Box/Rectangle Shape Stores... Boring, Efficient, or both?

I currently have a square store layout as part of a big marble tower. Only two floors though, one for PG stuff, one for em, not quite so PG stuff. Simple spiral stair going up, I find I get pretty even distribution of customers (same number of people visit and remain on the ground floor as the first floor).
So while it's a fairly small square shape it's fairly open and minimalist, all the vendors follow the same kind of theme (white marble background to the images) and I feel it works very well for a low-prim solution.

I am however working on a new store design that I will be producing on a larger, dedicated plot of land, it's going to have a good 900 prims going for it so I can have a nice, big, open store but with plenty of little bits to explore as well. And without using mega-prims I hasten to add
I won't give any more away though, as it's going to be something pretty cool.

But I guess ultimately, what works for you will depends on a few things:
- Do you have a lot of stuff to sell? If so then you need to maximise the use of your space, in which case a big box is probably best. Just make sure to have plenty of space to move around and see things.
- If you have a few items (or a handful of flag-ship items) then you can go for the more 'intimate' smaller rooms which put the focus on the fewer number of items in them. It helps to have a central area to this though so that people can easily get to the individual rooms they're interested in, by category for example.
- Avoid multiple floors unless you're stuck for horizontal space. If you do then I would recommend ramps (spiral ones are nice) as these are just more fun to use than teleporters that require right-clicks (forcing people out of mouselook when they're browsing) and which make the experience less seamless. If you end up with multiple floors though then by all means provide a teleporter for people who know what they're looking for.

If you have some big items that you want to get a lot of attention then rez some examples in the middle of a room with easy ways to purchase them (do NOT tell people to go to a vendor, I hate that =). Less important items like accessories or other things that are more for fun but not really flag-ship products can go around the edges.
Try to arrange things evenly, a lot of the worst shops are a box which just have items arranged all around the edges with no real pattern, or worse, cramming more of the same into a space without thinking about how cluttered it becomes. The main-problem with this is that if they are all different sizes then the shop becomes uneven and people are put off. If you have big-items that you don't want to push then place these in vendors with similar items, or on their own if they don't belong to a category; big "miscellaneous" vendors are horrible.

For example, in my store all my items are housed in vendors, with demos that rez as required. However, since I will soon have the prim-limit needed I will be rezzing permanent copies in prominent places within my store, with a way to buy them directly. The advantage of everything being in vendors (ie the same visual size) though is that the store is "even", meaning people are free to find items based on the signs I have up describing the category. They can then use the vendors to browse that category easily, as each one represents a sub-category within it.
This is opposed to items vying for attention by having large items overshadow smaller, more valuable ones. Or just so much junk lying out that the good stuff gets overlooked, or the whole thing just takes plain ages to load.

In fact, if your store caters to anything that has a real-world equivalent, then find a few stores that showcase these in real-life. Even if you have no real-world parallel, just look in a range of stores and note how things are organised; things that they want you to see are given pride of place, things they want you to impulse buy are positioned near check-outs (places you are most likely to consider what else to buy). Consider also how some of these things make you feel as a customer, is the store too cluttered? How easy was it to find a random item?
Ignore the specifics, like shoes being on shelves, as these don't always translate well to SL (it means a lot of detailed items to rez), but on the sort of general things they do to organise their store, WHERE items are in relation to where you enter, how they layout the store so that you can find things. There's lots of interesting patterns if you look for them.

Okay, I know you didn't want an essay, but there you go, hope it's of use! The more well-designed stores we can get in SL the better, I hate product heaps and teleport nightmares

Client / View Admin Options (or Ctrl-Alt-V) will enable fly on no-fly land.

Just remember to turn it back off after, it does mess the UI up for some things (nothing bad, just non-usable admin clutter options).

The biggest reason I see for 'square' buildings is that they are prim efficient.

Less prims on building = more prims for displaying stuff.

I would prefer more detailed buildings - more pleasing on the eye - but most people don't have the land they want, only what they can afford.

Broccoli

I was impressed with one furniture store I saw, (maybe Sky Designs?). You rezzed into a central atrium, surrounded by large arches at a comfortable viewing distance from you. Each arch led to a differently themed room of furniture, and there were a few pieces visible inside of each from the TP in point.

The theme of each room was on a large sign near the arch (all the same size). In general, I like it when signage identifying "departments" are like that - all the same size, large signs. That way I can click on all the visible department signs to make them rez, and get into the department I want before the store has rezzed.

The rooms' themes were things like "Moroccan", "Gothic" and then I think one was "Drapes and Screens".

Each room was large and open, with lots of space for camera slew.

The store did not address the issue that many furniture makers have, how to show different textures of a same piece. I like having one piece of furniture out that I can sit on, and then if different textures need to be shown, use a holovendor rather than cluttering up the floor.

I have a parade of 4 small roadside shops - each 10m x 10m square. They are modular so thay can easily be put in rows.

Interesting buildings are lovely but when you're shopping, surely it's the goods you want to see, so the architecture shouldn't get in the way of that. However, I still think it's nice to make a place look 'real' - by that I mean not neccessarily reproducing what you see in RL but something that is believable. If it just has plain translucent pink and green walls and out of scale tiles on the floor, you just don't wanna be there!

One of the things that scared me when I started building was that I knew about the hatred for "boxy" structures, and yet I couldn't think of sensible structures other than boxes. Since then I've realised that the vast majority of buildings in RL are square, and that is what people tend to be comfortable with, but that the "boxy" look is more to do with the appearance of the building being a completely bare and undecorated cube than being a cube at all.

The most common layouts I see for shops are either squares or hollow squares you can fly into. You're right that you don't want people to explore too much, at least, not unless there is lots of stuff to explore. DON'T make anyone fly around lots of empty space looking for products! (Of course the downside is that this reduces your traffic score. )

Exactly.

My Home, I built it.. I hate the boxiness of a lot of buildings in SL, so I fixed that for mine.

ALthough its a square, I have the lowest floor with a 1/2 width little 'porch' with pillars supporting the second floor above, the second floor has an open balcony, and the third floor has a very small little balcony. THough from two directoins the outline of my house is just a rectangle, these little changes make all the difference... I'm extremely pleased with the result, and it actually ended up using less prims than a full box would use because of the cuts I made.... so I have more to decorate with ^^

I tend to like big open stores. Calico Creations and Gurl 6 are both nice and open....easy to cam around in. However, I like it best when they're organized by style, color, etc. It makes it easier to find what I'm looking for. I've found that at some hair places that are really huge, I have a hard time finding what I want. I usually tp in...snatch up demos of what catches my eye, and then try them on at home to narrow down what I want to buy. If I'm trying on a lot of hair demos in a store, as is everyone around me, I find the lag to be horrendous. I just completely freeze with all those prims rezzing around me at once. However, I get annoyed when I've tried the demos, decided on what I want, and then can't find that particular style when I go back to the store. Grrrrrrrrr.

What the store-owner needs to understand when they set no-fly, though, is that many customers will never see what they would have been passing, because they will have left before then.

I can appreciate a nice build in a store, but I really just want to find what I'm looking for. When a search brings me to a huge, confusing mall, I usually leave rather than search around for my obscure item.