Just How Bad is the SL Economy

Although I do not create anything I do see your point. But, as a CONSUMER if I purchase an item I should be able to give it to someone if I desire without having to go through the trouble of getting a gift card or whatever the requirement is. That to me is such a turn off and takes away the spontaneity of buying a present for someone. I use xstreet or whatever its called these days to accomplish that but again where's the spontaneity of doing this inworld. If this was a rl situation (which I know rl rules do not necessarily apply in sl) this approach would be ridiculous.

So what happens, my inventory as well as others are cluttered with items we no longer use that someone else may have a use for. There is always talk about making the new user experience more friendly for newbies, well for those like me who don't build, create nor that computer savvy, this would be my way of helping others as well as cleaning out my closet (inventory). No different than donating to a charity as a way of cleaning out your house of items you don't need.

I'm sure I'm going to get flamed for this but so be it.

Sable:

I'm certainly not going to flame you, and I don't think anyone else will.

I sell hundreds of items every day, and all but one is mod/trans. The only item that isn't transfer is a copyable item. I don't see thieves as being a problem, and I don't see how no-trans can prevent it. All it can do is assure a seller that, if a person didn't buy the item from the seller, then it must have been stolen in some way. What then?

Selling mod items does allow people to screw things up - it does happen. But, even though I sell hundreds of items every day, those occurences are few and far between, and I fix it for them.

The markets that use complex multi-prim vendors and the markets that use separate prims for each product are largely disjoint, and merchants that try and present products in a way that doesn't match well with the market don't do well.

And, even if you solved the vendor problem perfectly, it's still effectively doubling their inventory for what they believe (rightly or wrongly) is few sales. If you want to convince them that the effort is worthwhile you have to convince them that you represent a larger potential market than they appear to believe you do.

That might have happened in the States, but does not apply to the UK. Most of these Superstores have located on the town fringes where the rents are much cheaper. You won't find them in the Town high streets.....you will however find chain store branches in the High street, which have largely replaced the small independent outlets over time.

The proof is in the pudding so to speak. There are many inworld merchants giving priority to mod/trans or the choice of mod/trans mod/copy. So there must be a market.
I beleive the problem is one of propagating misinformation about the badness of mod/trans. It is further my belief that this misinformation is used when merchants don't want to make the effort instead of being honest, it is also used by merchants who do not want to see their products at yard sales or want your friend to buy their own instead of you saying, here have mine because I don't use it much anymore. It is called an agenda and it works very well to the merchant's advantage. What would be the point of spreading this misinformation otherwise? You would just say "This is the way I want to sell." The misinformation is designed to put a stop to those who want to offer something different in the same way businesses have been known to collude together to fix prices, set policies etc.
It is my hope that eventually those merchants will be replaced by up and coming merchants who don't have this agenda and do not need to spread misinformation.
I beleive that a good start is to combat this by bringing awareness to any who will listen that mod/trans is not inherently bad and if you want to offer it then nothing bad will happen to you or your business.

I'm sure there is. Conversely, there's also a market for copy or the choice of trans or copy. I'm not talking about that, I'm talking about "the market of people who won't buy no-trans at all". Personally, I prefer copy because with over 300 avatars in my inventory it's a pain to be unable to set them up with the right outfit by default... but I'll buy trans if that's all there is, and (as I noted) on one occasion I was buying something as a gift and got a copy version by mistake because I didn't notice the box had different settings.

And I agree that there are a number of bad arguments against transferrable items. Clearly I do, because I've attempted to counter those arguments in this thread.

All I'm saying is that the third of the arguments presented... that offering BOTH options is extra work... is not so easy to dismiss. It's a real issue, and I think you're unnecessarily minimizing it.

If a person is going to offer the alternate perms set when a customer IMs them then it is very little extra work from that to sticking it up in a vendor too. Even if they are not offering that option, if they work in a smart way, then any extra time can be substantially minimized.
I have done this myself to see and it is no more than a couple of extra minutes for an outfit with the usual parts. That included the time in GIMP to produce two images with different perms showing, for the majority who don't use vendors like mine
This is my opinion, you obviously do not share it, lets just agree to disagree on this.

Maybe I'm naive, but I really don't think that most business owners are setting things copy because they want people to have to buy it from them in a greedy sort of way. As I said earlier in the thread, I used to offer a choice, and it was the many requests for a gift card that caused me to change my vendors to ones that didn't support that option. I made my decision based on past sales, but copy/mod being the only option does have some added benefits:

* When I'm contacted about non-delivery of an item, I don't worry that the person might be working the (glitchy) system just to get an extra transfer copy. Non-delivery is probably the most common customer service request I get.

