Is it possible to build and manage a multi-story shopping area?

Hi, been considering building a shopping zone to subsidize my land and wondering if it's possible to stack shops vertically without conflict. Seems most are side-by-side & loft-style so im guessing its not the easiest to manage due to technical limits of zoning.

Just a planning thought. Thanks

What is so hard about it? Until recently with new search, most malls operated this way, and having your own parcel wasn't that important. You don't have privacy concerns, or shouldn't. You are the one controlling the media. Unless that's the only gripe, I don't see what the problem is.

Yes it is possible. Look at Furnation Worls Mall as a good example. Or the vending area in the Sensations sim.

You need a stall rental system that can help you to manage access and prim count. And you need to form a land group that the merchants can join, with a limited number of officers for maintaining the area, and a more restricted role for merchants that allows them to rez prims there.

The HippoVend system seems popular, vut there are several alternatives out there. Take a look at several existing malls, and see what system they are using to control the "unused" stalls or to allow merchants to pay their monthly stall rental.

no gripes. im a newbie when it comes to being a manger in here. my knowledge was based on how land is subdivided, but seems there's plenty of tools to make it work. thanks, this is good to know.

Your main limiting factor, and the reason it's very rarely done in SL, is the issue of limited prims per area of land space. As a rough guide, in order to operate a multi-storey mall, you need to buy not only the land for your mall but for each additional floor in your mall you'll need an equal amount of land in the same sim left vacant. ie if your mall is 4000sq.m and has 3 floors you'll need to own 12,000sq.m and leave 2/3 of it virtually empty, just to allow for the triple demand on prims in the mall itself. Malls like Furnation's Skymall manage it because they purchase a whole sim for it and put nothing else in there except some minimal landscaping in the rest of the land.

thats not too much of a problem as i own this sim and am building this to subsidize my play time, ill have enough prims to allocate. open space plays a big part and its not too big a structure... i could always make it one-story, but visually it just appears nice as a 2-story so i'd love to make it happen

If you're doing two story make it accessible, some places just build two stories and then expect you to fly to the higher levels.

But that "having your own parcel" would seem pretty important now, with the new Search, wouldn't it? I know a lot of malls (one floor or more) still operate as just one big parcel, but I think if I were making a mall, I'd want to offer the tenants their own places to list in Search. Or is the combined Traffic number enough of an advantage to outweigh that, still?

Of course, if one is making it two story just for the aesthetics, with space and prims to burn, maybe just assign separate parcels for each space, where each such parcel is tenant-occupied on only one of the floors, and some kind of public space on the other. I've never seen this, but might be more appealing than just storefront-next-to-storefront. Plus the pathways have to be public space anyway, so they could be offset so "path" on one floor was "store" on the other (no "atrium" that way, though).

A mall is still very powerful if done right, thanks to the parcel content. If all the items are searchable, and if the store owners and some of their patrons put the mall in their links, the mall can be found easier than someone who only sells a couple dozen or so items. A themed mall that sells related items, e.g., skins, hair would get a boost in searching for skins & hair thanks to the sheer amount of skins & hair on the parcel. The name of the business is not so important as being in a place found for the item that people are looking for. If you are in a skin mall and all the vendors did as I said, you would have a naturally strong bunch of links for that given search term.

Its a courtyard with 2 stories around it. could that allow for the parcel settings, such has LM points in front for the downstairs and upstairs gets the actual parcel that the shop is located on?

I think Cristalle is almost surely correct that the win is having all the content links for the whole mall, so my idea of parceling it out was probably not a good plan--especially if the content in the mall is related across shops. Sorry for the bum steer.

no worries, im hoping the content and vendors will all be related. that' be great