xstreet undercutting

Well you get what you pay for I suppose. Cheap usually goes hand in hand with nasty.
In real life I do dj work and its a job that is hard to break in to and also one that many people want to do. There are always a lot of people offering to dj free in venues just so they can get their foot in the door. Established djs have no respect for these people offering their services for free and generally look upon them with disdain. Anyone who doesnt have enough self respect or self worth to charge for their services shouldnt be in the industry in the first place. Undercutting people who have worked their butts off to establish their business is a low and desperate act. Its the same for xstreet or any other industry.

Ps- Id rather pay 300 bucks for quality designer jeans than cheap nasty walmart jeans anyday.

LL is changing things in response to what LL describes as "The Race To The Bottom":
https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/commerce/blog/2009/09/17/changes-to-xstreet-sl-listing-popularity-ranking

I stand corrected then. thanks for doing that nicely. I thought for sure it ran both ways. Its why i was a bit confusd on what i was seeing on some items. thanks. My bad.

$29.99 on sale

Thats exactly what it is a race to the bottom. Im glad they are doing something. Lets hope it works.

Oh, I feel relatively certain that there is no question to the motives, Occam's Razor and all that

Lols while sucking on a lol-ipop skating around on her lollerskates.

I get plenty of high quality items on the cheap in SL and I see plenty of overpriced poor quality items in SL. Automatically attributing poor quality to the inexpensive and high quality to the expensive is the mark of an ignorant consumer. Implying a lack of self-respect and self-worth to people is nasty and unfounded, although an overinflated sense of self-worth and false sense of entitlement probably has a lot to do with why people might make that claim and whine about it.

For some it's just a matter of getting their name out there to be seen, can always jack prices up if your sales get too high

Others maybe they calculate the prices based on the raw materials and labour required to manufacture additional copies to sell. items inworld in vendors always need to cover the rent/tier/prims of that used to sell the item, Xstreet doesn't have amonthly charge, you can list an item there for free for the next 50 years. And only pay a percentage "tax" when it sells.

I think if RL fouse companies could build repeat copies of houses for $0 they wouldn't be charging a lot for them.

While there are a lot of public-spirited creators out there who make stuff and give it away or sell it very cheaply, the OP does have a point.

There are some XStreet merchants who list low-priced items to game the advertising system there. LL just posted a blog about changing the ranking algorithm so that low priced items no longer gain an advantage and get shown on the teaser page first.

This. Plus the fact that there are no production costs, only development costs and selling costs.

If the 100 pairs selling at $80 make $30 profit each, then the development costs would have been be 100 (80-5%(80)-30), or $4600, assuming that the selling costs are 5% of sales.

So the cost per unit for the 1,000,000 pairs would be $0.0046. Selling cost per unit would still be 5% of gross, so $1.75 for a total cost of $1.7546 per unit and profits of $33.2454 per unit. That is $3.2454 higher per unit than the 100 pairs by a combination of the lower selling costs per unit and much greater dillution of the development costs.

Of course the trick to it is that if you lower the price, you are not guaranteed to get that drastic an increase in sales. In some cases you will get no increase and in some, you may even see a decrease. Many equate cheap with lower quality. You will want to experiment with price to find the right level for your goods.

You are a real piece of work just throwing out mass insults like that.

YOU are the nasty person here.

A LOT of people, and some of them are here for sure, actually wear jeans from walmart because that is all they can afford.

Go jump off a bridge with your market protectionist whiny crap.

Any person who universally correlates quality with cost is freaking stupid. Period.

More idiotic selfish, NASTY, nonsense.

The only thing you have said remotely accurate so far is that "you get what you pay for" - and that does happen more often than not. But in the case of Xstreet and people making freebies, you are clueless. Lots of people make crap, but lots of people also make quality - and it is free.

Deal with it.

Its a holdover from a time when it was much more the case, when production costs were much higher and low cost meant either corners were cut in production or there was something wrong or unpopular with the goods so the price had to be lowered to get them to sell.

These days, production costs are low (non-existant in SL), so that situation no longer exists. There is still some correlation, but much less of a guarantee.

Er, gratuitous analogy time:
Coca Cola and Pepsi spend huge amounts of money promoting their brands, despite 'cola' being pretty generic.
My local supermarket sells them at about the same price - roughly £1.40 for 2 litres.
They also sell their own label 'reduced sugar' cola for ... 20p for 2 litres.
When my daughter was very young she was influenced by the marketing and wanted one of the 'brands'. Since she was 5 she understood quite clearly she could buy 7 times as much cola if she had the cheap one. She tried it, she likes it, we don't buy 'brand' cola any more.
So far I haven't seen Coca Cola and Pepsi entering a class action against the supermarket on behalf of all wronged cola-makers.

There's probably a point in there somewhere but I've forgotten what it is

Me, I enjoy making stuff. I could give it all away free, but I like to have a little money to offset the cost of textures, animations, and scripts I have to buy from others. Occasionally, I will make enough to buy a new dress or something for my house. What I sell is eclectic and odd, because I have usually made it for something I needed. I don't sell enough to even attempt to cover my tier cost each month. I hope I charge a reasonable and fair price for what I have made. There is no magic market formula what to charge for a particular product. Up to each creator what to set the price at and each buy what they will pay for a particular items.

