Copy or Transfer? Which is better?

As a landlord, I do want copiable furniture because that is far too much money to spend for something that will basically constitute free advertising for an end user who will at some point move on and buy their own stuff. Profit margins are running thin, and I already have to value my time at something close to zero.

I'd be willing to pay 3-4x the price of a single for copiable versions of items. Will I replicate it many times over? Yes. But while the use of it is free, the ownership of it HAS NOT CHANGED, and if someone really wants to get their own, they will.

Looking at your rents that start from 100L a week, I can certainly see that your margins are tight, Cristalle. I started renting my skyboxes with my own stuff in them. Then I improved the sofa when I found a full perm freebie. After that I made better ones still.

I'm just chatting for chatting's sake here....

One way to look at rental furnishings is that they are no different to the home itself. They are all part of the thing that's being rented out. If the homes are bought, and not copyable, why should the contents be copyable? I'm still undecided on it. The thing that's in my mind is that a rental business may start out with a 3x the cost copy item for its half dozen homes, but the business can grow a lot and the 3x copy item ends up being in 50 or 60 homes. E.g. I sold a few skyboxes to someone who was starting in the same business. In the not too distant future, she'd bought over 50 of them. That's why I'm torn.

I guess it's down to what a creator/seller is personally comfortable with.

Its ridiculous to have a "no copy" flag on data after the end of the information age, that ended roughly 2001, if you ask me.

Agreed.

The seller needs to feel right with how they are marketing their wares. I'm not dismissing buyers (far from it) because if the buyer doesn't like those perms, I'm sure they can find a like item elsewhere.

It's up to sellers to balance between profit/marketability/stability.

Though I admit, I'm a fan of the "sell more for less" generation, and run my sales that way. Esspecially in light of the no production costs.

~Jessy

So am I. I often say that I'd rather sell 11 @ 100 than 1 @ 1000. And still I'm torn

I look at it this way, Phil.

I build all my own apartments and houses. Only bare land rentals have a structure on it that is not made by me. If a tenant moves on and buys their own land, they have the ability to buy the house that they lived in, or any one of my other houses. I have had some tenants buy a house from me for use on their own land. I see it as free advertising for my building services and my prefabs. And in that vein, if I furnished an apartment, the tenant can then buy their own if they love it enough to want to keep using said furniture. Right now, I have 48 potential sets of eyes, not including their partners and friends, who may decide that they want to own the same piece of furniture. This number is bound to get bigger in the future. Some may go ahead and buy it. I am not, however, going to buy the same stuff 48 times over. I would like to branch out and buy some new furniture to do more upscale rentals. I will not, however, buy X amount of sets. Same thing with TV systems. I just cannot afford the expense, and if the tenant loves it, they will get their own once they leave. I am willing to pay a premium above the cost of a single, but I am not going to buy the thing 100+ times over to satisfy anyone.

I am not asking anyone to do what they are not comfortable with. But I am explaining the rationale behind why it's not so incomprehensible and may even be a good idea to make furniture copiable, even to a landlord.

Why not? Simple: twice as much work every time you make an upgrade or minor improvement. I only sell a few items, low cost, copy/mod/no-xfer. You can buy as gift on SLX. Also, each product has lots of different objects (mostly, jewelry sets).

But every time I make an improvement to a script used in multiple products, it takes quite a bit of time to go through each set and update each object in the set. Double the work so folks can get xfer? Well, if profit were my prime motive I might.

Vending also gets more complicated. You either need twice as many vendors or more complicated ones.

I would like to see more sellers doing this. I can understand why they might not. If I was serious about business, I wouldn't want to lose sales because of the copy/xfer model. On the other hand, I wonder how many sales are lost for that reason. The extra time and effort to vend both versions might be better spent making new products.

Void's post is an excellent summar.

Here's another consideration. When selling things that are worn, don't add a premium for copy. It's not like furniture, where a landlord can buy one couch and set it out in 100 apartments. You're either wearing it or not. Well, sure, you can put the ring on both hands and make another one into a belly stud -- as the seller, I say GO FOR IT and get all the mileage you can. For worn things, folks want "copy" so that they can make outfit folders, to wear on one click. Can't do that with xfer stuff. I much prefer copiable for worn items, so that's the way I sell it.

Also, it's best for the customer when worn items are modifiable, so that we can adjust them to fit our avatar. Of course, I can understand makers who prefer to protect their stuff from being copied; and it is easier to (manually) copy something if it's modifiable.

So don't update one set and post in your store, and on a notecard in the package, that one or the other doesn't get updates. I think Winter said some items were a pain to update automatically.

Personally, I sell Mod/Copy items but use a vendor that can sell a "gift" to another avatar. The buyer pays and the item is delivered to the person the specify.

The point is, there are always options. It just depends on if the seller actually wants to sell to as many buyers as they can. Don't sell Transfer, then you're not selling to that buyer base. Don't sell Copy, then you're not selling to that buyer base. IF the seller is happy with that, then fine.

