A More Balanced Envato Market

Today Envato Market serves one and a half million active buyers from around the world, connecting them with the work of thousands of talented authors. We have always been an author focused community, our core value being that When The Community Succeeds, We Succeed. As we hinted earlier in the year in our 2014 Roadmap, we’re now focusing on lifting the user experience of Envato Market across the board. As a two-sided marketplace, we want to take a holistic view and bring buyer needs into focus in everything we do. After all, the best way we can serve our authors is to deliver an increasing number of happy buyers into the community. Our goal is to create a really fantastic experience that benefits both buyers and authors in the long term.

This has been a deep shift in our thinking, influenced by discussions and research not only with individual buyers, but larger agency buyers as well. We believe it will ultimately yield a better marketplace for both authors and buyers. We’re setting sail on this course with changes over the next two months to improve the purchase experience, reflect our two-sided marketplace in our fee structure, and provide the foundation for more buyer-oriented improvements in the new year.

Reducing Handling Fees

Buyers paying without using deposited credit, will now pay less in handling fees. We’re reducing the handling fee on items under $10 to just $1. We’re also starting to wind back the handling fees on expensive items, so there won’t be any fee on items over $75. And of course buyers using prepaid credit will continue to pay no handling fees.

Better Licensing on AudioJungle

Envato Market’s AudioJungle continues to be the highest sales volume stock audio marketplace in the world. Last week we announced that we’re upping the game on AudioJungle with an improved suite of licensing that will give clarity for high volume uses like film and broadcast as well as clearer expectations on popular regular uses.

Improved Watermarking on Images

This week we’re getting prepped to roll out improvements to the watermarking on both GraphicRiver and Photodune, with a new less intrusive watermark, as well as unwatermarking categories that don’t need them. We think this will help your browsing and buying experience when purchasing images.

Search Facets

All year our search team has been hard at work improving how you find great items on Envato Market. Some of these changes, like our Trending Filter or Rollover Video Previews, are visible, but most have been under the hood tweaks to relevancy algorithms. We’re very excited, however, to be on the cusp of releasing one of the more visible search changes we have in store – search facets! These will add more filters to search listings to help you drill-down to the items you want.

Better Buying Tools

Finding items is great, unless you can’t keep track of them all. And let’s face it, with a library as vast as the Market’s, that’s entirely doable! That’s why our Purchase team has been busy building a shopping cart for much of the year. We’re getting close to releasing the first iteration of the cart for logged-in users. Look out for it a little later this year.

Continued Commitment to Customer Service

We’ve moved our Envato support team over to a brand new Zendesk system and we’re now rolling together a detailed help centre system to help customers find answers faster through a self-service system. This will free up our team of twenty five support staff to deliver better answers to the more complicated queries, shorten wait times and improve satisfaction. We’re still in transition phase, which means our response times are not yet as fast as we’d like, but they’re heading down and we’re confident this trend will continue. We’re also building a better refunds workflow to help us provide a clearer, happier experience for buyers, and to give authors the power to refund transactions.

Changing our Fee Structure

We’re a two sided marketplace and today we’re changing our business model and fee structure to reflect this. When you purchase an item from Envato Market you’ll be able to see the breakdown of the item price from the author to you, and our service fee on top. Businesses focus on where their revenue comes from. Switching to a two-sided fee structure will help us focus on both sides of the marketplace to ensure we earn our fees. This change takes effect today, so your next purchase will include this fee breakdown on your statement and receipt.

We’ve updated our terms and conditions to reflect these changes, and we encourage all users to read through those documents.

What Services does Envato Provide?

Envato is trusted by a million and a half active buyers because of the services we provide. Our team of expert reviewers curates and qualifies all our content before pricing it consistently and competitively. That huge library forms the broadest range of creative goods of any digital marketplace and is available through a single, simple interface and account system complete with powerful search and sorting, collections, special offers, bundles and deals. We provide customer care for using the platform and help buyers connect with the best authors from all around the world.

What’s Next?

We’ve got much more coming for our loyal buyers including a ramp-up in our footage library, corporate/volume buyer services, clearer item support processes and systems for themes and plugins, and much more.

For Authors

Are you an author? Read all about what’s changing in rates, fees, and other changes that affect authors.

You can also find a discussion thread on the forums here.

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