Posts by Themespike

I’ve had a similar experience on a few different occasions. I agree with UI20 , at the very least Envato should make it clear support is not part of the deal. People need to understand at $25-$35 per theme (of which the author gets on average about half), they’re paying a tiny percentage of the development costs for theme. Just an hour or two of tech support can put the author in the red.

Even better, Envato should provide a mechanism for buyers to pay extra for support.

Web hosting isn’t exactly the easiest business to break into. There’s tons of competition, razor thin margins and it’s very cutthroat. You’d have to do something quite different to get noticed. Like hosting optimized for WordPress. Or a really great/low effort reseller system. Just opening up with cPanel probably won’t fly as there’s already a million people doing that and there’s always someone willing to do it for cheaper.

That’s my 2 cents.

Selling child themes might be tricky with the current way ThemeForest works. I’d suggest bundling the parent theme with the child theme. Add a note to the reviewer and they might give you a higher selling price if you can make the case it adds more value.

We’ve been selling on themes on ThemeForest here for about a year. In that time we’ve got quite a few requests to customize our themes. We’d like to focus our business on building new themes, so we’re looking for someone we can partner with to handle customizations.

Ideally, you’ve got Photoshop, HTML , CSS, PHP , and WordPress skills. If you’ve done real estate websites, that’d be a huge bonus.

You’d have full access to our themes. We’d provide 1-2 leads per week. The value of the initial work isn’t always great, but it has developed into larger projects for us in the past.

If this is something you’d be interested in, please send a couple examples of themes you’ve customized to cody@designspike.ca. Please use the subject line “Theme customization partner”.

Cheers, Cody

I have to say that all the reviewers I’ve dealt with (including jremick) have been very helpful when queried for more details. But I do agree with luckykind that the process could be more transparent.

Adding a bit of structure to the rejection letters would probably make everyone’s lives easier. Even if it’s just a summary of the checklist the reviewers go through. For example:

Design:                Pass
Ease of Use:           Pass
Code:                  Pass
Features:              Pass
Size of market:        Fail
Description:           Fail
Documentation:         Pass
Etc...

I’m in the same group as you all. I took an information systems program which included only a basic HTML course. I actually think it did more harm than good because the information was so out of date. I’ve yet to see a college or university program that prepares people for the real life in a significant way.

That’s true, you don’t have to provide support. I’m worried about comments and ratings impacting sales.

I’m just curious how other authors deal with this. We have a few templates on ThemeForest here and we get a lot of support requests. As you can imagine, they’re all over the map. How do you do xyz? Does it work the abc plugin? Many of the questions are already answered in the included help doc.

So the question is how do you deal with this? You aren’t paid for this time, so the more service you provide the less you’re making per hour. Has anyone tried charging for support?

I like how WP Plugins (http://wpplugins.com/purchase/61/cms-members-wordpress-version ) has a higher price if you need tech support. Would something like that fly on ThemeForest?

Thanks for your opinions.

We were discussing trying to roll out a system so that we have two payment cycles a month. There would still need to be the same cooling off period, but two opportunities per month for a payout. Would that help? If it’s useful I’ll suggest to accounts that we begin working towards that.

Absolutely!

It would be nice not to have to request payment every month as well. If it’s already there, sorry. Ideally if I’ve made more that x number of dollars (say $50), I can set it to just pay me out every month (or two weeks like you’re talking).

Is there any chance of speeding up payments to authors? I really dislike having to wait until the 15th of every month. Even if there was a dollar (or five or ten) charge to get it faster, I’d like the option to withdraw money on my own schedule.