Update on sales slump.

But my products had modest sales success then they stopped - they are houses, not fashion items, so tastes shouldn't change all that much in 3 months.

Anyway, I'm not too bothered, I didn't come to SL expecting to make a fortune and my aim has only been to cover my costs, which aren't much anyway. I guess I'm interested in the dynamics of the SL economy and just wondered what people think.

If more people are learning to build, that's a good thing. Maybe a new breed will develop, the SL door-to-door salesperson plodding the unmade Linden highways....

"Good morning sir, nice day isn't it? I see you have rather an ugly, badly built house. Would you be interested in looking at my catalogue?"

Ummmmm.....

For me its:

Ads vanishing from my profile?? Go figure that one.

Estate owner selling my shop from under me. Twice.

Unstable and lossy inventory. This is a biggie me thinks.

Poor performance. Hard to buy stuff when it take 10 minutes to rez at the mall if you can even tp there in the first place. And if you finally appear, can't move around very well for lag.

I think we have to consider the end of "first land". Newbies were able to put some L's into their bank account (even if they never got market value, they were getting a couple thousand at least)

I used to have a furniture store and had good sales of things in the 50 to 200 L range...... sales dropped to zero and after a few months of that, I shut it down. I still sell hats that are all less than 50L, but sales are really sad. My spending has also dropped to almost zero.

That's what I've thought about all computer games other than SL!

My main shop is also my home and so it doesn't need to pay for itself. I also have a varying number of 64m square mini-stalls to sell from - I don't get involved in renting space.

However, a swish new mall has opened across te road from my place. After a slow start, all the shop units are taken now although there never seem to be many people there.

I can find no stats to back that USA has the most premiums but if the USA has the largest percentage of users then that makes sense.

USA has the largest percentage of players in SL so they will most likely have the highest spending percentage also. However the doesn't mean the USA spends 80% of the money spent in SL. That is just an insane argument with no backing.

Oh I'm not claiming that 80% figure either.

Explain how if LindenX activity has not kept pace with the rising number of registrations, and with increasing concurrency ...

That there is not an accompanying slump.

If the pie stays the same size, but lots more people want to eat it ...

Each person gets a smaller piece.

I have spoken to a large number of merchants who have seen a decline in sales. It obviously wont affect everyone. Especially not those who are among the leaders in their niche.

But unless spending on SL overall goes up to keep pace with the number of content creators, obviously the average content creator will make less.

well the thing is that a lot of markets are a buy once or a few times kinda thing. this is especially true for something like a skin after you buy one you never need to buy another unless you get bored of it.

growth has been very small to what people have looked at previously when LL was attempting to reach a target number of users online.

it's just that the focus of where money is getting spent is different. from looking nice to things to do.

SL went over its peak of exponential growth and now there are 100 stores per newbie instead of 100 newbies per store (hyperbole but still ) for the low-budget market.

I personally spend less because the stores I frequent have just been releasing fewer and fewer (original) things lately and new things I find are either more than what a "top" designer would charge, or not the same quality, or the seller won't sell as NC/T (about the biggest reason).

Inventory loss is for a large part a self-fulfilling prophesy as well. Everyone talks about it and warns other people not to buy and so it spreads until everyone's afraid of something that's almost entirely preventable when buying new things.

These are the posts I was referring to. Note the Stock Exchange is at records HIGHs right now and if College students are not situated by now then they are probably well screwed. The only logical point is the turn of the seasons but we should already be feeling gains from that. If anything that is just off setting the slump.

What we have had is a greater influx of players who are not willing to put any money into this game. The explosive population growth which has come from countries mostly outside the US has resulted in more people camping for money and otherwise looking for jobs in SL, when they are few. In my opinion, the SL economy is unsustainable if too many people are not willing to put ANY money into the game.

I have heard it more than once from newbie tenants that this game is expensive and that with the decline in income from camping (i will extrapolate that to jobs in general), it's harder to stay in the game. I've lost more than one tenant to finances because their SL job didn't cover the rent. I have heard that my rent was "too expensive" from people who only camped or danced for a living, when the rent was little more than the equivalent of $1 per week.

As for the US population being the biggest spenders: that would be true, the only thing is, we don't know how much. Certainly the largest single concentration of premiums and active players, and spenders, but by how much? I believe that when the population boomed and other countries eclipsed the US, SL had a massive influx of people unwilling or otherwise unable to put much, if any, money into the game and are dependent on the game to provide their SL living. With the demise of casinos and other gaming, it also cut out an income stream for these people. And so shopping is going to be meager.

When the population skews that way, you are going to find that only the established names do really well, because they have their loyal bases, and people continue to recommend them. It's harder for newer people, who have to put more money into the game in order to get the recognition that brings word of mouth recommendation. Look at how inworld classified ads have skyrocketed - you have to put a lot of L in to get on the first page of the classifieds. If you are not willing to put any money into the game as a new shop owner, your ass is grass.

I am a former camper-for-a-living. I lived with two friends on a beautiful island (AmaZingg Island - nice estate owners, Cedric and Zingg). Until I branched out on my own to become a landowner, I can tell you that my SL was great - I earned my SL living and I and my friends put the money back in by renting a place, shopping, and otherwise having fun. I had my friends (some of which I made through camping) and we had a nice SL life, living in a nice place and getting to explore SL. This is how the SL economy goes around. Unfortunately, lots of things have changed since then, and it's not as easy to do that.