* I don't get replacement requests anymore due to an item being messed up beyond repair while being modded. This one wasn't huge... I didn't get it too often anyway.

There are benefits to the seller on transfer/mod too, of course:

* If the customer makes a mistake, I can take back an item to exchange it. With having things set to copy/mod now, I just give them the one they wanted, and make a note in their profile, so I'll know if it becomes chronic. Generally, what this happens with is hair colours anyway, and I don't know that anyone is saying hair should be set to transfer...

* The customer can give a gift of a particular item directly. However, most of the requests I've gotten like this, if not all, the buyer asks me to send the item to the person they want to give the gift to because they still want it to be copy.

Offering both options really was a lot more work, and I really didn't notice any change in the amount of sales during the time I offered it. If it was just changing the perms on unscripted items, it wouldn't be that bad, but as soon as anything had a script in it that I didn't have mod rights on, it was a lot more work. The other draw back of having both options, is that I had to have two of everything in my inventory. My inventory is big enough without that!

Anyway... just my experiences. Not trying to offer any type of "excuse" as to why I have things like I do. Just the pros and cons I've noticed.

just a point on using vendors....i personally hate them. i hate standing around waiting for the image of the next thing to rez when im shopping. if i go to a store and there is a lag like that, they lose my biz. in my own store i have been experimenting with using one multi-vendor and the results are showing that most of my customers just bypass the vendor entirely.

LOL!

I've been saying this since February 2004, which is why vendors were never allowed in my Malls.

Uses boxes people or rezzers.

Vendors may save prims but they auto-lose my business.

Not sure if you were referring to my post or not... when I say vendors, I just mean the boxes I sell from. I don't care for having to scroll through images either.

I use 1 vendor/product for the same reason. I was until recently on a slower computer and hated the multi-vendor slowness. I ended up modifying a script from the forum. I have it for free in my shop.

I always thought the multi image vendor slowness was due to people using large image sizes, is that not the case?

Exactly my experience. Tons of extra work, and hardly any extra revenue. It is about changing the permissions of the item, the scripts inside, the animations inside, boxing them up in a different box, making separate textures for on the box and/or vendor.

Now whether Gabrielle wants to believe it or not, that is the reason I stick with one permission system only. In my case, that is modify-transfer. And for my plants department, copy-mod. It has nothing to do with "it is my shop so I do as I want", it simply has to do with a great amount of extra work with hardly any revenue showing for it.

Have to say I agree. Most of them take far too long to browse through. It's a real disincentive to checking out all the stock.

--
Aes

No matter what you are waiting for load time, even if its a 256x256 image.

Oh...one more benefit to copy perms for clothing that I'm surprised I forgot. I can now include lots of layer and prim options in each box. This one does seem to be popular with a lot of buyers. You can certainly do this with transfer, but you know at least some people would look at it as a way to get two for the price of one and give away or sell one set of the outfit and keep the other set for themselves, which would not be what I intended when providing the extra pieces.

People often use single vendors now that only download one product per vendor.

Having visited Jesseaitui store a year or two ago, i can remember him selling skins and tattoos...that would justify why he sells them copy only. One of my companies produces Kids skins...and from the outset my Partner & I decided they were only ever going to be sold NoMod/ Copy/No Tfr to try and limit the possibilities of theft as much as we can....or at least make it a bit harder. Looking around most top Skin companies set similar permission systems and rightly so.
Our skin sales have not been effected in doing so. Only twice did we have a slight mishap, in that a Parent bought a skin package and wanted to gift it to her SL Kid. As it was an honest mistake, I simply sent another pack to the Kid. It wasn't worthwhile quibbling over a few hundred Lindens, it's not like i had to recreate it from scratch again!.....plus the goodwill and making customers happy might lead to future referrals!


I think the permission systems varies acccording to what you make and sell. My Body Shapes i offer No Mod/Copy and Mod/Copy options....if someone wants to gift a shape to their partner, they can grab the same item from XStreet. Sooner of later XStreet will be intergrated into the SL viewer making it easy for everyone to buy products for a 3rd party. My poses i sell Mod/Copy, our Furniture shop sell mostly Mod/Tfr or simply Tfr products, my Partners animated Fairies are Tfr only.
I have Menswear which i haven't launched as yet....but most likely I'll set it to Mod/Copy when the time comes.

I don't think i use vendors for anything that i sell...except the poses, which are thrown into a Poses stand which you can flick through

No Mod Shapes.....

