Price Musing

While searching for a tiny av for Fate Gardens, I noticed something about the pricing of tiny products. Tiny buildings seem to be priced less than regular sized buildings. They don't seem to have many fewer prims than an average low prim house, yet there seems to be an idea that smaller should cost less. In retrospect, the building industry seems to work this way across The Grid; larger building, more money. It's just like the real world.

Tiny clothing is comparably priced to regular sized clothing even though it's mostly composed of attachements rather than textures. It's technically a different industry altogether yet it follows the same fashionable practice of matching the price to the designers reputation rather than considering the size of the product. It's just like the real world.

Here's the odd one. I'm not very animated so this may just be wrong; but it seems to me that tiny animations sell for noticably more money than animations built for regular sized avs. Are tiny animation much harder to produce than traditional ones? I don't know how to relate this to the real world.

Prok's recent post accomodating tinys with half-sized lots, at a lower cost, but with a full-sized parcel's number of prims available, is the most quantitative example of smaller size equaling less cost. It doesn't add up though because Ravenglass is having to hold empty land in those sims to afford the prims effectively reducing the company's profit.

Anyway, I find it interesting that any given industry seems to have a common pricing model that does or doesn't take the size of the product into account. Other than hand, I don't see where any product takes any more skill, time or virtual material to build or support. Yet some industries price tiny items higher, some lower, and some the same; and these variations follow the standard pricing schemes that each industry traditionally uses in the real world. When will virtual merchandising realize it's own set of norms?

There's a thread on the SLExchange forums discussing this very issue:

http://slexchange.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&p=1800#1800

I would have expected everything to be marked up, fads are usually like that. You know the craze is over when the prices are slashed. In terms of houses, the smaller size could afford fewer prims I've found. I don't know if others are simply shrinking their big ones and not taking advantage of that.

I noticed the land example you used, too. This is a rental situation, so perhaps the thinking is that by the time the fad is over, the market will pick up. The fact is, the land economy is very sluggish and lots of prims are unused. For the most part those glad to see lower land prices are not increasing their land holdings. Rather the pleasure in seeing them drop is about old grudges and a satisfaction in seeing evil land barons get their comeuppance.

Well, I sell a Tinie vehicle, and it is in fact a sized down version of one of my full sized vehicles, with a different sit pose.

I sell it for $400, as opposed to the "regular" sized vehicle which is $500. I priced it that way not because I feel that it is worth less, but rather as a pricing experiment. I plan to experiement more with prices in the future, to see if lower prices brings higher sales volumes, and to try and find out where the "sweet spot" of maximum revenue is.

- Jon