Merchants: Why Your Sales Are Down

I've seen that. L'Oreal offered a set of four free skins at Greenies', showcasing looks that you could do in RL using their products. Out of curiosity, I tried 'em.

Our home-grown skinmakers do a better job.

Still, if a company hired GOOD designers, what you worry about could easily happen. It probably will. And the GOOD SL designers might well decide that making RL dollars designing for a RL company beats the pennies they make, working for L$.

How about over-saturation of specific product lines...

There are countless clothing stores out there...countless. Many of the hardcore clothing consumers have already created a massive wardrobe. On top of this, they feel like they've not seen anything unique enough to purchase lately. So many choices, yet so many are the same--or variations on a theme. They already own more 'my favorite' outfits than one can manage...they aren't buying new pieces. I don't know...just a theory.

New people that come into SL have a great many choices to browse...and this I imagine is both a good thing and a bad thing. A good thing that there are tons out there, but a bad thing because so much is crap, and so much is carbon copy.

Old people are tired of clothing. It's been SO done, and it's being regurgitated over and over and over...spreading like an outlet virus...

The question always is: how many shoes can one woman have?

Ladies...you know that answer. So, what am I talking about then...

I have a chekat av in my inventory I have not worn in for ever. Sort of a cat centaur if you have not seen one. Watching any form of 'taur on a normal animation is silly at best. Usually it's disturbing.

Anyway, I don't have a normal quad, but I would assume the animations are much like taurs. They are custom and specific to your AV. There are no default animations for walking, sitting, or anything. All done with an override. This is because the AO animations are actually warping your AV to fit the new form. So it's not like you can go to bits and bobs to pick up a new lion sitting animation to drop into your ZHAO II.

The market is deffinantly limited but if you were to make some good, new animations, they would be snapped up I'm sure.

I saw the same L'Oreal display at Calla. I just kept walking.

I have to agree. Maybe not about the crap part (since I don't create clothes, what do I know), but the 'So many choices, yet so many are the same--or variations on a theme' part.

I figure if there's so many places that offer the same variations, it must be because that is what the shop owners wear and prefer (?) I just always thought that it must be because I have weird tastes, that the only reason I find so few places where I like the clothes must mean my tastes are in the minority...



Sorry, this lady can't help you, still haven't found that many that I like. I only wear a few pairs, sometimes I just walk around bare foot.

Ask Imelda Marcos

A girl I know just bought a bundle of 41 pairs of shoes, all the same style but different colors. She claims it is a good start.

i dont think things are so bad right now. For me feb was slower and things picked back up to slightly above what i expcted for march. I tend to release one item each week atm but thats mainly because of my latest love for thirties styling. Its not always that often but i usually release at least two items a month. I find things pick up after a new release then settle back down again after a few days.

I personally dont see the economy in quite as bad a state as some as sales are steadily improving, general stability of the grid seem more of a problem. Though i agree there are huge amounts of free items out there now, i didnt look half as good as the newbies joining and kitting themselves out in freebies now as i did when i first joined and this immeadiatly made me want to go out and shop to improve how i looked.

wow strange that you ask this

I had a dream last night (I get inspired by my dreams) that I had done just that, a store window display much like RL, and I am gonna give it a try, see if it looks like my dream window LOL

weird...

My thoughts on this overall are all over the place.

I had a rough start to March, possibly due to an advertisement deficiency, but things gradually got better. Shelled out for advertising mid month, tinkered with my visibility in search and the folk who have popped by since seem to have been more receptive to purchases. Over 5 months, March has been my best month yet.

What I'm looking to do better in the future is to build a better means of 'word of mouth' advertising, since that seems to be the best kind if undertaken properly. I am, however, hesitant to ask friends to put my business in their picks because ultimately that's a personal space which many folk use for other things (highlighting friends, memories, etc).

As such, developing further visibility has been my primary goal, and I have been considering developing smaller satellite locations which would refer to my main store - is this advisable? or at all worth it?

I'm in a particular quandary because my business is dependant on being shown in a 3D space - and is as a result very primmy. As a result, finding appropriate alternative launching grounds for my product has been difficult. I don't want to up my tier, so buying on the mainland is out. Renting from malls is difficult/impossible given fact that my product is meant to be outside, not inside a stall (and is often too big/primmy for mall space prim allotment). Renting from estate makes for variable traffic, depending on area, and specific theme/terraforming restrictions are often in place.

