Launched in 2008, ThemeForest is the world’s most popular WordPress theme market, pairing WordPress theme developers with hungry buyers. ThemeForest is a part of this seven-property Envato Market household (unified in 2014), which also contains the now extremely well-known WordPress plugin marketplace, CodeCanyon.
Because of its prevalence, ThemeForest is still one of the best ways for WordPress programmers to make a living — simply develop a motif, upload it to ThemeForest and, after validation by quality control, start selling to a massive pool of qualified buyers. Based on whether they sell exclusively through ThemeForest and what their sales volume is, motif developers earn someplace between 45 percent and 87.5percent of their sales.
Though Envato‘s fiscal details aren’t publicly disclosed, the stats which are available are totally shocking. In 2014, it was revealed that Envato had paid a cool quarter of a billion bucks to its sellers, with 48 of its vendors having generated more than $1 million worth of earnings each.
From a motif buyer’s perspective — the principal focus of this post — you are spoiled for choice. ThemeForest lists astonishing 12,000-plus WordPress topics, typically priced around $60 each, though Envato moved to allow authors to set their own pricing in 2016.
Is ThemeForest Suitable for You?
Naturally, the answer to this question ultimately depends on who you are and what are the business goals. Let’s take a look at the advantages and disadvantages to consider:
Looking at pros and cons to Think about if ThemeForest is Ideal for your themes or not:
Experts of Selling Your Themes on ThemeForest
1. Lots of Traffic:
First off, being a large & favorite marketplace, the first noticeable benefit for anybody who wishes to utilize ThemeForest as a platform to sell their WordPress themes is the large amounts of traffic that flow in and has exposed to the industrial topics. Some of that traffic will convert into a sale. In that aspect, ThemeForest is very similar to quite a large mall, in which a lot of men and women prefer to do their shopping simply because it centers on many distinct shops inside it. That way, people don’t have to cover large distances when checking out different shops since they’re all situated inside the same building.
2.Managing Everything “Meta”:
ThemeForest creates selling your WordPress themes a breeze by handling all”meta” and leaving you focused on creating themes (the product). From the e-commerce entire world, managing”meta” means that they take good care of getting payments if someone decides to buy one of your topics. They also handle the distribution of your electronic files. While this is, of course, all potential to do all on your own, it’s still a significant time & effort saver, especially when you’re just getting started.
3. Pretty Theme Demos:
Setting up a fairly demo of your theme on ThemeForest (with custom graphics and styles) can be quite valuable for sales because it clearly allows prospective buyers to encounter exactly what your theme might look like on a live site. Unlike the WordPress.org theme repository, not only are customized and pretty theme demos allowed on ThemeForest, it is actually a best practice.
4.Code Review for Your Topic:
As a remarkably popular market, ThemeForest must be dedicated to high coding standards (similar to the official WordPress.org repository). They devote expert reviewers to go over your theme’s code and be sure that it’s up to those criteria. It’s nice to get this reassurance about the technical level of your merchandise.
Disadvantages of Selling Your Topics on ThemeForest
1. Fierce Competition:
The immediate disadvantage that comes right along when talking about the traffic advantage (see above) is the simple fact that this traffic gets exposed to tens of thousands of other templates & themes on the same site. Granted not all those competitors are in the same WordPress topics category, but even if we are talking about just 9-10K other rival products (the actual current number is 9,674 WordPress Themes in the ThemeForest marketplace ) — that is nevertheless a difficult arena to be competing in.
2.No Communication with Customers:
A motif seller on ThemeForest doesn’t have any direct/indirect connection with the men and women who purchase their items. What that means is that you’re tied into that platform, because even in the event that you get a loyal customer base that comes time later again to purchase your products — those people will be gone forever in the event that you choose to take your business elsewhere, or if ThemeForest closes down a few days. Why gone forever? Because you won’t have some idea who they are or any way of calling them, that is why.
3. Popular & Multi-Purpose Things:
The ThemeForest marketplace, similar to any marketplace out there, is divided into classes, and then into sub-categories, to make it simpler for customers to get what they’re looking for. Once it makes a great deal of sense for any store to place products that serve various functions in different areas in the shop when entering a marketplace like ThemeForest and trying to make a buy — it is very simple for a client to get drawn around to the”Popular Things” page, or simply go with some”Many Popular Responsive Multi-purpose Theme”. This tendency appears to assist already popular topics remain popular on account of other, perhaps not necessarily less worthy themes. Not to mention that it also appears to decrease the general sales number, because people appear to be purchasing these monstrous themes once and then reusing them for many of their endeavors, by simply assembling the theme’s pieces in a different.
Conclusion
While ThemeForest still remains a great source of premium responsive WordPress topics for buyers, it might be a fantastic idea to test out smaller motif stores such as ThemeIsle, Themezinho, A Topics, etc. or reach from the developer and get all questions answered before making a buy.