No Mod Furniture....

The cons of no mod shapes are obvious.

No Mod furniture means people who are normal real life sized in SL often have their limbs intersecting the furniture, and with no mod it cannot be adjusted, therefore it is useless to me or people in 5'-5'8" range.

I agree that misinformation about why permissions should be set in a specific way is not the way to go. Each person who creates should make that decision for themselves and then do it the way they want. I don't defend my position, I merely state it. If someone wants mod/transfer on a product, they are more than welcome to seek out someone who offers it, and there are plenty out there that do.

But misinformation about why some creators choose to use mod/copy can be just as damaging. I have seen it written in this thread that creators who make copy instead of transfer are a: making sure no-one else sells their product and loses them a potential sale or b: don't want to do the extra work required to produce a product with 2 sets of permissions (whether in one package or two separate packages), c: don't care what their customers want, just do what is easier.

That is a matter of opinion of course, but you can't be surprised when people read 'greedy' or 'lazy' into that, not only to the people who might feel they are being called 'greedy or lazy or lacking in customer care' but to the same newer people who might believe that misinformation. It isn't the case.

If we want to help newer people than I think the better statement to them would be "some people sell copy, some people sell transfer. Some sell mod some sell no mod. Decide what your preferences are, and find the creator who can give you what you want".

Thank you for all the great answers. Here's what I learned:

Some people make enough to pay tier, some don't

Some believe in giving out freebies and some don't

Some are making outrageously good sales, some aren't

Some like selling copy/mod or mod transfer

And so on, and so on, and so on

It all brings me back to my original thought - do it because I like to do it and hopefully make sales. I'd only close it if the overhead far exceeds my sales.

some ppl make furniture specific to rl sized and smaller (asian) avatars.
personally i think that a lot of sl furniture is way oversized.
why dont i make things mod? like i said before handmade sculpts with painted on textures... baked over texture. when we offered mod.. ppl would often IM me to replace their retexturing adventures.
also resizing upsets the sit target.. messes up puppeteer scripts.
we do offer copy/mod on request and also resized (bigger versions) retextured versions (match to house decor) at no extra cost. Ppl seem to like this personal touch.
Personally i dont mind the requests for special work and like to see someone who is completely happy with their item. Maybe we miss out on the market of ppl who prefer moddable furniture, but we do have great sales and happy customers. We also offer trade ins for recent purchases when we bring out a newer and better version of a product..

Each store has its own methods, its own customer service.. but it boils down to 2 things.. customer satisfaction and of course the bottom line.

Here's a graph of my XStreet balance for jPose sales; I don't withdraw much so this is an accurate reflection of accumulated revenues.

Plotted as a log chart, so exponential growth plots as a straight line.



I rescaled the vertical axis to hide the actual values in Lindens.

Bottom line: a business based on poseball/MLPV2 sales shows steady growth. I do very little marketing; just a couple of signs with LMs at a couple popular places, along with giving free product to those places. Also, SLX enhancements for a couple flagship products.

Interestinglyl enough, I don't see any changes in sales that correlate to when I started the SLX enhancements, or addition of new products. Actually, sales don't seem to be affected by anything I do, so I might as well just continue doing whatever I want for the fun of it!

BTW, past performance is no guarantee of future results. But if this growth rate (10,000% per annum) continues, pretty soon I'll own the world!

how exactly did I misrepresent the severity of any issue, not once did I say it was extremely dangerous etc

I merely stated a possibility of offering items with a specific set of permissions. I never said how bad or even gauged or put it on a level of how bad or how often it happens.

I simply said that it "could" happen, and therefor one should be aware of what could happen, and then make their choices with the knowledge

however in this post you DID say it was me, your post was directed at me

and I do not think they are excuses or fluff, for one, I am willing to offer objects with mod/transfer, so I am not even against it, however I choose to sell my items as copy/mod because in my experience it is what the majority want (again in my experience, I can not speak for all of SL, nor would I)


there has been no misrepresentation of anything here, except maybe you trying to make it appear than any info we set forth, is "fluff" or untruths, etc

ya know what... no matter what we say you will have something to say against it, and I am tired of it. And yes, you are getting personal, and you are insulting me, but... oh well, I can live with it. Not like it hurts or anything, just... insulting.

I am not here to try to convince anyone to do things any other way than how they want to, nor is it my business as to why they choose to do things the way they do.

If I do not like how they (anyone) do things, then that is too damn bad for me, because everyone has a right to set the permissions any way they please.

People will make their choices, and their choice is neither right nor wrong.