Vendor Income

I am considering allowing a few clothing designers / merchants to sell specific pieces of their collections within my land / build via vendors and was just curious if there were some kind of "standard" with regard to dividing any income that is derived from the vendor between the merchant and the land / build owner. Do merchants typically just pay a monthly rental for the space, or is a percentage of each merchant's sale in the build given back to the land / build owner? If no such standard exists, does anyone have any suggestions as to what has worked successfully in the past?

Weekly rent is what most people do, and it seems to be the most practical solution.

In many cases that does work, but I wonder if some mutual benefit can come out of having shared profits, ala SLExchange and Gigas, where the host store takes a percentage of every sale. Currently, if a mall owner just charges rent, there is little short-term benefit for improving things for your merchants' customers, because you get paid no matter what. Also, you wouldn't be as aware of the actual sales of your merchants, and might instead focus on dwell. In the long run this can be harmful because your merchants don't care about dwell, and will leave if/when their sales drop. And a high merchant turnover probably isn't sustainable.

If you go with a cut, you're taking the risk of not getting paid if your merchants don't do well. But you also may have a winfall if they do.

Many designers, myself included, don't like shared revenue vendors because we don't like anyone but ourselves having our sales information. Unfortunately you can't avoid that if you participate in SLExchange and SecondServer, but notice their privacy statements.

Also a few designers, Ferran and I included, already have vendors which split our revenues within our partnership.

Another issue is that we tend to use the same vendors everywhere. It saves time and effort loading and maintaining them. I have actually turned down a spot based on the need to use a provided vendor... it is often not worth the hassle.

Weekly has some advantages. It lets you and the retailer plan ahead.

Just my $L 0.02

Surreal