SL Merchants Survey

really liking the extortion sound of this:
"oh we can make sure items get delivered, no problem! just hand over the cash."

if they CAN fix the issue, then they should DO so, they ALREADY get paid to do their jobs...

Tundra....if they did not associate a fee with these services....then you get the mid-range, and top selling merchants screaming and hollering because they are doing all this on their own at an expense....why should new or smaller merchants get it all for Free....isn't that what would happen?

ETA: actually...right now, it seems to be the smaller merchants screaming that all this would benefit the larger merchants....if I'm reading correctly on the other forum....

Well LL won't be listening to their residents about that either. That is something to be concerned about, far more so than the survey.

Uhm this isn't a bad observation at all. Shouldn't guaranteed delivery be available to everyone as a basic function. What's next...charging for Guranteed Teleports, or Guaranteed Your Item Won't Disappear When You Rez It?

I'm not against LL making money..but the percentages they are quoting sound awfully to me. How can a small business pay that..and how can a new business break into the market with those barriers.

Where do you live?

North America

English-speaking non-American country (UK, Australia, etc.)

Non-English speaking Europe (France, Spain, etc.)

Asia

Central/South America

Africa

Middle East

Other
What is your gender?

Which of following broad ranges includes your age?

What is your education level?

1. Some high school (Secondary School)
2. High School (Secondary School) graduate
3. Some College/University
4. College/University graduate
5. Post-graduate (law, medicine, MBA)

What is the point of asking this? It has absolutely nothing to do with selling inworld.

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There have always been barriers. Tier fee is a barrier to expanding your business. Classifieds are costly. The competition is fierce. Malls are unpredictable. Xstreet is a CF.

That's a very good question. I have no idea why they'd want that information.

Haven't received the survey but read the comments across the street. Several points mentioned (paraphrased):

*A way to weed out "lag producing" (not my words) extraneous content and only like the top 10 merchants in world. Another poster commented that just because the larger merchants are, well, large, doesn't necessarily follow that they have better merchandise than smaller merchants.

*Another way to squeeze money from residents leading to primarily those with deep pockets staying.

*Residents who are on SL primarily to hang out with friends will leave SL and stick to Facebook, et. all. (Less lag was mentioned there.)

*The LL tendency to throw a high percentage of sales number out there so when/if this is enacted, they can say, but it will ONLY cost xyz lindens, making it then seem like a bargain.

Honestly it's more LL noise to me at the moment, but I'm starting to be glad I'm scaling back.

Some can be filed under to cost of doing business. But some of the numbers mentioed are extreme in my opinion. A person can start relatively cheaply, sign up for premium, set up a little stall on your free 512 and you are off. Or skip the premium and rent a little space. But no you set up your stall and the local wiseguy shows up and says he wants you to joing the Association of Preferred Businesses. All you have to do is pony up a healthy percentage of your sales, maybe pay a membership fee as well and you will be "guaranteed" that your business will be allowed to operate. Don't want to join? Oh...well good luck selling then.

A whole influx of new customers is expected, and The Association will be waiting to help them find what they want, and it won't be at your store.

I agree that the fees are steep, and there was a scale to give feedback on that. Can't remember the exact wording, but it gave you a scale as to "too high" or not.

I guess I read the survey differently than others. I didn't see an attempt to organize an exclusionary business association. And I've long since stopped worrying about that as a threat. People in SL buy like they do in RL. If they like the way you run your store,a nd if they like the way you treat them - they will be loyal. An 'association" is not going to take that from you.

No..people in RL buy what they are told to buy..."This is the latest".."This is the coolest"..."All your friends are buying it, don't be a loser"...mass marketing....More Predictable (tm)

lol....Which age group???

Most of the people I talk to in my own store are a bit older than that, I think....but just assuming. And I imagine that someone selling hair or clothes might have more of that type customer base. I don't know.

Extremely unlikely, unless the vendor was highly modifiable or there was a delivery module that could be added to existing developed vending systems. Extremely unlikely also because current XStreet-SL prohibitions against linking to non-LL e-commerce websites make it impossible for me to use XStreet-SL to sell my products.
It would hurt my business, because most of what I sell could not be on those systems, and would therefore be implied to be “unreliable” as a vending source. Even though the reasons I would not use it are because of the lack of capabilities of the offered vendors and the restrictive policies relating to XStreet-SL listings.
I have no problem with paying a 10-15% commission on sales, for a system that WORKS and that MEETS MY NEEDS. This is unlikely to do either.

I seriously doubt a “one size fits no one” vending machine would work for many SL merchants. A basic vending system such as you are proposing is all well and good for a collection of un-related t-shirts or rugs. It’s inadequate for content that should be grouped by categories, such as furry avatar vendors that let you choose a species group, sub-species, and color variant. It’s impossible for things like texture vendors, where you need to display a watermarked and reduced quality version of each texture so the person viewing the offering doesn’t just screen-shot each display and rip off the set.
That price is completely unreasonable for a small merchant. It exceeds the profits that they would get from sales on most items. It also assumes every merchant has an in-world store, which is not the case.
That price is completely unreasonable for a small merchant. It grossly exceeds the profits that they would get from sales on most items. This will severely harm small merchants, making them look shoddy and unreliable by comparison to the small percentage of huge players that can afford these sorts of fees.
A wonderful idea... at first glance. But also a plan certain to create huge levels of lag, and a terrible shopping experience. If it worked, you’d need far more than “an island”. You’d need a continent. I wouldn’t join unless I could see proof it wasn’t going to be a horribly laggy experience. But a whole lot of small merchants who have difficulty making enough sales every month to cover their mall fees or store parcel rentals will come flooding to your offer, abandoning the malls and sims that they have been paying fixed overhead costs in now.

