Sales plumeting?

Nothing beats that powerful and hard-to-measure word-of-mouth factor. I work to get the basics right. I chose a niche market that is not saturated. I work hard to make quality stuff. I listen when my customers tell me what they want. And then I hope that people will tell others about my designs, or see something an avie is wearing and inspect it or ask, where did you get that?

Many thanks, Eclectic.

and you have reasonable and competitive prices, THAT was the factor that played biggest for me when purchasing your sculpt maps

by the way I love your stuff (I must have almost all the stuff in your store by now LOL)

As an addition to the designer freebie discussion: I had gotten to the point of having pretty much all the clothes I needed (or more accurately, *wanted*) in SL. As in RL I am not much of a shopper; I tend to buy quality basic items that can be mixed & matched and fill in as needed. Also, since clothes don't wear out in SL, I can wear them until I get tired of them, which for me, isn't often.

However, once I joined some of the freebie groups to promote my own little business, I began checking out the various freebies offered and discovered a specialty-type designer who offers daily dollarbies and has regular hunts for TONS of 1L items - all very high quality and unique.

From just checking out the dollarbies at that store (actually an entire sim), I discovered a store I would never have known about and have now purchased many items from there and make a beeline there first when I want something new. And an interesting side effect of all this - it has made me interested in clothes shopping again.

As far as I can see, there are four groups of people involved in SL.

The first are the non-buyers, who never buy L$ at all and live their SLs entirely on freebies. This can be because they aren't willing to buy L$ or because they're unable to, or because they don't see any value in purchasing L$ - typically because they just see SL as a talker, and treat it that way. The problem is that they are the largest group and as a result, this attitude becomes infectious. If a new person teleports to a group of green dots and they are not bots or campers, chances are they will be people in this group, and they will be treating SL as a talker - which gives the new person the impression that that's all it is. It's even worse that some entire _countries_ still can't buy L$, so everyone in these countries (and the communities that grow up about them) is guaranteed to have this attitude too.

The second are the paying consumers who actually pay L$ and purchase content. These are the most important users - as long as they're around there'll be an incentive for creators to come. The most difficult challenge to keep business going in SL is to arrange that these people can find equilibrium and recieve a valued experience for what they pay. That involves social manipulation as well as features of the world. On the positive side, they can "play house", or have sex, or become dancers, etc, interacting with the non-buyers as facilitators, friends or audience. But not everyone wants to be a facilitator, and I've encountered or heard of many cases where these people were driven off by the belief that they were just spending L$ so others didn't have to.

The third are the part-time creators who usually just make things for themselves to use in social contexts, and sell them as an incidental task. Unfortunately, these seem to be a dying breed, or at least to have very high turnover. They lose out in business to the full-time creators, especially since LL introduced SEO and other "big marketing" issues to SL. They lose out in social position to the paying consumers, who can devote more time to social management and networking, and who may well also have better content (from the full-time creators) and more money. For some people neither of these is an obstacle and they soldier on, but the drop-out rate amongst these seems higher, and most become either consumers or full-time creators eventually.

And the fourth are the full-time creators who make things all the time. Because they don't really do that much other than creating things and marketing them, they often don't spend many L$ because they have nothing to do with anything they'd buy.

Now, it seems that sales in SL are starting to fall because creators are tending to move into full-time creation, and the balance between the consumers and the non-payers is teetering. Basically, because there are so many non-payers they have disproportionate influence on the social climate and as a result the net experience of consumers isn't one of high value for money..

Yep. Crash, boom.

This is exactly my experience with Freebies as a Consumer. There are so many clothing stores in SL and too many will put up a picture that looks way better than the item truly looks and/or the picture is at an angle that hides the flaws. Anymore, I am just not willing to spend money just to see if I like a designer's clothes. The freebies let me sample the designer's goods and I definitely go back and drop bucks at the places that I like.

I don't have a store - I create nothing in SL. I am simply a consumer of products. However, I drop a ton of money into SL on a regular basis. While I may be a freebie shopaholic, I am also a regular drop lots of bucks shopaholic.

In many ways you are correct about the newbies that just want it all for free -- but from the people I meet, if they stick around in SL, they start spending money.

Others have discussed the other aspects of what Tony wrote, but I'd like to follow up on one other point: OK, what I would like to know is what other grid are they leaving for? If their objective is to set up a viable business, then you need to have a robust permission system and a lively economy. I have yet to hear of another grid that has that, and would be curious if one has popped up to cause these stories to be heard by you....

I just plotted my SLX balance over the last 6 months using a log chart, and was amazed to see how rock steady the growth was. Since I do almost no marketing, the steady exponential growth must be due to the objects appearing inword and being seen by others.

Really, I never saw such nice straight lines back in Physics lab (when things were supposed to come out that way). If this keeps up, I'll have 10 times the balance every 6 months. (Yeah, no doubt I can count on that!)

But my business is small and probably isn't much of an indicator for overall sales in SL.

/me invites Lil into his shop.

Ah, you'd charm me and I'd end up giving you everything.

But, come anyway!

Not only that, but quality full-perm freebies help people make content without being an expert in every area. That's why I'm committed to making freebies like MLPV2, easy sit target positioner, and any number of little objects I unleash into the wild, to be amused when I see them pop up in other people's builds.

OMG- That's you??? May I say now what a great thing you did with that! Thank you thank you thank you

Note to self- visit Lear's shop...

Is that log chart easy to use? (I'm horrible at using Excel.)

Also would love an easy database system to keep track of certain things in my business. Can anyone recommend a good, fairly easy one please?

Errrmmm....de-rail off now...carry on

Ditto that! I think my partner has one of those sit positioning things.

haha lears shop may come as a shock to some of you

Those kinds of freebies are things that help generate more creativity, instead of trying to make an end run around it like BIAB. Thanks, Lear. I know I'll be strolling by your shop.

From the point of my own business in the photography and machinima side of things there was a massive increase in land owners/land barons/apartment renters in the mainland and old mature full prim estate sims ordering advertising videos from me since the collapse of the OS market.

Its levelled off to about 1 or 2 a week now for for a good few weeks after the OS announcements it was almost one a day...

Well........ if you insist.

/me waves and smiles. Warning: shop's a bit kinky. Nothing but poseballs & MLP sets; no pics so you have to jump on, grin, and bare it. (wink) No PG poseballs, but the notecard giver passes out some free solo sits.

If you can make a regular chart, it's easy to convert to log chart (but not as easy as it should be). First, make your chart (I always use "scatter" type charts; that works best with the data I get from places like SLX). Right-click on the vertical axis and do whatever choice it is to modify the axis. Go to "scale" tab (IIRC), and choose "logarithmic" .

You'll want to set the minimum manually; excel always sets it to 1. It should be a power of 10, since that's the only way Excel seems to work for log charts, unfortunately.

HTH

I do!

/me ♥♥♥♥ Lil

Errrmmm, as an English Lit. major, that still sounded too "mathematical" for me. I appreciate the help though, Lear

I need a "dump this info in here and it does the rest" program...lol.

Going to look around on tucows.com...they might have something.

Hehe- now I am salivating...

Ditto and I think Excel is a warm fuzzy puppy but yeah- no clue what that all meant. Czari, I keep a simple spreadsheet as a visitor log and sales info. I use it to keep an eye on number of unique visits and on which days in which stores etc. Simple bar and pie graphs work for me.