Summary: Wondering how to get an item approved, and what the review process looks like? Here are key areas to be aware of when it comes to the review process at Envato. At this stage, we expect that you’ve already signed-up as an author and have an item(s) ready to upload or are in the process of preparing one.
If you know what you need or want to skip ahead, you can find more information by clicking on the other points below.
What does the Review Process Involve?
How does the Review Process Work at Envato?
What are the Review Times for New Items?
What are the Top Review Tips and Most Common Rejection Reasons?
I’ve Been Through Review, What’s Next?
What does the Review Process Involve?
We spend a lot of time trying to ensure that we have the right content that customers want. This means that during this review process, we do our best to ensure that the items are the right fit, so that your item has the best chance for success.
Once your item is uploaded to Envato, it is evaluated and assessed across our main Item Quality areas in the review process. We will look at:
- Item Presentation; this is about the aesthetics and how your item is presented to customers. This means following design principles, presenting your items accurately during the upload process. Some examples include:
- Cover and Preview Images
- Item Description
- Titles and Tags
- Item Information is all about marketing your item to a global audience and filling in all of the important details to help get your items found by customers during the upload process. Some examples include:
- Item Titles
- Item Descriptions
- Cover & Preview Images
- Technical Requirements mean the item is technically well constructed, compatible and easy to customize. These are often specific to the content type, such as Video, Audio, Photos, Graphics, Code, Themes and 3D items. This takes place during the item preparation process. Some examples include:
- The item works!
- Zip file structure
- Files and folders
- Documentation included (instructions)
- Legal Requirements are how an item meets our Envato terms. This is focused on ensuring the content of the item does not include any offensive materials, or breach the community standards. We may also identify potential copyright or trademark problems with your item during review, but it is your responsibility to ensure your items are clear of any potential legal issues before you upload. Some examples of things you need to ensure you have considered include
- Model and Property Releases are attached (where necessary)
- Your item is free from viruses and malware
- You have the licenses you need to include any assets that you didn’t make yourself
- Your item doesn’t infringe the intellectual property rights of anyone else
Some item types can be very complex, like WordPress items. So we also have Item Preparation and Technical Requirements that relate to each content or item type and will help you understand what to look out for when creating and uploading specific items within these categories.
Items being considered for other Envato sites, such as Elements and Placeit also have more detailed review standards. If you’re contributing to these sites, make sure to review the criteria before uploading.
Alongside our main requirements (Quality, Technical and Legal), please make sure to review any specific information related to your specific content type or if you are contributing items to other Envato sites. This will help you to understand what we consistently look out for in the review process and what you need to look for every time you create an item to sell on Envato.
How does the Review Process Work at Envato?
The Envato review process includes the following steps;
- Items are uploaded and submitted to review.
- Items are assessed by the Quality team with an approval, a soft rejection or a hard rejection.
If approved, your item is published immediately. Congratulations!
If hard rejected, this means that the Quality team has determined that the item is not suitable for sale on Envato. This can be for a number of reasons but generally, it means that the item is not at the quality level required or it has breached legal content guidelines. If your item has been hard rejected, you cannot resubmit the item.
Please note: Attempting to resubmit a hard rejected item(s) may result in revoked upload rights as we want to ensure a fair and equitable platform for all.
You must create a brand new item and ensure it is entirely distinguishable from your rejected item.
If soft rejected, feedback about the item will be provided to you through an automated email and notes in your Author Dashboard. This means that your item is almost ready to go, however it still needs a few more changes before it can be published!
If you receive a soft rejection, you will be given the opportunity to correct your item and re-submit based on the notes from the Reviewer (as outlined in the email or comments in the Author Dashboard).
To resubmit your soft-rejected item:
- Login to your Envato Account.
- From the Author Dashboard, click the 'Hidden Items' tab.
- Open the item by clicking on the item title.
- Click Edit, then Submit to update.
The item is then reassessed and published if it meets the feedback criteria provided by the Quality team.
Given the volume of content we receive, our teams are not able to provide specific feedback on Hard Rejections. However, we hope that you won’t be discouraged from trying again.
Our advice is to make sure your item(s) meets the main requirements across Quality, Technical and Legal and to check out the Top Review Tips and Most Common Rejection Reasons in section 5 below.
What are the Review Times for New Items?
The review times across content-types on Envato can depend on a number of factors, such as the amount of items currently in the queue and the available resources of our reviewers. You can view the current average wait times.
Our tip is to ensure that you have uploaded your item information correctly and that what you provided matches the items submitted during the upload process. If this is not the case, the reviewer may choose to correct the error(s) in order to approve the item, rather than rejecting it. This is done at the discretion of staff as a service to authors. If you are unhappy with changes made, you may wish to update and resubmit your item(s).
There may also be times during the review process when an item will receive a specific review status and need to be temporarily taken out of the queue. This can happen for a number of reasons, for example:
Held items: This means that an item may need to be reviewed by another member of staff, requires further information or a bug needs to be resolved.
Special Circumstances: This means that the item may be particularly complex or you may have bulk uploaded a large number of items, and so it may take longer for the review process to be completed.
If either of these occur, your items may take additional time to review. Rest assured, you will be notified during this process if further action is required and we will always try to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.
What are the Top Review Tips and Most Common Item Rejection Reasons?
If your item is rejected, we would encourage you to review our handy checklist of the most common rejection reasons encountered by other authors on Envato. This explores some of the common mistakes that we see across different items, sites and content types, such as Code, Video and Photos.
In general, an item must:
- Be useful to customers
- Not include any potentially offensive content (eg. violent, sexual or otherwise offensive content)
- Not be compressed to the point where the aesthetic quality suffers
- Not include your logo, URL, or watermark (you may include information about your services in an attached help text file)
- Be well constructed
- Be as compatible as possible
- Be easy to customize
You can also see an overview of our top review tips below:
- Upload items that show some variety and diversity in your skills. We want to see how you can create different kinds of items in your portfolio. It helps us to get a sense of the kinds of things you can produce for customers, but make sure they are recent examples.
- Consider taking some time to familiarize yourself with the current items and quality levels of popular items across Envato sites.
- If your file contains licensed materials, make sure that you have included sufficient evidence that you have a license or consent to distribute the item during the upload process.
- Be aware of legal requirements such as copyright to ensure your file is free of any potential legal issues.
- Keep in mind upcoming holiday / seasonal periods when you’re planning to upload new items.
- Reach out to your fellow authors on the forums who can help provide constructive feedback on your items.
- Take advantage of our existing resources on the Author Hub for trends, insights and tips from our community.
- Learn some new skills or improve your current skill set by completing some tutorials on Envato Tuts+.
I’ve Been Through Review, What’s Next?
Once your item has been reviewed and approved, it becomes available for sale on Envato. You can track the performance of your item and manage your sales on Envato by accessing the tools and resources available going forwards.
You can also get an insight into average earnings and when you can expect to start earning from your items in this new item expectations guide based on our Envato platforms.
Some authors are invited to sell their items through Elements and Placeit too. If you’re keen to be considered, submit your application.