And yet there are many who do have a preference other than price... There is a definate flavour difference between the colas, so it comes down to personal preference.

Would I be happier if my preference was a no-name or 'house' brand? Yes, because it would be cheaper, but that is not my preference....

Now if instead of a couple dollars a 2L, it was a couple thousand, and/or if the quality difference was less to me, then it would be another matter.

I've got two things on xstreet. A rosebush (using a full perm sculpt prim from someone else, and a texture based on an open license photo I spent many hours editing to fit), and a cage made from sculpties I created using an in world tool.

Every texture and sculpt map has to be uploaded, and as I kept changing my mind I had to upload quite a few times till I was happy. The audio files for the cage door had to be uploaded too. This all costs.

But, I'm not going to try and pretend either item is the best you can buy, and all I really want to do is cover my costs and maybe make the odd few L here and there. Which is why one item is 10L, the other 25 (I think, really should check some time). I suppose i could charge more, but why would I want to. I'm not doing it to make huge wads of cash, and if I was I'd be trying to create something a damned sight better. I very much doubt I'm hitting the sale of major creators, and if I am then they should look at improving their items or lowering their prices.

Okay, umm, Marly, sweetheart... It's not an industry. It's a game. It's not real. People want to say it is, but honey, it isn't. A real 'industry' employs real people and creates real jobs and supports the real economy. SL supports LL, and that's it, whether someone sells their jeans for 100L or 10L on XStreet.

There aren't little avatar people slaving away in prim sweatshops in SL-Brooklyn stitching together little tga's of pants to make them and put sculptie food on the table for their little bot-babies.

SL IS NOT REAL, It doesn't matter what people charge for their cartoon stuff on XStreet. Charging 3000L for a dress doesn't make you high fashion and charging 30L doesn't make you low fashion. If you want to be in the fashion industry, move to NYC, Paris or Milan, because that is where it exists. Not in SL.

For everyone who thinks that SL is a real community with real industries I have three words:

THE SIMS ONLINE

I've long thought that the benchmark for pricing on most things is freebies. The biggest threshold for a lot of residents seems to be the jump from L$0 to L$1 !!! There are a lot of good freebies about as well as not-so-good. I have a barrel of freebies on offer and they 'sell' quite well, but even my cheapest non-free items only go slowly.

Agreed.

Um, yeah, sure. Of course, the people who are making a real, full time living from SL might take issue with your idea that it "isn't real".

And, in case you didn't notice, The Sims Online folded. We got a lot of refugees from over there. Welcome to unreality. Oh, you can talk to people here, in real language, not Simlish. And we have this currency called "linden dollars" that you can buy and sell for real money. Yes, really.

I'm struggling with a few things I've accepted about this game (yes, it is a game).
1) I come to SL for fun, not to run a business
2) "Fun", for me, is creating stuff - building, texturing, scripting
3) I recognize there are some people who rely on SL for real money - maybe they live in Brazil or the Philippines, maybe they're living on a disability and need the extra for meds, or have young kids and can't work a regular job

So my compromise is to give my stuff away to people I meet and like, and maybe they give me a tip, maybe not. Its a great conversation starter, a good way to build friendships and a reputation in a small group but without the hassle of running a business, and not dinging anyone's real income. A lot of what I create does not exist and is truly unique, and I enjoy being able to bring life to a crazy idea I had, introducing something fun that's not a clone copy of a dozen other items being sold.

As for the general concept of freeware - well, maybe the original poster wasn't thinking of Linux or Apache or Open Office at the time, or all the open protocols that make the Internet even possible.

Okay, give me a list of people making a real living in SL. As far as I can tell there are maybe a couple of dozen at most. That does not make an industry, it doesn't even make a niche.

And yep, the Sims folder, just like that.. and someday SL will fold and some other game will get the refugees for SL. Because, it's not a real place. It's a game.

You can trade the currency for many online games, it doesn't turn them into real life either.

Last i checked there were over 250 people making more than $5,000 usd per month in SL.

So you are way off on that

The numbers for the groups making less are even higher, of course.

I made a living in SL at one time.

A LOT of people are doing it today.

Could you point me to where I could find that?

Sorry had to add this, cause the math won't get out of my head.

Even if we go with 250 people making 5000+ a month, which.. frankly, I wouldn't quit my day job for. It still doesn't equate to an industry.

LL claims what.. around 5,000,000 accounts.. which to be honest every knows is BS.. so lets lowball it.. say 250,000 actual users.. which I think we can assume is a conservative low end figure.. 250,000 users would put SL in the niche market range.

Now of that 250,000.. 250 are making what I would call, scary but okay wages since you also have to take into account they have no health care, no retirement plan.. actually they are on the low end of independant contractors. Which is basically what they are.

That makes .1% of the SL population if we go with conservative etimate of the SL population.

.1% of a niche market..

Definately not an industry.