authors can't buy their own projects, to make it look like they're popular, right?

hi – just checking, authors can’t buy their own projects, to make it look like they’re popular, right? I ask because sometimes I see a sale the minute something new goes on sale, occasionally, which is unlikely to occur, eg instant sales within 60 seconds of something going online.

it may also be deceptive advertising (from a government trade commission standpoint), since it’s not a genuine sale to a customer, but rather the author buying their own project to try and make it look falsely popular. Just checking, that doesn’t occur here, correct? Also it wouldn’t be fair to other authors, if some guys “buy their own projects” the instant they are offered for sale, to give unfair “popularity-appearance” advantage to themselves.

Just clicked the Purchase button on one of my items and the “Buy with Prepaid Credit” appeared. So I guess authors can buy their own projects. Weird. I hope I’m wrong tho. Strange thing happened last week when I uploaded a file. It got 2 sales immediately after the upload and never sold again after this. A thing I like to remind myself often is if a project is good it’s going to sell no matter if it had low or high sales during home page exposure days.

Protest said
Just clicked the Purchase button on one of my items and the “Buy with Prepaid Credit” appeared. So I guess authors can buy their own projects. Weird. I hope I’m wrong tho. Strange thing happened last week when I uploaded a file. It got 2 sales immediately after the upload and never sold again after this. A thing I like to remind myself often is if a project is good it’s going to sell no matter if it had low or high sales during home page exposure days.

And after you click:

“Please review the following issues that occurred

• This is your item, you cannot purchase it!”

EFEKT_Studio said

And after you click:

“Please review the following issues that occurred * This is your item, you cannot purchase it!”

Thanks. Didn’t wanna really click it. So I guess this neutralises my previous post.

I guess u can buy your project from different account, but I doubt that this “investment” will pay off if the project isnt good enough.

We can’t buy our projects. as AlexZlatev said , just with another account. but, I think customers buy items that they like that. They don’t take attention to sales number a lot.

moviePlankton said
They don’t take attention to sales number a lot.

thats not exactly the truth.

actually it’s the opposite; people are more likely to buy projects that have higher sales numbers posted, which is why envato publishes that, it’s a smart business practice, like having amazon reviews or sales ranking data. it’s called “social proof”—a project with 50 sales is much more likely to sway a buyer to purchase, than something with zero or low sales, as buyers will wonder ‘what’s wrong with it if nobody else wants it?’....

so it becomes self-fulfilling prophecy / popularity effect, by having sales, even if an author just buys his own project 1-2 times, using a gift credit card or anonymous name or whatever, makes it more likely to sell to actual buyers. IP address checking can help filter that, unless someone uses proxy/virtual ip server.

Some marketplaces, avoid exposuring the creation date, so number of sales is not so important without this factor…