ThemeForest: Why sell there?

From clients to products

For over twenty years, I’ve worked with amazing clients on lots of interesting digital projects. A key lesson learned in that time has been this: It’s not very profitable selling one solution, to one client just once.

Designers and developers may decide that creating products instead of client work is much better for their business. Products sold at low cost and high volume can yield much better profits than a single client project. You’re also in complete control of product quality and direction and are no longer at the whim of one client.

I wanted to increase my income through products, and started looking at the best options. Much of my freelance work involved designing and building clear and simple sites on WordPress, so creating themes for WordPress seemed like a good choice.

Use a marketplace or go it alone?

Creating themes is one thing, but marketing and selling them is quite another.

It’s relatively easy to set-up a digital shop and sell directly to customers. But it’s harder to advertise that business and quickly build a customer base.

An alternative would be to sell on one of the many marketplaces already operating: you have an instant customer base, a large portion of marketing is already done for you, and you can start selling right away.

Enter Theme Forest, a marketplace selling all sorts of web templates, from standard HTML through to complex themes for WordPress and other CMSs. With an already impressive global audience of customers, it would seem like a great place to sell my themes.

ThemeForest: Hot or Not?

Having been a customer on ThemeForest for a few years, I was well aware that it had a less-than-stellar reputation when it came to product quality, support, and low sales prices/commission rates. For example:

• http://wpcandy.com/thinks/about-35-dollar-themes/
• http://wpcandy.com/thinks/themeforest-is-the-red-headed-stepchild/
• http://slobodanmanic.com/321/buying-themeforest-insane/

However, it would be unfair to dismiss it on those terms without spending some time finding out the reality for myself.

I spent some time researching various aspects of the marketplace, including:

• What’s the typical sale price of a product?
• What’s the commission rate?
• What types of customers buy ThemeForest products?
• How well can I serve my customers when using a third party platform?
• What tools are provided for sellers to support their customers?
• What is the standard of the products sold?
• Do products meet my own very high standards?
• Will the reputation of the marketplace affect my own reputation?
• What’s the marketplace competition like?
• How clear is the product approval process?
• How good is the support for sellers?
• What happens when things go wrong?

As the answers to the above questions are quite detailed, a blog post covering all of this would be far too long. Please stay tuned for the next post in this series which will look at the first three options above.

Update 22nd Feb: Part 2 is available now: Return on Investment