I am VERY new to SL but I fully appreciate what you guys are trying to accomplish. I've been in SL not more than three days, but I've been exploring and reading quite a lot about it and I would love to start a business that I think would benefit all SLers.
I am involved in a Fine Art auction house in my FL and I've yet to see a transposition of that in SL. I would love to bring the traditional auction house business model to SL, but a) I am not sure if it already exists as a user-run business and b) I am not sure how to start it exactly; I suspect I can do a lot of the scripting, but I do need some help with scripting and, well, everything else.
If anybody is interested in helping me start and manage this potentially highly lucrative business I'd love to hear from you. Also, if anybody can either point me in the right direction, give me some pointers or send me to a WWW tutorial I would be ever appreciative.
For those not familiar with the general auction house business model:
Things are taken on consignment from vendors and are sold at auction. Once the buyer has paid the auction house for the item the buyer then owns that item and the vendor receives the proceeds, minus a predetermined commission.
The auction takes place at a scheduled time, usually a large event, and includes items from either one or multiple vendors.
The auction house sells pretty much anything, but to make it worthwhile the auction house usually doesn't deal with lower-end things as the time and effort put into preparing it for auction and advertising, etc., doesn't exceed the amount received from the commission.
I am aware that SL has land auctions, but I've only seen this on their website and isn't the same sort of thing. Our auction house would sell anything, from clothing to scripts to houses to accounts to land. Another reason people like selling via auction is they can get more people to their items; more exposure equals more interest which potentially equals more money for your item.
Anyway, if anybody is at all interested, I'd like to get started ASAP. This is a REAL business and potentially very profitable. I think SL needs more businesses like this to sustain its economy.