I think this is correct. I know quite a few people who are adamant about not putting any RL cash into SL, for various and different reasons in each case. That in itself has a huge downward influence on the economy, because clearly for most people if you are trying to make your ends meet on an in-world only basis, well ... that takes some time to achieve and, for others, is simply not very well achievable. But it is certainly a trend, that's for sure.

p

I think there is a very easy tendency toward a handful of "established players" in the various categories for a few reasons. For one, in SL now , location is irrelevant. You can be anywhere on the grid, and people will come to you if there is a way to find you -- so the "local angle" which can help smaller businesses get established, just isn't reallly much of a reality in SL outside of perhaps a handful of sims. Second, you have a search function that allows users to isolate businesses quickly, and that classified service costs a TON of money, as you point out, to get to a place where it will be seen by *most* users -- you can bet that most users are lazyish, and will scroll up and down the first page, perhaps some going to the second page, with only the most expertised and intrepid going beyond that. Because of that, the little shop is basically screwed unless they invest a LOT of money into ads up front to compete with the established players who can do so as a cost of doing an established business.

The more things go along like this, the harder and harder it is for new businesses to compete. Of course there are areas that will always be possible -- like market niche areas that are not satisfied by the existing players.

True. I think it is a crucible here for people who are serious about creating a business in SL. If you are serious, you have to make a real investment. It's bad enough that most people work for a handful of beans (forget the hill of beans, it's that bad). Between advertising and tier, it's a wonder any new players make any money.

78.43% of all statistics are made up on the spot

I increased my traffic by placing ads in Portuguese, Italian, German and French.
There are many many more non-english speakers now.
Over the last two weeks ,traffic has shot up from 60 to 61.

/sarcasm off
Im not making anything now, avoiding logging in. 3 days now. woohoo!

Quick Question re: loss of inventory items...

It's been my policy to sell everything as no copy/transfer (let's not debate why) but with this loss of inventory thingy, do you guys HONESTLY think I should change my policy (which has been in effect since day 1, and my customers have come to expect) to selling as copy/no transfer? I'm worried that either way, I'll upset somebody. Which is better?

Keep it the way you have it now. LL will figure out a way to fix this mess or SL will not make it. Sadly, it means more work for you keeping and checking records, since I'll bet you replace items when people IM you saying they were lost.

I would just sell a copiable version, but price it accordingly.

I have been seriously considering whether I should tier down, and drop out of the retail market for the time being. When I first opened up my store in late February/early March, I had people buying my product before I could even get it all placed on the sales floor.. Last month or so, when I rather expected things to pick up out of this much talked about "summer slump", they didn't. I have enough in my Linden account to cover one more month's tier, after that it's out of pocket.

I think I am going to pack up my dolls and dishes, sell the land, and find more serious avenues to pursue in content creation. This isn't going to sustain itself, which was a goal of mine from the start.

Ahh well, it was fun while it lasted. Spent a week building a brand new store building, even. I never expected to pull money out, but if it doesn't cover expenses, it's not worth the effort.

Selling things for Copy/no transfer can be good or bad. Just depends on what it is. I have seen and bought many things from people that sell them both ways. No copy is less, copy is more. I think it was waves the last thing I bought like that. If you only needed a certain amount of waves you could by a no copy set for cheap or if you needed enough for an entire island they sell you the copy version for a lot more. Just depends on what it is I guess.

Clothing that is sold no copy/no modify (especially prim stuff) makes me pause really hard before i decide whether or not to buy. For one thing, if you want to make mix and match outfits with pieces you cant unless the pieces are copiable. I do buy some outfits that are no copy, but usually only gowns or such that I know I won't need toable to use as part of another outfit somewhere down the road. The mod thing is important because hope is small and prim skirts almost always have to be adjusted to size.

On the contrary, my sales have been steadily climbing this month! It is not my "day job" but when I make a sale, it helps pay for the items I wish to buy.

I can't believe how many people are still in denial about the fact that sales in SL right now suck and have for months. Its not the fault of the products, designers or anything like that so stop trying to put the blame there. It's SL in general.

Like it or not, sales suck in SL right now and there is no change in sight. It really does not matter what you sell. The only thing that might still be selling at a ok rate is sex items (big surprise there). Other then that.. Sales are wayyyyyyy down.

Myself I am just riding it out at this point. Lowered prices way down and what I make is what I make at this point. However because of the low sales and way below prices I have also stopped making new products as the time and effort is not justified by the cost of the item.

Point is... SL is in a depression plain and simple. The only way I see it getting fixed is if the PR department at SL goes on another huge advertising campaign. Allot of attention right now is going to that IMVU as they went on a huge advertising campaign. So really its up to Linden Labs to do a good PR event to save us all. However that brings up the question of if they really want us here or if they want to turn SL more into a business tool which me myself, I think that's exactly what they want of course there is a ton of people in denial over that too. We did exactly what SL needed.... We gave Linden Labs the attention they needed to show some good numbers to people like IBM and such. They know that they will make a ton more money by using SL as a business tool in the end with corps.

Just one mans opinion... Time will tell.

My income steadily rose for over a year and then began to decline to the point its a fraction where it was.

I have continued to release new items but i'm not in a business of repeat sales.

I know that I have far more competitors now. So obviously were all trying to get at the available business. If that business doesn't grow as fast as I gain competitors ..

Not that hard to figure out

Sales are flat for me since falling off from Spring. Still waiting for the fall pickup but its not arriving anytime soon for some reason. The Lindex market is still showing the same thing day in and out.

Only good news for buyers at least, land is cheap!!! 512 for under 4000L in many places.