However, asking which is better, or which should an item be sold at? The answers are neither and both. There are markets for both styles of permissions. So it is entirely in the hands of the seller and what they feel comfortable with.

~Jessy

You misunderstood what I was trying to say. I'm not talking about auto-updaters. I'm talking about the time and effort a builder would need to spend to maintain two versions of each product.


That's cool. I use SLX for this purpose, and there's a sign in my tiny shop saying so.

The biggest buyer base will buy either version. Only a minority will pass a sale because of this.

What time and effort? o.0

The effort to click two boxes? One to select the option you didn't have and then the other to deselect it. ie, to go from Copy/NoTrans to NoCopy/Trans.

Time=@5 seconds.
Effort=2 more mouse clicks.




Yup, that works too ^.^



Hmmm.....due to how often this subject comes up just here on teh forums (which is an admittedly small % of SL), and of how many times I have heard the same in-world, I'd have to say that those that care about the Copy/Trans perms far outwiegh those who don't care.

Most of those conversations revolve around clothes, though, so may, or may not, apply to whatever product you sell. And, of course, it doesn't matter if you are happy with your buyer base ^.^

I would feel that selling of both instances of perms would be more an option on the table for those wishing to increase their sales. Variety being one of the bigger lures in sales. Low prices being the first. Quality actually being far down the list for the masses. (and before anyone argues that point, go look at Wal-Mart) I'm not saying it's the best, only profitable. Which, is usually a concern of a buisness.

~Jessy

If someone has an object that contains a lot of other objects, textures, animations, scripts inside the object's contents... maybe even inside other child prims, that would take a while to convert to a different set of permissions. You could be clicking about 50 boxes...

Ummm...if you have a Copy item with NoCopy contents, the contents still get copied. You jsut can't copy them fromt he copy.

I never tried with NoTransfer contents. *shrugs*

~Jessy

I prefer clothes and furniture that are Modify/Transfer. I don't care if they aren't copyable.
Vehicles should be copy as you can lose them fairly easily.

A copy item with no copy contents is a no copy item.

I don't buy anything that is no mod regardless of what it is. I could care less about transfer permissions.

Just to be clear, only prims are really modifiable. If I sell you non-prim clothing that uses a texture (and what doesn't??) -- at best you could shorten some part of it (making the edges blurry), make it fit a little looser (usually making your ava look funny or showing some part of your skin out the ends) or colorize it (making all the light areas go some hideous shade of whatever). Kind of turns your work into "New New NotSoLovely Flexified Barbie Halter in Red (Short)".

Then if someone transfers your modified monstrosity, will the next person know to fix it?

Not that I claim to do super high-end work, but all my clothing is No Copy, No Mod, Transfer. I could make two versions for sale (ie. Copy, No Mod, No Tran) but IMHO that generally confuses ppl and makes them look through twice as many items in the vendor. I could be wrong. My landscape backgrounds are No Copy, Mod, Transfer because ppl may want to change the backside texture.

All my stuff is pretty inexpensive so if it's not a big pocketbook drain if you have to buy two.

My biggest gripe on clothes is sleeve length. Most long sleeve items are a bit too long at 100, I usually like them at 88-92. I usually wear bracelets and or a watch, so the slight jaggedness isn't much of a bother, plus on my crappy video card it really isn't noticeable anyway.

:qft:

I usually just slide it back enough so the edges don't look all funky.

And on my furry AV's I much prefer mod pants -- I generally turn 'em into shorts because of the prim ankles.

For anything I wear, I vastly prefer Copy/Mod/No Trans simply because, like many others, I like the convenience of outfits and the "quick change" that affords me. I wear certain hair, jewellry etc that goes together and it's a total pain having to put on what *is* copy, and then have to remember which items go with that one - my inventory is too big for that and I want to do the mix-and-match process once. If I feel like tweaking it after that, then that's fine. Also, since I am significantly shorter than the usual amazonian women that seem to wander around SL, I need the ability to modify stuff to fit me.

For furniture, buildings, etc, No Copy/Mod/Trans is preferrable, because I might buy something that fits my place now, but if I change place, I know that I will never use it again, so I will give it away to someone who I know would appreciate it and get some use out of it.

I can totally understand people who don't want to sell their stuff Copy/Trans - it just opens them wayyy up to people ripping them off.

Incorrect.

I have many Copy items with NoCopy contents. Before post above, I went in-world to test. The scripts inside are definately NoCopy, but the item iself copies fine.

Remember, that contents may, or may not, effect the data displayed in your inventory, but they do not actually change any permissions. This is why some items look like "NoCopy/NoMod/NoTrans" while in inventory, but is technically impossible within the SL engine.

Anything I have with scripts has to be Mod or Copy for me to buy. Unless LL will get off their @$$ and fix the ability to reset corrupted scripts in NoMod items.

Clothes, I prefer Copy. Easier to mix and match outfits. If I want to give teh outfit to a friend, I'll look up the properties of the outfit (or the notecard in the folder) and give my friend the L$ along with the LM on how to get there.

~Jessy