This will be very harmful, to all the other mall owners and sim owners where malls are present, who require rent for their sim space weather the merchant makes a profit or not. A Resident mall owner has fixed overhead that they must meet, and can’t generally bank on a percentage of merchant profits as being sufficient to cover expenses. LL can, because if the server runs at a loss now and then, they make it up elsewhere. It’s completely unfair competition for the established mall owners.

I got down to Concept 4 - couldn't be bothered reading the rest of the crap.

When LL bought XSL, I said that it's because they want a slice of the inworld commerce pie. That survey is just more evidence of it. They don't want to provide good systems for people to use in a "your world, your imagination" environment. They want to turn SL into an environment where they are getting bigger slices of the commerce pie. Before you know it, the only way to sell stuff will be through LL's pie-slicing systems, and any trader who doesn't use them will find it more and more difficult to even be noticed.

Nope. It's not for me.

Note is says "has" developed. Not "may develop based on your feedback". It is already done. The surveys they send out are not for info gathering they are just advertizing that it is coming. Now they can send all the new players direct to the sanitized mall.



"Linden Lab has developed an Island in Second Life that enables merchants to create their own stores as large or small as they desire. Display your creative works from shoes to houses."

I think they are referring to the sim where the Luna Mall and Busy Ben's vehicle lot are. The merchant areas that ther raffle off free spaces in every 6 months or so.

But I agree. LL typically doesn't ask for and pay attention to honest feedback. They just do what they want, and then make a show of asking for "feedback" after they already have their course cast in stone, so they can cherry-pick the responses that support their pre-existing plan, and ignore the rest.

What LL built in was setting a prim for sale which simply works. Pay it and if something goes wrong your L$ comes back.

Scripted vendors on the other hand are resident-creations and the whole concept of delivering sales through a script is flawed to begin with so nothing to blame LL for (unless it relates to XStreet where LL is equally guilty for relying on scripts to handle delivery).

You missed off the best bit, Lyal...

[/b]They are coming into SL and becoming like us. People already offer free shop space for payments in other ways like that, so it's not like there's a need for it. The really bad thing about it is that they have power to divert people to their own enterprises, just like they did when they bought XSL.

One of their "concepts" is to come up with a delivery guarantee system - something that merchants have been wanting for years, and something that they really should come up with as part of the SL system. But no - they'll do it only for those who pay to use such a system. It's like saying that they'll create guaranteed TPs but the only people who can use it are those who pay extra. The rest will have borky TPing.

The buying of XSL was the thin end of a very large wedge. SL now has a completely different nature to what it used to have. LL makes money when L$ are bought, they make money when they are cashed out, and more and more they will be making money on every L$ merchant transaction, and they'll make sure that the majority of merchant transactions go through their slice of pie systems. Before long, they'll be making money on almost every step that each L$ takes. No wonder they removed the "Your world, your imagination" bit, because it isn't any more. It's becoming LL's own merchant playground.

Can't just be a sim. They said Island and it would have to be pretty large multi sim Island to fit hundreds of merchants they seem to be aiming for?

I pretty much agree with everything Ceera Murakami said.

I filled out the survey and in the comments at the end I pretty much told them that I felt LL had ruined the SL economy already with the changes they have made and I was not willing to pay them more money for any of the things they were considering, because I had no faith in them being able to do any of it without creating more problems and hurting my business all the more.

The amounts of money they want for the changes they are proposing is excessive and incredibly greedy. The XStreet vendor system we have should already be "guaranteed to deliver", why should I have to pay more to get one that does?

Is it my imagination.....or do they always toss this stuff out right before a weekend?

An island is simply a sim not connected to the mainland. Multiple islands can make up an estate and that is likely what LL would need to try and prevent lag and to handle the large number of sellers that they are hoping to attract to it.

This,

and this,

I very much dislike the idea of LL competing against residents, whether it's against mall/sim owners, vendor creators, or any other resident business.

Maybe someone, somewhere in LL sincerely thought these were great ideas; to me, however, they come across as ideas from someone with either very little in-world experience, or as a veiled way for LL to more tightly control (and profit from) the SL economy.

I don't think it's veiled. They bought XSL and started to take a cut on many merchants' sales, and to improve what they make, they immediately pushed users towards XSL - a huge ad on the website. Later, they went much further and put the ads in users' account pages. There's nothing veiled about what they are doing.

The stuff in the survey about advertising and what have you, is all about pushing users to the places where LL gets a cut of sales, and competing in the mall market just speaks for itself - and guess whether or not their mall will receive grossly favoured advertising.

There's nothing veiled about any of it. They've seen the sort of money that's being made in SL, and they are all out to get as many slices of it as they can by pushing users towrds the places where they get a slice, and by coming up with new ways of getting slices. It's turning into Linden World, where people can trade successfully *if* they let LL have a cut.

No it doesn't work, not if you use the contents anyway, which they encourage you to do.