Homepage featured listing, is it worth it?

I put something on SLX yesterday and had a sale right away, I'm wondering if it's worth it to pay for the Homepage featured listing?

In the end only you can determine if something is 'worth it' to you. I will share my experiences though, maybe that will help you make a decision.

Newly listed items get listed in the 'new items' section, where they start at the 'top of the list' and slowly move down through the pages till they vanish. Consequently, it is not unusual to get a few sales right away when you list a new product. Once the item has fallen off the new items list, it then will 'compete' for space with every other item in its category.

The homepage featured listings will usually put that item infront of a few hundred people per day, which I believe does increase the chance of getting it infront of someone who will be interested. Additionally, it helps drive the traffic of your other items as people who do look at the featured item, frequently check out what else you have.

From a pure mathematical point of view, if you look at the cost of the listing (either 7 days or 30 days) compared to the price of whatever the item is that you are selling, less commission fees, you will know how many of them you need to sell in order to 'break even'. If you run the listing, and the generated sales only cover the cost of the listing, or if they fall short of even that, then it might not have been 'worth it'.

On the other hand, there is a less tangible benefit merely from getting your product and your brand infront of people. If you are new to SLX or your items or store are new, then it might be worth while to lose a bit of money on the enhancements in the short term, while hoping that the added exposure will help in the long term.

Personally, I used the 7-day homepage featured listings quite a bit, I tried different items each week, and when I found something that really sold well, I sometimes put it on a 30 day homepage listing. I did that for 3 or 4 months, to help build awareness and get my sales and traffic numbers up. Then in July or August, I felt I had achieved my goals in that regard, and I don't think I've run any enhancements since then.

One last comment -- do not do a homepage featured item for anything rated 'mature'. Those items will not show up for 90% of the visitors to SLX, consequently the number of impressions is only a fraction of what it would be for non 'mature' items. I made this mistake once and the results were incredibly disappointing.

-Atashi

I've used "homepage" listings for a couple of my items. My headliner LIVES on the homepage listing thing. The math here is obvious.

if you're making 1 sale per week on the "normal" setting
and 10 sales per week on the homepage

and your profits from 4 sales in a month is 1000L
and your profits from 40 sales in a month is 10,000L
and homepage listing costs 2899...

10,000 - 2899 = 8899

8899 vs 1000

Hrm.....
It makes sense for me!

It varies depending on the item. As with Winter, my most popular items are permanent homepage features. As for everything else, well, not everything is as popular with shoppers.

Long story short, items that many people want to buy are helped greatly by homepage feature listing, but items that aren't as popular are just a waste of money to feature. There's no real way to tell ahead of time, so just do listings on items which you think will be popular and make sure to set it so that the listing isn't automatically renewed. Test the waters for a week and go from there.

Well I decided to do it, if nothing else I love having my listing show up at the top I wish I had smiled for the picture though

I have used the featured homepage options a couple of times but as my products are not something ppl tend to buy without Actually Seeing first I did not really expect to gain sales off SLX from it. I was more paying for the increased visability which it did satisfy, 1500 homepage views and 15 actual views as apposed to 1 or 2 daily before. Other products views rose also, As somebody else mentioned ppl often check out your other products after seeing the featured item if it catches thier eye. Traffic on land did increase that week and dropped again when add stopped. Sales in world increased that week although is no way to tell for sure how much SLX ad played a part in that. I would say that the price of your item would determine if you would recoup your Lindens through SLX, but it is hard to put a value on increased traffic/exposeure. It would really depend on your type of product though.

Well after reading Winter's and Johan's replies, I've decided to give it another try too I picked two items that seem to have been popular lately -- I'll give them a week and see how they do.

ShayLa also has a good point about a correlation to inworld sales -- If you have a store inworld, it's a good idea to include a link/SLURL to your store, on every item you have in SLX. Especially on items that are available in world for viewing. A lot of people, myself included, will window-shop on SLX due to the convenience of their categorization and search functions, then go inworld to see the product first-hand before buying.

-Atashi

I'm logged in with Sleek while I'm at work. It sure is nice to see my Magic Box clicking away