CentrioHost Blog

With WordPress being used by over 34% of all websites, the space can be very competitive! A big dilemma for a lot of new WordPress theme developers is whether or not they should go out on their own or distribute their work on an already established marketplace. Today we have the pleasure of interviewing Henry Rise, the CEO of ThemeREX, a Power Elite Author on ThemeForest. He’s going to share with us his first-hand experience of having sold themes on ThemeForest for five years, and some of the pros and cons to the platform. If you are still contemplating which route to go down, hopefully, this can help you make a more informed decision.

ThemeForest + WordPress

For those of you who might not know, ThemeForest is owned by Envato, and is an online marketplace where you can buy and sell HTML templates and themes for popular CMS (content management system) products like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. According to Alexa they are listed in the top 1,000 websites in the world and receive millions of visitors each month. They are definitely one of the largest marketplaces of its kind.

As of writing this, there are over 10,000 WordPress themes available on ThemeForest. They have what you might call a “need each other to survive” type relationship.  According to research from Freemius, while only 28% of the Themes on ThemeForest are WordPress Themes, the WordPress themes are driving 80.5% of the total revenues. You can buy a theme for literally anything, from a corporate e-commerce theme to a wedding theme. Just for fun, we pulled a screenshot of ThemeForest back in 2008, in which time they had only 14 WordPress themes.

Why the massive growth? Well, it’s quite natural as WordPress themes are easy to develop. Moreover, entrepreneurs and small businesses tend to prefer WordPress over other content management systems as it is easy to use. According to W3Techs, 60.8% of all CMS users are utilizing WordPress. You can also check out our in-depth to learn more about the history of WordPress.

However, due to the fact that there are so many WordPress themes on ThemeForest, this makes the competition tough. You can no longer just list your theme and watch the sales start rolling in. ThemeForest authors and developers have to make certain changes in their strategies in order to succeed. If you want to reach the top of the selling lists it isn’t recommended to place your entire business solely on ThemeForest, as this can be risky. It’s also recommended that you run additional marketing campaigns for your brand, even if you’re a power elite author.

What is a Power Elite Author?

Envato has what they call an elite program. This is to reward sellers that cross certain thresholds when it comes to total sales volume. The first level is once you pass $75,000 in total sales, you are rewarded with an elite badge, a 12 months tuts+ subscription, and Google Analytics on your seller profile. This would then allow you to add UTM parameters to marketing campaigns and see what is actually converting. The levels go all the way up to $25 million, in which you can pick your own adventure and Envato foots the bill.

While those levels might sound outrageous to some, there is a lot of money to be had in the WordPress theme market. The number one selling theme on the marketplace, Avada, has sold over 300,000 copies! And if you do the math on $60 a license, that is over $20 million in sales on just one multipurpose theme. However, they also have the advantage of time on their hands, as they have a very well established brand and theme. It can be a lot harder now with all the competition.

Pros of Selling on ThemeForest

Today we are interviewing ThemeREX, a power elite author with over 37,000 in sales. They have over 156 WordPress themes on ThemeForest with a 4.5 out of 5-star rating. If you are thinking about selling your designs on ThemeForest, you should know all the pros and cons before taking any actions. Who better to take some advice from than an already well-established seller?

Here are some of the pros that Henry, their CEO, shares with us about selling themes on ThemeForest:

1. Stability

Envato gives you stability and confidence in your bright future if you are building a web design business (we mean serious business, not creating templates from time to time when you’re in the right mood).

2. Lots of Traffic

Envato has insane amounts of traffic. According to SEMRush they get over 9 million organic visitors per month, and this is only estimating desktop traffic. So you can safely assume it is a lot!

What does that mean for you? Your themes are viewed by a targeted audience, lots of relevant people. This traffic is not random. Users who browse your themes have extensive knowledge of the topic. Sometimes it seems that they know more than you do about it. So, what should you do? Try to convince them that your products are good.

Let’s take ThemeREX as an example. We started from nothing and our traffic has grown to 200K visits per month very quickly. Please keep in mind that most of the traffic comes from demos. The trap is that the majority of customers will never see your home page. How to avoid it? Show them more templates on demos, or use banners, etc. Make sure that you have your finger in that traffic pie.

3. Choose Your Pricing

Envato gives you the choice. You are free to choose prices for your items. For instance, you can opt for the lowest price and sell your magnificent, time-consuming work for a dime. This will be your sacrifice to name building and climbing to the top. Or, you can do just the opposite. You can set your price at hundreds per theme like some vendors at the high end of the charts.

4. Higher Revenue With Exclusivity

You have to make another big choice partnering with Envato. Would you like to sell your themes everywhere or exclusively on Envato? The difference is in the revenue. If you are offering your products here and there, you get 50% of revenue. Maybe you will be satisfied with that. But most of Envato partners choose exclusivity and sell their themes only there. The fee can then be reduced to 12.5%, but it also depends on gross sales. So, you’d better think twice about what’s more beneficial for you. Learn more about Envato author f