A really bad shoppping center design

While skin shopping today I stopped at a shopping sim. The whole sim seemed to be devoted to selling merchandise.

The store area looked like it was made from Monopoly houses, all sprayed indentical white, with identical gray tent shaped roofs on them. From above it looked like a grid of gray tents.

The stores have access only through one little door. The stores are stuck next to each other in parallel pairs of lines, with the doors facing inward to a narrow passageway. So to get in you have to walk down the narrow passage and go through a door.

The stores have signs, but they are on the front wall , not sticking out perpendicular in a way that would let you see them while walking down the alleys without playing camera tricks.

At the teleport in spot there is no directory to tell you store names or what merchandise they have or where the stores are.

I walked down a few alleys and didn't see what I was looking for and left.

I think this may be one of the worst designed shopping places I've seen in SL.

There are people in SL who know how to make good stores, virtual stuctures that help you find your merchandise and that are pleasant to look at and move around in.

If someone is going to plop down over a thousand bucks on a sim and pay 200 dollars a month rent then it would probably be worth finding one of these builders and paying them to make a store that will bring the customers back instead of driving them off without buying anything.

If I have to spend more than 10 seconds trying to figure out where the door is or where the store I am trying to find is then that place is history.

Playing "Find the Door" is a major peeve for me. I wonder if I should start IMing shop keepers with, "I came to shop at your place, but I couldn't find the door, so I left"?

Yes that does sound like a horrible experience... have you tried giving some of your thoughts to the owner?

One of the malls I have vendors in has a tiny entrance in the front, one in the back that I didn't realize was there, and a stairway coming in from the roof. And the building is monsterous, takes up nearly a quarter of the sim. I can understand the look they're going for, but it's really poor design. Thankfully my vendors are on the roof, I wonder what my sales would be like otherwise.

My main showroom in Kekekabic has a very obvious front door, and the other three sides are surrounded by forest, so hopefully it's pretty hard to mistake

Yes Sensual I did once and was promptly reamed out for my stupidity so never again.

I can say that my former shop had a 10 meter wide door that nobody could miss and I wish all shop owners would do the same instead of playing "find the door" with their customers. Actually I was just at a place, owned by a well known creator, that had hanging vines all over the place hiding any doors she may have had. Needless to say I won't be back there unless she hires a gardener to clean up the mess.

It's almost like people don't want me to spend my vast fortune at their shops.

i know of which sim you speak. i have not been there personally, but my husband stumbled upon it while looking for shop space. absolutely no curb appeal whatsoever and it was impossible to navigate.

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I think I saw this one too and it was something sort of like a maze.

Putting a roof on a mall in SL is crazy, a waste of prims malls should be open to the sky so you can easily fly, see and move your camera around. I hate the long narrow corridors lined with booths that you cant see into without turning your avatar every 10 meters.

Actually now that I think of it I don't go to shopping at malls at all. I occasionly check new products and go to that place if it is easy to find and not hidden in some mall. Megamalls aren't my cup of tea.

If a shopowner wants my Lindens then they better make it easy for me to find.

I cannot figure out why there even is a door, we certainly dont need one in SL stores.

hehehe indeed there are many poorly designed malls/ shops in second life. the best one i Know of is the Promenade mall in clarksburg all the shops have 10 meter wide openings and the rest is open sky above the 10 - 30 meter wide pathways.

Any architectural design that's a hindrance to commerce should be thrown out. The remaining pieces should be made as nicely as possible.

Could we get a screenshot, suezanne? I'm curious.

It is over 65,000sq m of shopping. I have been told it has the "real mall" appeal. The word I hear often about the place is HUGE. It really is.

Now with the commercial development beginning to surround the mall, it is set up nicely for a couple sims of stores and business area. Its really looking sharp!

Look for Big O! Mall in Baekje! Thanks !! Xplorer

Actually yes I rent a vendor stall in Big O and it is pretty good, very large, open spaces.

At Plaza Del Jardin I have three levels with a huge opening on the first and second levels. From walking through the opening (can't miss it, you tp right into it) you can see every store in the mall on all three levels just by turning your veiw, no hidden passages or searching. Honestly I feel thats key in designing a shopping center, the ability to find what you're looking for in a moment.

I am always looking for good rental spaces in good malls. Often I like to give a brand new mall a try. Anyone else know any good ones they can name? Never hurts to give a little free publicity to the places you like.

I don't think there is a problem with roof's on shopping centers. Sure they take prims but they can make the place look designed properly which adds to the attraction to the place.

Open to the sky can look very cheap and nasty. Roofs must however been a minimum of about 20m up on a store IMO.

At the Promenade Mall we are just on the verge of doing a major renovation where all the stores will be visible from any where in the mall. we are also going to include a park and reflecting ponds in the center of the mall. My partner in the mall will be beginning the renovations soon. ITs not that the current set up is not working but its been over a year with the current set up with a few minor changes here and there but those few minor changes have put things out of whack over time and its Time for a change.

Roofs aren't always bad, but "Hunt the Door" really is a problem. I particularly hate stores with "glass" walls, where they've left out the glass in one spot, and you have to go around bumping into walls, walking around three sides of the store, looking for a spot that's nearly identical to the glassed in sections.

Oh well, at least the maze trap telehub malls, the one's that would try to "catch" you inside their rezzing walls as you were flying, are dead. I remember that when I TPed into someplace, I used to make a point of simply flying straight up for abour 150 meters or more before even trying to move horizontaly.

Back then because of that sort of thing I made it a point to never, *ever* shop at a store located at a telehub, and laughed when people started complaining about how P2P was going to kill their trap-maze mall business.

Ah, the bad old days.

I am fond of the open front concept for malls, so you can see inside each shop, i had alot of fun recently making a "strip" center for a neighbor, it turned out so cute, even has a bell tower, i put it in SL Exchange if anyone wants to take a peak at it..havent sold one yet, but it was great fun for my first comercial build.

Don't forget the wayfinding signs when you build your shopping areas!

My main problem with my facility is I'm a one woman crew. I build. I modify. I customize. I manage. I script. I texture. I erect the signs and stuff. Problem is, this work can become overwhelming. And it frequently does!

I wish there was more SL time

I can never get as many things done as I want too.