Holiday Sales in the Toilet?

I know a lot of peoples sales dropped significantly around the time the new search came out, but what about the last week? Because I mostly sell furniture, I didn't expect to sell much since it's not something people are as likely to give as a gift, and it appears I was correct. Sales were significantly lower than past weeks.

Am I alone here or has anyone else experienced the same?

Yesterday for some reason I had a spurt on sales, today has been absolutely awful. The holiday week hasn't been good full stop, I guess folks are busy RL or going to SL parties.

The forum hangout is choc-a-bloc.

I wouldn't worry Bradley, even my free furniture hasn't moved much this past week and it goes quick well most days

Brad, you may have better luck if you sold in a shop and not in the toilet.......

Damn! But I thought it was such a novel idea.

My stuff does best at Halloween. The rest of the year is sort of... meh.

But yea, sales DO seem down lately. I've kept track of income/outcome since January of 2007. BIG slow down in November for me.

My sales the past two weeks have been awful. But the past two days...WOW!

I was so discouraged I was thinking of closing down. Now, I've been given strength again

I had a couple of relatively poor days right after Christmas day, but they were due to technical reasons. Apart from that, sales are great. I'm in furniture too. Yesterday I had the second best day ever for me and my best ever day was just before Christmas.

My holiday sales have been good, but before and jes after.

Sounds like everyone is all over the place. My store is still new so I'm not expecting miracles and have been pleased with sales right up until Christmas day, when they went down. As I said, I wasn't surprised since it was the holiday but then the past two days were the lowest. Funny to hear for others it was the best.

Ours were down also, but we held off on a couple of new releases until after the first of the year.

My business is pretty new. My sales around the holidays were lowest on 12/22 and 12/23, pretty good on 12/25 and 12/26 and have been on the lowish side of average since then. I figure people are travelling or are in RL stores shopping before christmas and now spending their gift cards or checking out the post holiday sales. I've done slightly better in Dec than Nov. Not bad at all.

I opened just after Thanksgiving and was pleased with sales (small goal of making the business pay its tier and expenses as well as my alt's parcel tier) all the way through Christmas day. I had saved up a nestegg (try to keep 4 weeks tier handy) anticipated post-Christmas sales would droop. Happily, quite the opposite has happened, with yesterday being my top sales day so far. A plot of sales, though, shows a distinct sawtooth pattern, as today's sales have been almost nil.

Still, overall, I'm pleased.

Edited to add: I need to get over to your shop and buy a Lite Brite soon, Mari. My favorite toy from childhood.

I think I'm doing a lot better since the new search

Well, I've just finished doing my end-of-month sales figures. As always, the results weren't what I'd expected. :-7 I had thought that since I'd had a number of days with no sales whatsoever throughout the month, and seeing how SL has been rather flaky over the last few weeks, that my sales were pretty well down compared to previous months. But when I add up all the figures, I'm delighted to discover that my sales are only L$2k short of my record highest-sales month ever (October)! How cool is that?

Of course, since my business only started up in September I only have a few months' worth of sales figures to work with so that "record sales month" is probably less impressive than it might be; still, since I've opened my store I've made a consistent good profit, and always succeeded in raising enough to pay my tier and expenses several times over each month. So I'm pretty happy with the results, overall.

People should really stop freaking out about every one or two day fluctuation in sales; some days are good, some days are not, and that's all just normal. For me, Christmas day was terrible (no surprise; who's online that day) while the day after was my best sales day in months (also no surprise.) But guess what, even then the week averages out to be the same as any other week.

I figure my sales would be poor for the holidays because people are trying to deal with RL shopping.. and money is kinda tight this year. There are a lot of reasons for this, such as price of gas, milk and pretty much everything going up - except paychecks.

So, I didn't expect many sales and decided to use that time either working on textures, new stock, or for goodness sake, taking time off for RL.

My sales dropped significantly with the whole downturn in the per Resident Spending vs. Large population growth over the last year.

They recovered a little, and have flattened out, they are maybe 1/4th of what was my consistent level for a long time.

Pretty much over the long term it looks like this is my new normal sales level, and the holidays don't seem to have changed it much.

I only have 9.5 months of sales data, so I don't have enough to talk about regular sales levels. Month-by-month I have lots of variations but the overall trend for me has been a steady incline, with two exceptions.

August saw a 25% drop compared to July (gambling ban, introduction of voice, and some serious SL issues like borked search / teleports / etc for days and days on end.)

November saw a 50% drop compared to October (introduction of new search).

The first half of December was very quiet for me as well, but (touch wood) things seem to have started to pick up again.

-Atashi

The chart on this Reuters page shows how sales have fluctuated over the holidays.

http://secondlife.reuters.com/

Mine were pretty average before Christmas, much to my surprise, but did pick up a lot since Christmas, exactly the opposite of what I expected. I'm still averaging only 25% or so of what the sales were last year.

I agree that sales fluctuations day to day are meaningless. Monthly sales are much more meaningful to me and have been pretty consistent over the last 9 months.

Sales Have been fantastic here. Just got to keep pumping out new products.

I expected sales to be erratic, during the last month - apart from xmas/new year in the northern half of the world, it's also summer holiday time in the southern half. Look around Sydney, where I'm located, and it's almost deserted for 2 weeks, apart from tourists.

Do you use a visitor counter? Check your daily shopper numbers - compare the number of people who tp in, to the number of people that actually buy something. If people tp in but don't buy, you may have a problem with your product. If they're just not arriving, you may have a problem with advertising etc.

hahahah!

coco

I do use a visitor counter, but you bring up a good question. What is a good percentage to expect from those who tp in compared to those who purchase? I'm sure it depends on what type of item you are selling and how much competition. Generally in RL I know salespeople have a general rule: 10% of the doors you knock on will let you in. 10% will buy. This is retail and SL so I'm not sure how that relates, if at all.

I guess I need to ask around. I'm right near the top of the new search listings and I'm happy with my location with the old search listings. Not sure what I should expect the actual number to tp in to be, but they seem low to me.

I'm no business man, I just like playing in photoshop. But, the % will vary, depending on what you're selling - the lower the price, the higher the percentage should be. Don't expect too many people to spend $100's without shopping around.

Keep a record of your visitor numbers for a few weeks and do your calculations.