OK...Your turn..."Honest" Solutions for Business Owners

Depends on the person running the station. I've had them almost chase me down with food in their hands. One time, one of them said "you need this, you look famished!". I laughed and tried it; it was quite good.

There are times when I am not hungry, or when I am not interested in the product. However, even then, I find it very difficult to get grumpy over someone offering me FOOD.

Honestly, clicking that button in the top right is annoying as all hell. It's a trivial complaint I know - but it still bugs me. And whether I'm right or wrong to be annoyed - I'm the customer, and I've already formed a poor first impression.

The difference is that I can't EAT a landmark, or a flyer. God forbid anyone spray perfume on me without my permission; I'm liable to take the bottle of perfume and permanently embed it into their skull. Some people are deathly allergic, and just randomly spritzing people as they walk past is little less than assault with a deadly weapon.

The difference is that I don't have to say no to the off-to-the-side-food-ladies. I can just walk past, and ignore them completely.

I can't do that with inventory offers, I have to pay attention to them, and click something.

I kind of enjoy being spritzed with a nice cologne when visiting a RL mall... Different strokes for different folks

Talarus...tell me why when someone admits they don't like malls in the first place, I should give any validity to rude comments they make? With the statement "I don't like malls", anything that follows is bound to be negative.

Yes, there are a few things around that *some* people aren't going to like. I'm now at the point where my response to that is "tough". The xploder will normally only run for 30 minutes a day. The pay for picks? Oh well....someone will make 100L a week for having me in their picks, and they get helped for helping me.

Other than those two issues, and parking my alt, there's no "gaming" of traffic...very minor on the "gaming" scale. Some people are not bothered by them at all, and some are. If you are...don't come to my mall. If you aren't, and you'd like the opportunity to shop some really great stores, come on by, we'd love to have you.

And honestly, is it *that* freaking hard to click an "ok" button? I'd rather deal with one button, one time, than the 3-4 I get hit with at other stores, or that stupid copybot protection spam that floods my screen and protects nothing.

Again, you can't please all the people all the time, and I'm already tired of trying.

And I'm one of them.

Yeah, well, when you or a friend get to experience not being able to breathe because your airway completely closes off, prompting quite a scene and a call to 911, you might feel a tad differently.

It's not so much the one click that's bothersome. It's that if you're looking for something, and checking more than one place, and every single place has a popup or two, it gets annoying, fast. Personally, I don't find it hugely annoying if I'm only going to one place, but after that, if each one has popups, I'm going to get tired of it, and revert back to my old favorites, even if better quality or variety is out there.

I thought dragons could eat anything.

As long as most people agree with your compromise, you are right. Do you know for sure that most do?



It's true. The trick is differentiating the raving lunatic comments from the ones which do reflect the views of many people.

I get that, I really do. But let's just suppose that I read this thread, and ok...no landmark offer, no thanking for shopping with us, no pay for picks (oh, which has been up less than 14 hours...lol), no method whatsoever of increasing my traffic other than a classified ad, exactly how long do you suppose I would have stayed in business? I've made it nearly a year, and would like to make it for another one.

I rather suspect that the large majority of the people commenting in this thread...wouldn't be bothered to drop into my mall no matter how well run, no matter how well advertised, no matter how "honestly" it was managed.

LOL Love...should I run a poll?



More polls!

You don't have to force a popup to thank people, though, or to offer landmarks, or freebies, or anything else. You can have a sign, like many others do, that is unobtrusive, and still have the same effect. A script that sends out the same thank you, or the same offer, to every person to drop by isn't any more personal than a sign doing the same, and a sign looks better (imo). I can't, of course, tell you what to do, but I can say that in my opinion, signs are much better than popups. They take more effort, look nicer, are less in-your-face, and so on.

Personally, I will likely never go to your mall. I just don't go to malls, preferring main stores because of the variety of objects of similar quality and style, rather than a larger selection with larger variance in both.

I might, but then again I'd probably just avoid the cosmetics section altogether and be better off for it

Just sayin'

I don't think you have enough information to judge, personally, and I don't think the comments were all that "rude". It was posted fairly matter-of-factly and was qualified from the beginning. If it were me, here's how I would handle it:

Did the person NEVER like malls, or is it a recent change in attitude?
If it was a change in attitude, why the change?
If it was because of something endemic about what malls had become to that person, what could I do to make my mall attractive to that person?

If you get on the defensive, you won't ever ask the important questions that may make a HUGE difference in your patronage, precisely because you won't get past the indignance over simply what was said.



..and that's just fine. You don't have to change anything you don't want to; it's your mall. However, if you want people to like your mall, and to come to it, you're likely to have to do or change things you don't necessarily want to do. That includes listening to people and making them feel like their opinions are important, even if you don't choose to act on them.



Fair enough; as long as you are happy with the status quo, then by all means, just write off anything that people offer and suggest to you. If you AREN'T happy with the status quo, maybe you shouldn't be dismissing people and their opinions so out-of-hand like that.



