Shopping Malls .....

What's happening with the shopping malls:

German Island is gone
Lost Link Island is gone
...

When there is a big mall:
- A lot of shops are empty (rental boxes are down but items in shops)
- When there is trafic: 95% are campers
- 1 out of 4 shops is full perm
- ....
- ....


WHERE are the good malls ?
WHERE are the shops of the REAL designers ?

Most of my favorite designers are in stores or sims of their own it seems, with a few having outlets in other areas.

I never had much luck going to malls and finding good stuff, though when I was newer to SL that is exactly what I did.

Are you looking for clothes and shoes? I really only started to have luck looking for good things like that when I found fashion blogs. Even if I didn't want the items they specifically blogged about I could begin to get a sense for who designed what. Once I found the shops that get blogged about I could find their mainstores and any smaller rentals they had. If a really top quality store has a rental/mall space somewhere then there is a better chance that the stuff there will be good. Or, they host their own mall of some sort on their sim and maintain some degree of control over the quality of the products/vendors in it.

Can I post blogs here?

Personally I started with http://www.lindenlifestyles.com/

Another really great way to find stuff is to go to the new products listings on this forum. Window shop over there and then TP to interesting places.

I don't use malls to shop, I go for the main stores. The only malls I would visit is the specialist ones that cater for set markets. I think most of the creators cut down on mall space now and the malls that the newbies find tend to be high traffic ones due to hoards of campers.

The rendering pipeline that LL introduced in 1.17 (? earlier? HAve forgotten) caused texture loading to be even slower than it was. As Malls were already high on the client-side lag due to the textures, they have slipped a bit further down in functionality.

Also, as stated above, a lot of buisnesses start in malls and vendors, then get popular and buy their own land, moving up to buying their own sims.

Malls work in RL because they put everything a person wants in one easy to access spot (plus is a great place to drool over teh opposite sex ~ ).

In SL, the means to TP have taken that away a bit. Back in "The Day" when we had Telehubs, and not P2P TP, malls made more sense. Less flying time, and land near the Telehubs was prime buisness land. Now, however, the prime buisness land is a private sim, where you can controll every aspect from who can fly, to who can even be there.

I personally like going to some of the malls still at times. It's nice to browse and a great way to find up and comming creators before they become famous. However, when I want something specific, I head to the islands of my favorite creators.

~Jessy

If I find a area with a few shops that sell items within a particular theme, lets say Goth, and I like their products, I do a check on all the creators 'picks' in their info, usually they have more than one shop and it's in the 'picks', i go there and find other new builders/creators/designers that sell items I like, I move around a lot in SL doing that too.

Well I'm a REAL designer in the sense that all my work is original and unique.


I don't use mall spaces, mainly for the reasons you have already outlined.

I don't want to be in a place with hoardes of campers to artificially pump traffic figures.

I don't want to be in a place that has many full perm or BIAB shops

I like to have control over my own little retail space.

Plus the tier on my own land works out costing less than most mall spaces.


My experience as a consumer has been that almost all good original designers have their own store. Occasionally you come across a hidden gem in a mall but it is very rare.

Campers may not be real traffic, but they are certainly eyes upon your product (except for bots). There are often real people behind the campers, though not always, and they are shoppers too. Camping spots, used wisely, can be a win win for everyone. What good is it to have campers if they can't shop around them? Malls with strategically placed campers would be beneficial because they'd have some traffic from new people looking for camping and the campers themselves. I know that I've shopped while camping and I can't be the only one.

I have found that some designers and builders may not have notoriety yet in the community with new folks, and a shopping mall is a great way to familiarize themselves.

Many large retailers will place a shop in the mall specifically to draw more traffic to their main store. I don't think I would be wrong to say that large retailers began their shop in a mall at some point.

IMO, each of the business owners assist one another in connecting the customer to what they are seeking. The customer will return to places they know will be long lasting and have a great product to offer.

I can only speak for myself, but the stores I have had in malls never make enough money for it to be worth the trouble. I keep trying them, but I have never had one that was worth it. I guess people just don't shop at malls for whatever reason.

Malls aren't that bad, I've got stores in plenty of malls and hardly any of them are full of campers.