Theme Thrift.com, a new project from Jake Caputo of Design Crumbs, is a “Pay What You Want WordPress Themes” theme shop. Unlike most theme shops, Jake isn’t boasting dozens of themes, or even two or three. Instead he is offering just one theme at a time for a “Pay What You Want” price tag. Each theme available is up for sell for just a few days, after which it is taken down permanently (or moved elsewhere). I’m posting about it here because Jake decided to use Easy Digital Downloads as his e-commerce platform, and he has done an exceptional job with the integration.
The philosophy behind the project is “Pay What You Want WordPress Themes”. The themes can be purchased for $5, $10, $20, $35, $50, or even $0. Yes, zero. It’s a beautiful idea that really lets users show their true appreciation by choosing to pay for the product they are receiving, instead of just downloading it for free. Whether it turns into a profitable venture or not has yet to be seen, but I certainly love the idea.
The variable pricing option that Jake used was made possibly by the features released in v1.0.5 of Easy Digital Downloads, which was pushed out less than 24 hours ago. You can read more about this significant feature enhancement on the Easy Digital Downloads development blog.
Jake was nice enough to answer a couple of questions for me:
1. Why did you choose Easy Digital Downloads, and what do you like about it?
EDD was extremely easy to use and set up, plus it met my needs perfectly. It gets to the point with the options and doesn’t give me a bunch of features I don’t need. Other e-commerce plugins I’ve tried take hours to set up and are too convoluted for my purposes. EDD had my store up in no time, with no stress.
2. What was your goal with the creation of Theme Thrift?
I had a theme sitting on my hard drive that I couldn’t decide what to do with. I considered selling it on my own, and I considered giving it away for free. Both of those have pros and cons, but either way I was worried I’d be white noise. Then one day I started kicking around the idea of “pay what you want” for themes; I hadn’t seen that done before. This seemed like a win-win. Once I saw Easy Digital Downloads was going to have variable pricing, I knew it was the way to go. A short two days of design and development later, I launched ThemeThrift.com
If you haven’t seen it yet, go checkout Theme Thrift, as well as Easy Digital Downloads.
Thanks for the write up Pippin!
Love the idea. When I sold skins, knowing what to charge was always difficult. Hope it works.