Beyond establishing satellite locations? hmm. I'd like to develop a greater symbiotic relationship with complimentary businesses... and that's something perhaps I'd like to learn more about.

She doesn't come up in search?

Well what I find quite amusing, is that I designed a couple of shops with display windows, but never was pleased with the result. So I disgarded them. Still after this comment I might feel inclined to adapt my store front again... Thanks for the extra work
By the way I do have windows already, so you can look inside. And on second floor even a balcony Because I dislike big closed rooms!

Greetings Marcel

Well I'll try a few experimental ones - but if Puppet wants a "cock hind leg up" animation, he will have to make his own particle effect.

A girl can never have too many pairs of shoes!

Totally agree! To me the keyword is originality. Who wants to wade thru lag for the same old same old. And don't get me wrong, I still believe there's a lot of really cool stuff out there but there's a lot of the same also.

I check the fashion blogs, SLEX, and the forum new products for things, hardly ever go to the stores anymore just to shop as I have all the main stuff in my inventory that everyone sells.

Oh yeah Ann, cool hair at Magika, just found that place last week thru Savoir Hair blog.

You'll have to try google, don't think shes an Avatar.

Exactly my point my dear.

lol

If one doesn't create or play the game regular enough to play club host/dancer/salesman, for them to buy there's two main options

put money into the game (which let's face it, many won't do)

Or camp...What's the camping rate these days? Around 1 linden 10 mins...

That's a long time before a new man on SL can buy himself a tuxedo



I agree about the lack of new stuff, I work in a mall, there's one vendor who has the same products in the store as they did when I began working there, around a year ago. Many mentions of 'do you have new products, special offers, want to be involved in our events?' seem to fall upon deaf ears...

Still no complaints of lack of sales from the store owner, just the customers bored of seeing the same stuff..

It does seem that women's clothing occupies an insanely high proportion of the overall SL market.

Yet, I still have trouble finding clothes that I like. Most women's clothing is made for Britney Spears wannabes.

Try finding clothes for an avatar representing a short woman of 39+ years without perfect breasts, who would like to look sexy but also dignified. There's very little.

Of course, much of the reason that most clothes are made for Britney Spears, and not the middle-aged woman, is because female avatars are overwhelmingly Britney Spears wannabes. The Amity Slades of SL make up a tiny fraction of the SL market.

How much of the Britney Spears phenomenon is based on what the SL users really want, and how much of it is based on the lack of variation available, I don't know. It's actually pretty darn hard for me to customize an avatar to look like something different than a Britney Spears wannabe. It may not be worth the effort for most people.

I would guess though that the high profile of the female fashion business, along with a lot of the same clichés in design, is based in part because of lack of imagination by the creators, but is also based in part because there is a high demand for the cliché designs.

One thing I have come to appreciate though is that, in SL, there is a limit to the pairs of shoes I need. I started out in SL by buying too many clothes and not being satisfied with most. I discovered that out of my huge virtual closet, there were a few outfits I'd wear over and over again. I've now come to embrace the simplicity of the small closet. It's not like I have to do laundry in SL. And it's not as if anyone actually remembers what I wore three days ago. I can get away with a much smaller SL wardrobe as compared to RL wardrobe.

And color-change shoes (or packs with different colors available) are a godsend.

Creating skins is one area in which 2D and 3D artists from outside SL can come in and easily transfer their skills to SL application.

Before coming to SL, I had made plenty of skins (textures) for Poser figures. It's based on the same principles as skins for SL avatars. I wasn't as good as the professional designers, but I did very good skins, and it didn't take me a lot of time to learn.

I've done a few skins for SL. It is much, much harder to do skins for SL, in my opinion.

In Poser, a lot of the shading and highlighting work isn't done by the skin texture itself. The geometry and lighting do a lot of the shading and highlighting work.

When it comes to the texture maps themselves, many Poser figures come with easy-to-use UV maps (texture templates). It's usually easy to draw naturally on them, and it usually isn't too hard to piece-in photo elements.

I could also do my own custom bump maps for Poser (2D textures like skins, except they provide something of a 'virtual geometry' useful for detailed shaping that isn't necessarily practical to acheive from the geometry).

In SL, you get absolutely no help from the geometry and lighting when it comes to shading and highlights. The geometry is too primative, and SL lights are awful. The template is poorly laid out, and doesn't lend itself to natural drawing or easy use of photo elements. SL uses bump maps for avatars, but the bump maps are one area of content that users can't provide. All avatars use the same bump maps, no customization possible.