When you have to do it up to hundreds of times a day because other people feel similarly, yes, it becomes a distracting, annoying chore. Ditch it. If you listen to no other piece of advice from me than this, make it give-on-click only. I think you will be surprised at how many people you are probably losing just over this one issue alone.



Then maybe running a mall isn't what you want to do. Seriously; that's what it ALWAYS is. All day, every day; trying to please everyone you can as fast as you can. The more you please, the more that will continue to shop, and the more that will continue to rent. Running a mall is a step up from just being a content creator selling your stuff. When you are just selling your stuff, you have only to worry about pleasing your own customers. When you run a mall, you have to work to please not only your customers (the tenants), but THEIR customers as well. That's a lot of responsibility. That's a lot of work. That's a lot of listening to gripes and complaints all day, every day, and saying "Thank you for your wonderful feedback!" with a smile for each and every one.

-.-

I haven't dismissed ANYTHING. Every piece of information in this thread has been taken in. I'm at the office right now, so there isn't a thing I can do about it.

And maybe YOU didn't feel it was rude, but I did.



This is one thing I *may* change. Then they'll bitch about the chat spam because a greeting will still be issued. I just need to figure out who is going to bitch more...the non-button pushers or the no-chatspam haters.



I realize that you don't really know me. I'm keeping that thought in my mind, trust me. But the bottom line is, I'm very good at doing the things I do. This thread, however, was apparently a mistake because for every opinion in one direction, there is an opposite opinion.

What is crystal clear is that I have been given some opinions and ideas, and I simply need to determine which are going to piss off the least amount of people, because it's clear, everything one can possibly do, every option one can take...is going to annoy someone.

I'd guess people would complain more about the offers than chat spam... then again, I'm not too bothered by store chat spam.

I mean, really, how often are you conversing upon tp, when the greeting is issued? It's not likely to interrupt anything, and is completely ignorable with no further action.

I used to rent at a mall that did some neat things to bring in traffic, I'll get with you when you are in world or drop a n/c on you.

Honey's mall is nice, very neat in style, and set up really well. I paid a month's rent yesterday and have already made back over half of that so she must be doing something right (not plugging, just stating a fact).

(ps) that other mall is closed now, not giving away anyone's secrets lol

Thanks!



YAY!

don't raise my rent lol

Let me take these one at a time.

1) Landmark/notecard/subscription offers. Offer them, just not automatically. Make it so that people who want them can EASILY get them, IF they want them. The difference will be negligible in effect, but MASSIVE in terms of patron enjoyment of your venue.
2) "Thanks for shopping with us". If you (or your staff) do this personally with IMs or in open chat, then it is most meaningful. If you do it with automation with a giver or IM, it's meaningless almost to the point of insulting. If you're going to do this, put up a "Thank you for shopping with us at Cherry Park!" sign. Maybe even put a "free gift" in it that changes weekly; make sure the sign indicates that clicking on it gives a "free gift".
3) Pay for picks. As long as I am not directly solicited for this, but it is yet another sign that points out the deal, that's cool. "Pay for Picks" doesn't bother me as a form of "gaming".
4) You've claimed you already have done more than "a classified ad". Others have suggested quite a bit more to you that you claimed you were looking into.



Well, we certainly won't bother if we know beforehand that you are doing things which offend us or our sensibilities, and that you basically tell us "don't come here" when people are simply answering your request for suggestions and advice. We also may never come because we simply are not in the target demographic for your mall or your stores. Do you have anything that a Dragon would be interested in? Do you even allow non-humans? There have even been a few malls which FORBID non-human avs. I would hope yours isn't one of them. You might even put in your mall description "open to all avatars" or "something for everyone", if that is indeed the case.

If there is nothing in knowledge that deters me, either before I get there, or after I get there, then I will likely visit your mall at some point. May not be tomorrow; may not be this week. Might even be a month or more from now. The point is, if you are sincerely trying to do the best you can to accommodate your tenants and your patrons, and are doing everything you can to honestly "get the word out", people will come and, more importantly, they will return.

Are you paying tier on your sim from your mall? I thought you mentioned you weren't, that you're not even offsetting the costs of the land the mall's on.

I'm paying tier from my sales. When my sales went up, I got more land. My biggest competitor is the free copies of some of my own products floating around, because I'm selling them on the honor system. I didn't start putting advertising into the thing until recently (stupid me), and I've made a lot of other mistakes, but I'm still making tier on my sales.

And I'm not running bots or landmark givers or 'sploders. I've got a joke lucky chair that gives you a gift for things like "the last letter of your first name matches", and I only added that recently... and I don't think I've ever seen anyone camping it.

And I do visit malls, both as a seller and a buyer... and as a just plain explorer: I stalk green dots on the map. But it takes something extra special to make me come back... because there's nothing in SL that I actually need to "go to the mall" for, the way I do in RL.

And I honestly can't say if I've been to your mall or not. I'm at the office now, I'll check it out when I get a chance.

Not always an option, given that, in many department stores, the cosmetics section is implanted in a main aisle that you have to pass by in order to get to the rest of the store, or is embedded into a clothing department.

Thankfully, most large department stores have long forbidden the practice after being sued a few times.