All discounts suddenly gone from products?

The "Make offer" button has apparently been permanently removed at the beginning of this year.

Eight hours ago, I contacted CGT support about the discounts disappearing, but have not heard back from them. The loyalty points are gone as well. Right now, there are no sales discounts (with the exception of those put there by the sellers on certain products of their portfolio) nor can you use loyalty points on purchases. Under those conditions, I am not going to complete my purchase transaction as originally intended, unless and until this situation is resolved.

This has been going on for about 24 hours now. Looks like someone is asleep at the wheel...

It is unpleasant also for us sellers. That such thing happens in last days of month when everybody wants to get some sales to improve selling statistics of ending month.

Hi all :)

We’re in the process of optimizing the sale-offs to make them more dynamic and maximize your sales. Regarding the ongoing sale-off, we are working on fixing it and the items you previously saw on sale should be back on sale tomorrow at the latest.

Regarding the Loyalty Points, currently, they are not visible because they cannot be used during a sale and it was confusing most of the users. CGTrader Points will become available again once the sale is over. However, we are also running some tests for better ways to build loyalty and improve the current setup.

As for Make an Offer, the data showed that the feature usage was very low and experiments proved that it harmed sellers’ performance significantly due to a complicated process that required buyers to wait and often ended without any sale. That was the reason for sunsetting this feature.

Please note that we are doing our best to remove all the unnecessary steps in the process of searching and purchasing 3D models and maximize your sales!

Obviously I don't have access to "official" CGT data, but, in my personal experience, the Make-an-Offer feature was a major thing. According to my conversations list, I made 250 offers over the years, about 80+% were accepted by the seller right away, a few more were settled with a negotiated price (i.e. higher than my initial offer but lower than the current price listed on the website), and about 10-15% were either outright rejected by the seller, we failed to reach a compromise and I did not purchase, or I never received a response to my offer.

In other words, more than 200 of my offers led to sales. Not exactly all that trivial a number in my estimation. (I even had a few offers I made around Christmas accepted this years, after the feature had been retired.)

From my point of view the thing is this: Some sellers either don't participate in website-wide sales events (or only very rarely) and some go no higher than 30% off; but some of those in these two groups allowed offers to be made. Which significantly increased the chance of a sale being made to me. Now, after the removal of the offer feature, those sellers who don't participate in sales events will most likely never sell to me because I don't pay full price for items that list at more than 10 USD as a matter of principle (As a mere hobbyist I don' t NEED to buy anything; I'm quite willing to spend thousands of dollars a year on 3D assets but only if (a) the product interests me and (b) I can get a good deal; if sellers don't want to discount their products that is totally fine by me; no sale then. Thus, in my opinion, the sellers are more negatively affected by the removal of the Make-an-Offer feature than I am as a buyer; in fact, I'll be "saving" money by purchasing less than I might otherwise have.

@lassebauer
It looks like line breaks are not possible (or rather: will be automatically removed) when you use "Reply" instead of the "Your answer" text field. That is why I changed my original reply to JuditaCGTrader to "Well..." and posted my "real" answer separately. The missing line breaks when using "Reply" are another thing that CGT should fix.

Back to the topic at hand:
I, for one, will not go the "project route" just to get a discount; again, there is no asset for sale here important enough to me to go through that hassle. If CGT continues to make the purchasing experience worse for buyers, it will probably cut into sales. After all, it's not like CGT is the only game in 3d-asset town.

The good news: The sales discounts are back.

The not so good news: While "up to 70% off" is still being advertised, I can't find a single model that is more than 50% off, so that has not been fixed (I informed CGT support about this almost 48 hours ago).

At least the missing sales part is fixed.

"Up to..." being the key words here. It´s been that way forever, pretty much since the very first, or second, Black Friday sale where there were lots of assets on sale for 70%. At the end of the day, it depends on what the original price was, and unfortunately there are plenty of examples of authors who increase the original price in order to give a big "discount", only to land on pretty much the original price. Oh, well - at least the intended sale is back.

And I agree. The missing "make an offer" function is a counter-productive decision. But at the end of the day money talks, so we´ll see if it makes a difference or not.

I did not notice anybody raising their prices before a big sale such as Black Friday. Usually, I maintain a wish or watch list of products I may be interested in and I check this list quite often (sometimes several times a week), so I think I would notice any changes in price. That being said, I did notice price changes to products some time after I had bought them; the sellers apparently figured out they were asking too much and lowered the list prices; this kind of behavior is an additional reason for me to not pay full (list) prices.

Since I have a number of "preferred" sellers, whose discount pattern I have learned over the years (i.e. how much are their products discounted in case of a 50%-off sale, how much in a 70%-off sale), I have a fair idea about what to expect from them during any one site-wide sales promo (some never go beyond 30%, some do 40% in a 50% sale and 60% in a 70% sale and some go "all the way"). And none of those, who usually do 70%-off during a 70%-off sale go beyond 50%-off in this sale.

If CGT advertises "up to 70% off" but there are no products actually available at 70% off then this ad claim is at least misleading and should (more accurately) state "up to 50% off". If there are no products at 70% off than the claim is simply not true. Otherwise you could just as well claim "up to 100% off", because, mathematically speaking, all products would fall under that even those that are not discounted (i.e. 0% off is still "up to 100%) or free to begin with.

Apparently, the sale is over, but the loyalty points are not back yet. Things are still off in some ways.

OK, the loyalty points are considered in the price of eligible products once again, but I still can't see anywhere, how many loyalty points I actually have.

@lassebauer
To be fair, I understood the sale to end on February 2 anyway (from the e-mail announcing the sale), however, I thought they might extend it by a day or two because of the problem with the disappearing discount. Apparently not.

That being said, I got the things in my basked at the advertised discounts before the sale ended. But I wouldn't worry too much; the next sale will probably be in a few weeks' time. ;-)