Because the tools of SL are far more primative that what I am used to with a 3D program like Poser, I think that designing skins for SL is much, much harder. A lot of tricks one could use in other 3D applications get thrown out the window when it comes to skins in SL.

I'm thus absolutely not surprised that the "home-grown" skin designers in SL are much better than professionals from outside of SL trying to establish a skin business in SL. Designing skins for SL is a far different creature, and anyone wanting to do it will need to have time and practice doing it for SL specifically.

I completely appreciate why SL skin designers charge so much for skins. And even though skins are probably among the highest-price of the must-have items for any avatar, I have trouble imagining that the money the SL skin designers earn really makes up for the time and work put into making them.

I made a skin that I use for my avatar in SL. I like it well enough to use. And it took so long and was so tedious to do, I have no desire to try to make several more so that I can have a skin business. It's not worth it.

It's real obvious why sales are down.

LL can not keep things running long enough for anyone to buy anything.

I hadn't heard any official numbers (I hadn't really be looking), but it's not surprising that retention is down. When I came to SL, it was in the boom part of the cycle. Now, SL is in the bust part of the cycle.

I came to SL in Feb. of 2007, during a big population explosion for SL. (I read later that Linden Labs started a big marketing push at about the end of Dec. 2006 or so to make a huge increase in SL membership).

When I got here, there were lots of new people like myself, and more and more new people every day. A lot of us were on the same learning curves. SL actually worked quite well. I had few crashes and periods of awful lag.

It's not surprising that some time after that initial population spike, all the new users learned about things like prims, textures, and scripts. Not just buying, but making their own with varying levels of efficiency. So I would expect a delay between the population boom, and the strain on resources that the boom would cause.

I noticed SL's performance deteriorating for me around the summer of 2007. That's about the time that I started making my own content in earnest, so I'll guess that a lot of those who came to SL when I did were on the same curve.

It doesn't surprise me that a lot of people who came in on that initial population explosion and stayed a while would start leaving at the point that SL stability started to take a downturn. And then the leaving of some creates a domino effect; when all the friends you made when you first got here start disappearing, you are less likely to start logging in.

And then SL performance has gone from annoying to downright unbearable. In my experience, it seems to have taken another significant drop downward starting two or three months ago.

Then add to that the new multi-player 3D games that have been cropping up. Whether you consider SL a game or not, it competes with the same pool of computer geeks for its population. I know I did a lot of socializing instead of playing when I played MMORPGs. A lot of the SL population could be moving their online socializing to more stable environments.

I over-spent on clothes a lot in SL for over a year. For almost my first year of SL, I never had a transaction problem.

In the past month, I have been hit several times by SL's transaction problems. I would pay a vendor my money; it would take the money away from me; but I wouldn't get the product. In each case, the transactions problems (with the "do not conduct transactions" warning) was not posted to the Linden Labs blog until about an hour or so until the transaction bugs had already taken my money.

Fortunately, in those cases over the past month, each merchant has promptly refunded my money to me.

But I consider myself quite lucky. I don't count on all merchants being that attentive or honest. I've been ripped off for a lot of money in land more than once, so I don't want to count on the attentiveness and honesty of merchants in returning money for failed transactions all the time.

And quite honestly, I'd like my transactions to be easy. I don't want to be checking my transaction history every single time I make a purchase. Or writing a note card to a merchant every time. Or check the blog for an "all clear" before buying something every time I want to.

So, when it comes to me, as a consumer, the transaction instability has cut my former impulse buying way, way down.

I have seen a constant increase in sales since I seriously started business in around July. My sculpted gems, stairs, architectural supplies and furniture has seen constant sales with no real gain or drop- to me, this shows some overall growth in the economy. However, as I have been dabbling in other markets the last 4 months and created new products, they have accounted for additional sales.

One problem is that for many areas of content creation in SL, there is already a saturation of quality content and content creators. Thus, for a newcomer there are few options: either create something slightly inferior to similar things on the market and vastly undercut, try to find a unique niche (limited in profit), or do something already available better than anyone else (requires lots of talent and time.) However, there is one other option: innovate, and do something that nobody else has yet done. Given that SL allows one to do so much, this is, and will be, a ripe area for newcomers or people wishing to expand their market. Doing something new can be risky, but it's exciting as hell.

On another note, sales have been down the last week and a half. I have never seen as many failed transactions requiring me to replace products as in recent days. I can barely even work on creating new products myself, as rezzing fails, textures take absurdly long to load, and uploads fail. This is getting completely ridiculous.