I sell themes on a marketplace called ThemeForest. It’s sort of a dream job. You work on a layout for a few weeks to a few months, and when you’re happy with it you submit the theme for approval. Assuming the theme gets approved you can sit back and relax (for a day or two) and reap the benefits of all your hard work in the form of revenue. Except for one thing. Support for the theme commences. Now ThemeForest make it very clear that authors do not have to provide support for their themes, but everyone does and for good reason. It’s smart business. As soon as it becomes apparent that you do not provide support, a buyer is going to think twice about purchasing your item, and if they do and get stuck they are one click away from given you a 1 star rating. The customer essentially has a gun to your head.

So now we’ve established that support is in fact a necessity, we’re left with the realization that we’re going to be spending a good few hours of the day answering questions for free. Those same hours which could be spent working on our next theme. I understand that people need support, especially for an item they’ve paid for, the issue is the type of questions that most authors receive. Really as customers you are not helping yourselves at all (not all customers of course, many of you know the drill). You’d think that you would try to be as clear and concise as possible so the author has a good grasp of the situation immediately. Oh no, that would be too easy, instead we receive questions like, “Help me ASAP, I need to get this site up immediately! Every time I install your theme an error comes up and totally kills my site.”. There is so much wrong with this. So if you’re a customer and need support, I suggest you read on as I take a look at some of the most infuriating questions authors receive.

“Help me ASAP, I need to get this site up immediately! Every time I install your theme an error comes up and totally kills my site.”

Firstly, you’re not helping yourself by telling us to help you as soon as possible. Most authors answer support questions when they have free time or at set intervals during the day. We’re not going to rush to your aid and drop everything we’re doing. All you’re going to do is piss us off and our willingness to help you goes down ever so slightly. Secondly, telling us an error comes up does not help. You have a specific detail at your finger tips, the error message itself, and decide not to post it. It’s like going to a doctor and telling them you’re ill. The doctor asks, what are you symptoms and you reply, I’m just ill. Vomiting? Temperature? Nope. Just ill. Please, please, please always copy and paste any error messages you receive, because most of the time we will then be able to diagnose your problem right away. Thirdly, whenever possible please refrain from undescriptive terminology. Telling us that it kills your site is meaningless. This could refer to any number of things. On the one hand your whole database has been deleted and on the other the theme has just made your site temporarily inaccessible. How can we provide a solution to such a huge range of potential problems!

“How do I move this area over here, change the colour of this text and enlarge this image?”

I don’t mind helping out with the odd CSS change, but you have to understand that we provide support for our themes as you bought them. This means we will help you out with any problems you are having setting up the theme or any bugs you come across. What we are not is your personal customization service. If you want to change the theme to your liking, and you probably will, this is your responsibility. This is not support. You should make a list of all the changes you want made and then hire a custom developer.

“Your theme doesn’t work, I bought it under the assumption it would look like the live preview!”

Sigh. In most cases this message is in response to a five star theme that has been on sale for nearly a year and has raked in hundreds of sales. Common sense suggests that the theme works just as advertised. Why do you never assume that the problem lies on your end, either with your server set-up or your inability to read the help file. Again, your lack of specifics really doesn’t help matters. What doesn’t work? Can you install the theme? Can you activate the theme without any issues? Do you receive an error message on a particular page? Details. Details. You do want us to solve your problem right, or did you just email us for a moan?

The Key Points

So what is the key to being a good customer. I think it takes three things:

1) If you run into any problems your first source for help should always be the help file. Every theme has one, and many include a troubleshooting section (either in the help file itself or in the item page’s FAQ section).

2) If the help file cannot solve your problem then you will need to contact the author…maybe. Check what support service they offer – details will be provided on the item page itself on the author’s profile page. Some author’s answer support questions on the item discussion page, other’s prefer to be contacted via the contact form and more recently some are using their own support forum (including myself). One of the benefits of the latter is that you may not even have to ask anyone for support, a quick search on the author’s support forum may bring up the answer to your problem, since so many customers ask the same questions over and over.

3) If you do contact the author, be as descriptive as possible with your problem. Copy and paste any error messages that occur and provide links to the exact pages the problems are occurring on. In some cases a screen shot of the problem may also be appropriate.

And that’s it. Three key points that will make solving any issues you have far easier for the author, and most importantly yourself.