Moving my main store.. any tips?

Well I got a note card last night.. The sim owners are closing the sim July 1st (looks like it gona be mallish when it reopens) and I need to move my store.

I did some math, and decided to go with mainland so I wont have to deal with this in the future. I just bought some new land (Good timing with the rock bottom land prices) and put down a new building, and will be filling it up with my stuff tonight.


Sooooooooooo........... Anyone have any tips to make this transition as easy as possible?

Hi Johnnie

that sucks, moving main stores is always a pain, but at least they have given you a little notice.

If you are able, run both locations together until they close the sim, put up signs or a landmark giver at the old location directing all your customers to the new location. If you have a group for your store make sure to send out notices with the new information. Change any and all notecards/landmark givers to give information for the new location.

When the sim closes and re-opens, if there is a mall there, keep a small satelite store there for a month or two for those customers who still have your old landmark.

Post the new location on any forums/websites you are a member of.

Place information about your move in your profile with the new landmark

Basically let as many people as possible know of your move

Lastly, good luck, and hope your move goes smoothly

Lots of info and signage. I would put up signs and landmark givers to your new location asap. if you haven't already. Put the spin on it being new and improved for sure. People like new things. And the 'newness factor' will generally play to your benefit. Maybe have a grand opening party, any excuse to throw an event in my opinion.

Also don't forget SLX or onrez if you use them ,new boxes and edit you items with the new info.Going mainland is the safest option in my opinion,good luck.

I remember back when I was first starting out and I had a store rented on an island. The guy gave literally 3 minutes warning before returning my stuff when he sold the island. Fortunately I had already setup a new main store on land I owned, but it was still pretty annoying.

As for specific advice, note that I moved my main store a couple months ago and successfully transferred all my business there. People have mostly already told you what you should do (nobody's mentioned updating classifieds but that should be obvious,) but I want to expand on one piece of advice.

My newest location opened in February but my old location is still there (planning to finally ditch it in the next week coincidentally.) Initially I left the old store fully stocked, but because I purposely never updated it the inventory gradually became overshadowed by my new store. Meanwhile, the entire time I had landmark givers in the old store pointing people to the new store. I continued to get sales at the old store, but the sales there dwindled until finally I decided to remove all the vendors and replace them with signs directing people to the new store.

Long story short, gradually transitioning from the old location to the new one seemed to help.

Had the same thing happen Monday, but it was a rental situation in a theme mall on the mainland. I was told I would have until late in the week to clear out, so I made landmark givers to my alternate location and set those up. Then my landlord shut the mall down Monday afternoon! Luckily, I did have the small alternate shop already running and had good ads in place. Sales haven't dropped too much.

I did go out and set up a new mainland main store and set up advertising. Here's hoping. And now I hear the name of the old mall has been sold and I can hope it will be re-established somewhere. Why couldn't the former owner have simply sold it? Argh!!!

now that you have your own land, you can set it up just how you want. my only thot is to make sure you set it up to be in search right away, and be patient.

also, get into the classifieds and post the move there.... maybe 5-10 days in a row. not only will some of your old clients find you, you'll draw in new ones.

be patient. it'll lose business at first, but then suddenly things will stabilize.

Make sure that once the new store is up and running, to take the original store OUT of Search (both in Places and All,) change all Classifieds to direct to the new store, and use the same keywords, etc in the new place's Search. That way current customers will find you instantly the same way they did before. I don't always use Landmarks; one never knows how current they are. I use Search/All nearly exclusively now, because I can find exactly what I'm looking for instantly. So make sure that your new place is set up keyword-wise like your old place, at least for the moment.

Update your profile pick too, and classifieds, etc. I usually just find the owner and check their pick for the latest store location.

Hello Johnnie I'd recommend against using mainland unless your store is small. My original store was on mainland, and when I moved it to a private sim, there was many times less renderlag and rez time because visitors didn't have to rez the content of my mainland neighbors or the surrounding sims.

I'd recommend finding a _good_ sim landlord (they do exist; ask around. Sarah Nerd, a widely respected land baron, would definitely know) on a sim that doesn't have any other adjacent sims. You may even consider renting an openspace sim, which has 1/4 the prims and resources, but could work well for a store (I myself am renting out two openspaces to friends with stores.)

I disagree entirely on the island only approach. We now have our shops on half a mainland sims. We suffer NONE of the issues you describe. Its all in picking hte right spot and building smartly.

I moved my store to my own land in an established sim and the only issue I had was when you search for my name online the jewelry store that was once next to me, now apparently they own my old store location, shows up in my search.. That to me is odd.

Clearly he regards anything past the first day of the week to be late in that week.

To the OP: Erm remember to take your stuff?

Thank you all for your comments.

Without trying to stir up a mainland vs private sim war. In the case of getting booted from a sim can happen on ANY private sim. Sara Nerd was mentioned and I remember reading a post of hers that was talking about how she was thinking about converting a low occupancy sim into 4 openspace sims. So you might have to move no matter who the owner is.

Mainland and private sim's both have their advantages and disadvantages, but it is up to the person to know what they want, and what they are willing to put up with.

Anyway, turning a bad situation into a positive one, this is a perfect time to finish up some projects and get them ready for the new grand opening