Freebie Cancer has Spread, Sales Plummet; Monetary Policy or Economic Doom!

Hope you enjoyed my work. Nuff said.

I've grabbed more free stuff than I can reasonably even look at, and I'm finding precious little that is really high quality. The best stuff I own is stuff I bought. If shopping weren't so tedious I'd do more of it. Sellers need a web-based shopping site with better preview pictures than slexchange, and such a site should make it easy to limit search results by permissions. And there should be a way to try stuff on before paying for it.

SL should have dressing rooms. You go in there, bring up an out-of-world browser on a site like slexchange but better, select an item to have it transfered/worn in the dressing room, and if you like it you pay for it. When you leave the dressing room anything you've "tried on" disappears unless you've paid for it.

I don't think freebies has anything to do with sales going down. But maybe the high prices being charged by many shop owners is doing it.

I may be wrong but I was told, items made like clothes and others, cost nothing to make but the time spent making them. So if this is true, then there should be no reason for these items sold at the common inflated prices you constantly see in many shops.

Not to mention, the price on money (L) has gone up a lot. I used to buy 6000L for $20.00 not too long ago. And I heard it costed even less before. But now for the same 6000L it's almost $23.00 US.

All this adds to less expenditures by the consumers.

actually that really isn't 'nuff said'

New people will load up on freebies, but they aren't usually the best quality. Some people don't care about that, but its actually more about the stigma then quality. Its the same in rl. Is Prada stuff really worth the high amount it is? No. People buy it so other people can see they own it.

Hense why branding here is so big. Someone says (usually now on a blog) that such and such new designer is amazing. Other's go check it out. If the quality is good enough, then insta-fame. Sometimes, the quality dosen't have to be all that great. I've seen people swoon over poses with broken and twisted limbs.

As for the pricing of items, its usually along the same lines. Price means one of three things in people's minds. 1. quality 2. brand 3. greed. The greed part is a lot more rare then you'd think, but actually getting worse these days. I've seen poses with all sorts of flaws be priced considerbly high, and those with few to none priced really low. So while there is a stigma around higher price = better quality, doesn't make it so.

What many I know do is check out the prices of other items and consider the quality of theirs based on what other's are doing. You look at a large range of items and see where your stuff falls in based on quality of work. What I did is look at the average price of different levels of quality of animations. I then threw out the ones I knew to be downloaded from 3rd party sites. Then laid them out based on origionality and quality. I then priced where I felt mine honestly would fall. Saddly, fewer are taking this sort of thing into account.

As for the comment of not costing anything but time, you don't place a lot of worth on our time. That time is a lot more then you'd like to believe. That 'time' is learning the program(s) needed, the quirks of those projects looking right in SL, the time figuring out what either hasn't been or what people want, creating, uploading, fixing parts, uploading again (usually that part happens quite a few times), making ads, adding to the store(s), marketing, and customer service at all hours of the day/night. That time you have a hard time funding, is highly underpaid. The most I've ever gotton for a custom set of animations still paid me under minimum wage for the amount of time spent on it.

On top of that 'time' you have costs. Owning/renting land, build of the shop(s), and advertising. Have you seen how much it costs to list on the first page of the classifieds? Today its L$15,500.

Very true statement above, and alot of work does go into products unless simply duplicated from freebies, however; my point is people are blatantly using freebies to lure newbies into their shops for traffic to stay at the top of the listings in "Search" "Places" tabs. As more and more business come and or go the market is increasingly using freebie bait for these purposes and is spreading as a lure not a so called "I like to help newbies excuse" but; in reality to sell what they have produced and priced. If this was not the issue with some stores "not all" but alot, the products they spend time in selling would be free as well.

Hence my point, freebies for lure/traffic. As for a store that would just simply offer freebies, why would they if they have to pay for either land tier or rent with no compensation unless of course they were wealthy and only did it for a hobby and have no life outside of SL. Therefore what effect does freebies have on market value, some freebies are high quality items, depends on the person because one mans junk is anothers treasure. Also another consideration in supply and demand is population/SL update bugs which can be a deterant in retention of residents which effects sales depending on influx of newbies, again which goes back to the bait and hook of freebies, so; in conclusion, in order to survive even having high quality items we are evolving to having to increase land area to provide freebie marketing and gives a perception of I can go here and get freebies as well as shop but here I have to spend money..hmm, lets see;
"I think i'll just take the freebies for now and use the rest for real life and buy me a 6 pack and party thus a perception of "hey I got all this stuff for free, it's the trend, im cool; I got the best deal possible "Free".

There are some clothes I even wear which in my opinion are high quality and stylish I got for free. Eventually over time as the older high quality items become free, the new influx of residents spend less considering the influx of population compared to the longivity of retention in game. Example: alot of the people I used to know have gone away that used to buy my items replaced by newbies and with more abundance of time to shop for freebies and quality regardless of retail the prority becomes freebie shopping and more time to shop the freebie bulk and pick out of that bulk the best quality.

Also another consideration is a talented shop owner that does produce high quality freebies as a lure to attract to the store to get possible sales from other items, which then becomes quality freebie competition, thus; there you have it, the cancer grows, the cancer competition grows the cancer destroys market value over time considering the average of online population stays and 9000 per day which is currently the issue. nuff said.

And people like me selling stuff full-perm and open source must really bake your britches.

The basic problem is that SL is a post-scarcity world. It's a simulation of a world on the cusp of a Vingean transcendence. Trying to force it into a 21st century economy is always going to be problematic.

I don't think freebies harm sales at all.

As many have already said, freebies just tend to be poor quality.

The problem boils down to 2 things. High prices and the fact that many places refuse to offer refunds. With the sheer variety of av shapes, an article of clothing for example, might look great on one av, but terrible on another.

A lot of buys are simply a risk. You're spending large amounts of money on things that just simply might not work.

I opened a clothing store about a month ago and I certainly can't complain about poor sales.

So why aren't my sales suffering because of freebies?

Because I'm fair. I sell fairly elaborate outfits, at lower than average prices, and offer refunds as long as the buyer IMs me one the day of purchase.

In other words, no risk. It's low cost, and if an outfit looks wrong on their av, they know they can get their money back.

Yeh, I almost always give people refunds on any of my stuff if they can show they bought it... even if it's copyable and they can't "prove" they don't have it any more.

My marginal cost on a sale is zero. The biggest per-sale cost is customer support. Why on earth would I want to increase that cost for the sake of pretending that I'm selling "real objects"?