k+ per week.
the constant attention to new ventures and redirecting visitors to other envato new products, with review times and other issues is eating us a live.
If you just check the envato sites design, it has not changed to something really new for ages something from which we as authors would benefit in means of sales, promises as US market clients will go up etc. Are just sadly empty.
Again i really care about this community but lately every move envato makes it disappoints me. But hey what can we do but leave if we do not agree so for now we stay
Totally agree with you, let me share my thoughts a bit. It is sad to wait for almost 8 to 12 months for launching one product. I love Envato but Envato is not helping the average earning authors to get more sales. Instead Envato is gifting disappointment to its hard working authors.
matthewcoxy i got another soft rejection with 11 more errors. All of these are totally new and related to design this time. I am not happy at all to see another soft after many many soft rejections. Thanks Envato for such a beautiful work to pinch the Authors.
Had to open a new acct because I have not logged in for over a year and the info that I have does not seem to work.
The problem is I have purchased 3 different themes and now cannot upgrade any of them, particularly, Invictus, because all the purchase codes on in the previous acct.
Sent an email to for support on this issue but wanted to reach out internally here.
Can you search for my name in a different account and respond to this email address?
Isn’t it supposed to be 22 days for review time for a e-Commerce item? I don’t even remember the time I have submitted my last WordPress theme, pretty sure it’s been 40 days already and still waiting for an answer.
Funny thing is, I have already coded/finished another WordPress and started the third one but still dealing with the first one
Funnier, the new rule (if any) will possible make your working effort on the second theme gone if you chose a wrong development approach which you only know after your 1st theme is approved.
In my opinion for Themeforest case, I think it’s better to the reviewer should be deference each category. Because item likes Wordpress needs more time to review than the other item,
I’m on my second day of waiting too. Had only one soft-reject reason (4th soft rejection) hope to see it on the market soon.
Also, I have a question, if i get another Soft Reject, but i decide to upload a new item, will i be able to edit soft rejected item while the new item is being queued for review ?
