Question concerning item pricing...

First off, let me say hello, all. I havent posted here yet, and so this will be my first post. Yeay.

I have some items that I am selling in SL which currently exist in the public domain. (The copyrights have expired on these items, and belong to the world instead of a company).

The items are, however, to my knowledge unique to SL. On average they take me about 1-3 hours a piece to re-create and about L$30-50 per item.

I have been selling the items, but have seen very few actual purchases on the items (while they seem to be generating a good ammount of interest) for $L100.

Due to the ratio of purchases/interest, I am assuming that they are priced too high.

Those who are interested in the items outside of SL can get them for free, if they know where to get them. However, there is no way to view these items (to my knowledge) within SL.

Given the ammount of time/money invested in each item, contrasted with its public availablity outside of SL, what would be a fair price to sell these items at?

I am willing to take a loss on these items, given their circumstances, but I would like to at least recoup the design/importing costs.

What are you selling?

It could be that there just isn't the market, or it's a niche market, for the items you're selling. I've just taken a look at your profile and I presume you're referring here to the SL renditions of public domain literature that you produce?

Speaking personally, no matter how cheap a "book" in Second Life was, it's not a medium I would use to read a book. I'm not sure whether that view is the same for the majority, but it just feels quite an uncomfortable venue to use for reading.

Pricing in Second Life is strange, there aren't the market forces at work here, and there doesn't seem to be the direct competition that forces prices down. You'll find similar products at very different prices, both of which might be doing quite well in sales. I've always priced cheaply and gone for the volume of sales, rather than pricing high and selling fewer. My reasons for this stem from why I build. I build because I like making things and once I've made something I like to make that accessible to as many people as possible. Hence the lower pricing. As an example my most recent product, the Skoopf Icicles, took around 30 hours in total to create and tweak, I'd guesstimate. I'm selling those for L$75.

Thank you for the feedback, Moopf. Yes, the items are the books. And, you are right, they are hard to read within SL (as opposed to reading an actual book), although I think they are noticably easier to read in SL than they are from the original texts (I devided the files to substitute for the lack of a bookmark feature).

I think that Im going to have to look at this from a perspective of "If I were anyone else who might be interested in these, what would the value of this item be to me?", and I can tell you now, it wouldnt be what I am charging for them.

I have some time to day (some people call this 'work') when I can figure out where to go from here. Its brainstorming time.

It's a guess, but I'm thinking that many people, if asked, "if you had a Second Life where you could be whatever you wanted (or are supposed to believe that you can be, eventually), what would you most want to do with it?" wouldn't include "reading more books" in the answer.

Furthermore, the people who would include that in their answer will either a) read the books IRL, or b) have some reason IRL why they can't or won't read the books, which is unlikely to be contradicted by providing them with the books as SL objects.

If you want to make a bundle relatively quickly, I'd advise you to do something with prOn. Though I don't deal in it directly myself, I know through my friends and SL associates that it is probably the simplest and quickest way to SL riches.

Hope this help - and welcome to SecondLife!

Lack of sales does not indicate that prices are too high.



What would a beautiful study in SL replete with all the classics be worth?

Perhaps a library with not only RL history, but that of other worlds - Activeworlds, Lineage servers, Ultima Online shards...

It is a dream of mine.



Get a critical mass of books, advertise, and charge what it is worth for you to continue doing what you are doing. I think you are undercharging by a huge factor.

- Desmond


Edit: also, if *you* don't value your work, people will pick that up, and undervalue it as well.

You're absolutely right, it could also indicate a lack of overall demand, however which is what I was trying to get across in my first post. it may also be because you haven't reched a critical mass of people who know about what you offer.



This is something I've often thought about, as in the real world that can indeed be the case. My experiences in Second Life, however, have shown me that the same doesn't seem to apply here. I don't find that people have undervalued my work.

this may be entirely idiotic and out-of-place, but maybe you might try the reverse direction... make them all L$10; 'impulse-buyable'. you might end up with more sales. but yes, if only books, and only inworld-readable, the buyer might not feel like it's 'worth it'. depends on the kind of texts you provide, i suppose... i'm not in-world currently myself, so i can't check out your wares personally to provide more of an opinion. (fiction, non-fiction, authors? i do some amazon used booksales myself, where pricing is a bit of an issue too, so hopefully my advice isn't too half-baked, lol

i'd do a spreadsheet on the possibilities of selling at the lowest-predicted L exchange rates for RL $.10, $.25, $.50, and seeing what, say, ten purchases a month adds up to. if you're developing something akin to an inworld 'amazon' service, with text delivered to your virtual door, then you're jumping on waaaaaaay early for such a service, lol!! which may play into your favor, eh? who knows...

if also there was a way to provide an 'offline' copy also along with the sl/'inworld' purchase, a pdf, along with the the inworld copy, that would surely rate a higher price... think of all the laptop players who travel around, and maybe want to read the book while in a RL flight, where they can't make connection to log on...

(but, gee, i guess that gets into a possible future sl feature anyways, has it been discussed - a semi-permanent cache of your homespace/last location, where you can 'log on', offline, and build your land offline, write scripts in a sandbox - maybe a few categorizations for the cache, to be saved for use offline. then log on and have it update the online servers/dbs?)

Wow. Thanks for all the replies, some great ideas here. Ive decided to take a small sebatical from my book importing trade and think through exactly how to do it better (only a few days). In the mean time, you all have given me some insight into the SL economy that could have taken me a while to pick up on my own, and for that I am very thankful. If you still got a stipend from positive ratings, I would rate you all positively right now.

In the mean time, I will be working on honing my texturing skills a bit. Just figured out last night that some point in the road I figured out how to build fairly decently, and I feel that I need to personalize things a bit. Maybe this is going to be a side thing, maybe more, Ill have to see what turns out =).