Top Sellers Should Be Based On Revenue NOT Number Of Sales!

Honestly,

Sellers can blame Envato in part for dwindling sales which cause them to cut price.
Here’s why… Many buyers (including myself) use to by hundreds of dollars of stuff per month,
Not because we need it now, but because we anticipated needing it in the future.
What we normally did was to keep a credit balance on our account, and this way, if we saw something we liked, we’d simply select it. In some places this is called impulse buying. Recently Envato eliminated the practice of allowing buyers to keep credit balances on their account. And now buyers must pay a transaction to PayPal every time they see something they like.
This had two effects on the market. First it eliminated the impulse buying behavior. So now, we only buy what we need right now. And secondly, this increased PayPal’s profits, because now PayPal makes money on every Envato transaction on the market.

All of this means is the following:
a) buyers have become more cautious and thus buy less product,
b) sellers sell less product and thus much engage in price cutting activities just to stay in business,
c) Envato makes less money from sales because sales volume decreases, and
d) PayPal (and others) makes out like a bandit because get to charge a transaction fee on every sale made (no matter how small).

And think about. If an item cost $5, do I really want to pay a 25% transaction fee on the item?
Not really, Instead you’re likely to visit another online market where you’ve prepaid and can simply select what I need.

Price cutting, increase competition, and decreasing profit margins is simply the result of bad decisions and bad policies implemented by Envato last year.

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Yes this business move remains a mystery for many reasons, and as you say impulse buying will be minimised. Buyers do often overestimate how much assets they need and are therefore more likely to buy more if it’s convenient to shop. Which right now it isn’t.

Absolutely not, and the thing is that no authors wants to sell their music for $5 either. It is done purely to temporarily game the system and get better visibility in search rankings/top list placement.

An Elite author who gets full commission earns 80 cents of a $5 ($4 is the buyer fee) music track + $1 transaction fee.

So the highest payout an author can get out of the whole purchase ($6) is drumroll… 13.3 %. Envato gets 86.7% out of the purchase. That might be the reason they are not equally concerned about the price dumping that is happening.

Anyway, the point with this thread is that sales numbers have become totally useless now that authors can set their own prices and the system needs to adapt to that and stop rewarding authors who basically give their music away for free.

Envato has talked about how sales numbers is a social proof that is beneficial for sales conversion and trust. Like so many have bought this wordpress theme therefore it must be good. For music especially this must surely be of less importance.

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Very nice to hear a buyer’s perspective. I’m sure they quit holding balances because they estimated this way they would pay less tax upfront (or something similar). But they always forget to count in the invisible costs like sales drop in the long run. I hope they made their calculations well. I can’t see why a healthy business would make such a decision. Unless it’s not healthy any more.

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Thanks for your reply! I am sad to read such revelations from buyers …

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Something no one reacts from admin to our posts in the forum. Better to write a petition to the support and officially subscribe everyone.
I have bad english, can someone take it on themselves?

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Me too! :slight_smile:

Is there no official reply yet?

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hi guys, i personally do not understand what u all talk about … as for i know this is gains who is sorting people, laready, not number of sales … i also do not feel like there is so much difference anyways as this is often quite the same in most cases, except in some very specific situations …

i also tend to believe that it will have no impact on saturation anyways … they should rather opt for limiting daily submissions for this and get rid of the very sold saleless items …

You’ve been around for years, have you never check the Top-seller page? or the the top new files? or have you never used search and sorted it by ‘best seller’? Apart from the “paw”/level, everything is based on sales number.

Well that’s the whole point of this thread. With ADP, sale numbers and earnings are no longer correlated. Price dumpers do rank high with good sales but with ridiculously low earnings.

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