Last week we released the Buy Now changes to the marketplaces which are needless to say, a pretty huge change. I promised an update one week later, so I’m back with some more information today!
So far, overall it seems to be going very well. We knew there were a lot of buyers itching for a Buy Now type system and sure enough the numbers have been climbing quickly. On launch about 15% switched that day, and over the last 7 days that number has climbed up to 28% of all sales being Buy Now sales.
This is a good indicator that we are filling a demand that was already there with our regular customers. Support issues about the deposit system have dropped off from being one of the biggest complaints to virtually non-existent (which Jordan and his team are very happy about!)
Overall sales have been strong and steady but not record breaking. Some authors have reported drops, some have reported increases. This is pretty normal I’d say. We’ve been watching GraphicRiver carefully as that was the place with the most increase in prices and overall it seems to be doing OK. There’s been a bit of an overall dip going on these few days of data, but not enough that I can say for sure it’s not just a normal fluctuation.
Today I’ll be announcing Buy Now, CodeCanyon, 3DOcean and a few other changes to our enormous newsletter list and on Tuts+/FreelanceSwitch/AppStorm. We’ve held off for a few days to get some initial data to compare to. This will of course bring a bump in sales as this type of marketing always does.
I’ve got some UI changes in the pipeline as well, though overall we will be sticking to the high price + discount version of giving prices. This has been under lots of debate in the team and on the forums, but we’re going to stick to the original plan.
So all in all, things seem to be going well which is good! As I say this was probably one of the biggest changes we’ve made to the marketplaces since they started. More unknown in many ways than things like the redesign or when we recategorize or change features. So as you would imagine we’re all paying very close attention to what happens!
It’s been a big year this year with the massive redesign, 3 new marketplaces and tons of upgrades and it’s really paid off with the sites many times larger than they were this time last year. I’m looking forward to writing my end-of-year wrap up post soon to look back on what has been the biggest year for Envato to date 
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