Should SL stores offer premium members a discount?

Should stores in SL start giving out some kind of small discount, like 5%, to customers who are premium SL users as an incentive or as a perk for being a person who has paid into SL?

I kinda like that idea. As a premium member, I would like the discounts.

Looking at it from a business owner perspective, I think it would be a nice way for storeowners to draw more premium members (who likely have more money to spend) in to shop. I wonder how to implement it without spending massive money on a scripted vendor that could pick up on payment info used status and give a discount accordingly. I don't know that one could separate out the premium members from the 'payment info used' avatars, but does that matter so much?

i say yes!!!!
but i don't think because someone is premium that they pay more into sl..
but heck ya gimmie a discount!! weeee\o/
lol

Much like some video stores have an "adults only" section in a back room, one could separate a parcel and have a small section "allow only payment info on file" with lower priced goods or special "premium only" items.

Which you could just cam into and buy at the reduced price, even if you weren't a premium account. Unless those vendors back there had specialized code to pick up on the payment info stuff...

but it doesn't say if you are premium or not ..i am premium and it just says payment info used just like someone that gave their information but is not premium..
so i don't know how you could sort it since it is kind of private information..

People buy things they like and need. A 5% discount isn't going to make much of a difference. If the exact same product is sold elsewhere, but yours is somewhat cheaper, than maybe.

i agree..now a 50% discount!!!!! well i will help you find a way to seperate premium and payment infoers lol

Not true. I think a number of basic members (like me) just don't see the point of going premium, since we can still own land on private estates with a basic account. I think we'd have more money to spend since we don't spend extra on LL

Before I went premium I paid just as much into Second Life as I do now. I spent maybe 10.00 US per week buying L$ for either myself or my alt.
Where does this money go if not into SL? My funds are of no more value than a basic user's.

" I think a number of basic members (like me) just don't see the point of going premium, since we can still own land on private estates with a basic account."

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The point you cant see..

I get ya At the moment I'm renting and don't own land, but the same thing could happen. I suppose it depends how much one has invested (in terms of time & emotion) in all this. If you spent a lot of time decorating, building, getting things just right and it meant something to you, then it would be a huge wrench to lose it all suddenly. So far I've rented land and just plonked a prefab house on it and that was it... so if I were to have it yanked from under my feet, apart from the money issue, I'd just shrug and find somewhere else. But a lot of people are not like me... their SL homes are precious to them, I know.

As a merchant I say: hell no! For me each customer is alike, unless they but a lot, then they are a bit more alike then the rest

Though I expressed my thoughts about the current membership plan often enough, I do not care wether someone is premium when I meet them, for fun or for business. Either they spend in my shop, or not. But giving premiums a discount because they pay LL, no way.

Personally, I think Linden Lab should be the one to bear the burden of creating incentives to go and stay premium. There's a big WIIFM (What's In It For Me) question here. I was barely breaking even on my P&L when I was in business as it was. Giving a discount to premium Residents would take money from my pocket and put it in Linden Lab's. Resident business owners should not be expected to incentivize premium membership at their own expense.

If mainland ownership and stipends aren't enough, maybe they should consider more. Platform stability and improved customer relations anyone? More flexible and affordable land tier? Linden-sponsored contests/drawings for fabulous valuable prizes including Linden Dollars, land, high value Resident created items? More favorable exchange rate for Lindex trading? There is a whole lot more Linden Lab can do to incentivize premium membership that they're not doing today.

I greatly dislike the notion that a person who has "paid into SL" as a premium member is somehow more deserving than someone who has not, for very justifiable reasons, gone premium. As it stands now, for many people, there is simply more incentive to stay basic, and that's Linden's problem, not Residents'.

As has been mentioned already, the big technical gotcha is that there is no way to determine at the point of sale that an account is premium.

Unless you bought the entire island, you do not, nor ever will, actually "own" land on the island.


Brenda recently went from Premium to Basic, yet I will bet that she still has bought more shoes than I would ever consider buying.

My premium memberships is something between me and LL and I know a few designers that are not Premium members, so.......

IMO this would only be a way for the merchant to cut thier own throat. A multi-layered way no less.

#1 - reducing already poor income
#2 - creating resentment in a large portion of the customer base (the LARGEST portion!) who does not qualify

All while adding needless complexity without increasing sales. Five percent won't make-or-break any customer purchases.

I know that. Everybody in these forums keeps saying that (and correcting anyone else who says otherwise) but hey, LL themselves call it "land sales", and when you purchase from the island's owner, he will tell you that you are now the owner of the parcel as long as you pay him tier, so... *shrug*

It's LL who uses misleading wording, don't shoot me for using their own terminology to describe stuff. If we're going to be pedantic, one can't "own" an entire island either, the owners are also renting it off LL. Furthermore, there *is* no land to rent or own, it's just server space.

Linden Lab get the premium fees, not store owners, so I don't really see the incentive for a store owner to do this.

80% of the landscape is private estate, you don't need to be premium to live on a private estate.

The premium membership incentives is on the shoulders of the Lab. It really should be up to them to get people to go premium and (more importantly perhaps) remain with a premium membership.

I have considered for the past couple months in dropping my premium membership, but I hold one of the "old" stipends (started back in 2005, so I have the 500L per week stipend, which makes premium cost for me next to nothing). So for me, remaining as a premium user costs me nothing. Also, I like the ability to have the support options offered for premium users (for what it's worth).

Now, another thing to consider about this, is as some have stated a lot of merchants and creators do -not- hold premium accounts. I believe a lot of this was due to there being no incentive to do so. Holding land was really the main reason to be premium, and up until recently, land prices were so high it was much cheaper to rent. You don't need a premium account to rent.

With land dropping as of late, perhaps we will see more people begin to go premium.

I agree though, I would like to see more incentives for people to go and remain a premium account user. But this needs to fall on the shoulders of Linden Lab to persue, not the merchants or any user.

A lot of non-premium members also pour real money into SL as well.

What Xerxes said. As much as some premium account folks might appreciate the nod, the flip side is you're going to risk alienating the majority of your customer base as well as possibly being viewed as some sort of elitist *insert naughty word here*. And as has been stated, premium/basic is certainly not a reliable way to measure one's contribution to SL, monetary or otherwise.

- Anti: premium, and wanting no part of this.

If the discount was marginal, I don't think that the feelings would be that offended. If it was a deep discount, then I could see resentment.

It could possibly be a good marketing strategy to offer Premium members a discount. If somebody goes Premium purely for the discount, then in order to make this a good deal they will want to save more than they paid for Premium, in other words more than US$72. So, suppose you give a 10% discount to Premium members, they will want to spend more than US$720 in a year so that the discount is worth more than US$72. Maybe, they would not have spend that much otherwise, so this may encourage them to buy more (in the same way that the "slow release" stipend helps to keep people active in the world)

But, this also shows the problem with giving Premium incentives which are just worth monetary amounts. If they are worth less than US$72/year, then Premium continues to be a bad deal. If they are worth more, they devalue the items in the world. So what's needed is a special benefit that can't be supplied by anyone else in SL - probably something programmed at the server level.

You forget to calculate the value of the stipend, Yumi. At 265L/USD, the cost of the game after stipend is $1.47/mo. At 12 months, the breakeven would be $17.66, or 4680L. That is all a premium member would need to save in discounts just to break even. Avid shoppers could easily exceed that in a month, much less a year.

I'd say yes, but all my stuff is already pretty damn cheap. Even a NPIOF member could afford it!