Hi!
This week i saw Envato is running some extra tests about the category page: https://themeforest.net/category/wordpress and if you open that url on Incognito mode, 50% of the times will show you the new design:
And the other 50% the old design:
Because all know all these changes are directly related to the conversion rate page views / purchases, i think Envato should consider this to the formula:
Conversion = ( page views from potential clients - authors - author team ) / purchases
A few days ago Envato launched a survey asking if you are a customer or an author and i think this make a lot of sense at least for Themeforest products where the conversion changed a lot with the sort filters and new category page design.
Elaborating this idea, an author and all his team probably will know what are they looking for because they have a really good knowledge about the market and also is well known a lot of authors generate a lot of page views per day just to get new ideas from other products, themes, etc so i think they should be removed from the conversion tracking to get more accurate results.
Author = someone who sold at least 1 usd (i think Envato know how to detect an Author).
Author Team = someone who can reply to the customer as support, i mean this: http://prntscr.com/oh0jkt
Finally my 2nd idea is the possibility to hide the Elements banner if we pass a variable, for example: https://themeforest.net/item/breek-minimal-masonry-theme-for-wordpress/24031994?ref=EstudioPatagon&banner=false
James in this post: Category Page Update recommends external marketing to attract more visitors but should be fair enough if we at least control the Elements banner so we can do external advertising with a better chance to make a sale.
As you can see on Best Sellers of the last month: https://themeforest.net/search?date=this-month&sort=sales&utf8=✓&view=list no matter what (if they are Power Elite or upload a very creative unique theme) they can’t reach 100+ sales, i know there are low seasons like April or July, but in the last year (2018) i saw a lot of themes reaching 250 - 300 sales in the first month and making them best sellers in the long term, now after the sort filter and category page changes is not possible anymore.
I hope someone of the Envato Team will read this and maybe they can give us their opinion.
@jamesgiroux @trent-aus @collis @KingDog @steve_lam
Thanks!!