I have already expressed my frustration with Envato here on the blog a few times. Among other things, for example here or here or here. Now something happened again that almost cost me several thousand dollars.

What happened can be read in this blogpost.

First of all, again the info: this blogpost comes about because of the “document, don’t create” mantra from Russell Brunson, who wrote in his book about how to apply it to get more traffic.

Volume licenses. Again.

In the last article, I wrote about how unusually difficult it is to sell volume licenses at Envato. Basically, you can say that this is not possible at all. Because the developer has to face some obstacles:

• There is no package price.
• Also the license types are not designed for the purchase of multiple licenses.
• You can’t issue vouchers or something like that.
• In order to offer a good price to one customer, you have to lower the price for all customers.
• The customer has to add a product to the shopping cart a hundred times if he wants to buy several hundred licenses (there is no simple dropdown or even a field where you could enter the number of licenses).

Really …. weird. To put it gently. Why aren’t these standard features available at Envato? My guess is that they want to promote their Envato Elements. Because it gets a prominent place at the top as a banner on all sites (CodeCanyon, ThemeForest, etc).

Well… as mentioned before, CodeCanyon is their platform. They can do whatever they want. I can accept it or not. However, what happened last week is a crazy story:

Account suspended. Money back. Licenses gone.

As mentioned in the last article, a customer announced to buy several hundred licenses. The price was $30, so I reduced the price. A short time later, the company started to buy. For the time being, 100 licenses. For me, there was a big jump in the graph that CodeCanyon provides to authors. About 15 minutes later, the sales were all gone.

That’s not the end of the story. Apparently, it was so unusual for Envato to have someone buy 100 licenses that they smoothly (probably automatically) locked my customer’s account. One day later it was restored. The money was transferred back to the customer, which explains why my sales disappeared, but the purchases were gone as well.

And even this is not the end of the story. Envato asked the customer to settle the purchase via Paypal. I’m not sure why the payment didn’t work out. Presumably, payment was made by credit card. Obviously Envato is not capable of accepting such a payment at all.

If you want to sell to agencies at Envato, I can only advise: please don’t do it! It simply does not work! Maybe the target group at Envato is different: Authors who just want to earn a little extra money. Because it doesn’t seem to be suitable for larger businesses.

Anyway. The whole story has a happy ending. But also only because my customer was very ambitious. The first batch purchases have just arrived. I’m curious to see what happens next.

I am really happy to have such honest and great customers. It is really worthwhile for you to stay on track! Here’s my digital high-five for you: 🙌 🙌 🙌

What’s next.

Hopefully my frustration with Envato has now come to an end. Because then I can get back to work. I plan to update to version 2.24.0 and initial ACF support this week! Wohoo! 🥳