Commercial Vendors

I've been entertaining switching to or supplementing our current vendors with commercial vendors, specifically Gigas vendors. The benefit is that it would reduce my workload and provide us with better online service and online sales. The drawback is that they charge a staggering 3% of our sales.

What ideas or concerns do have concerning a potential switch? Should we switch, supplement, or keep the current vendors?

~Ulrika~

Competition is always great, and with the upcoming HTML browsing in-world, things like SL Exchange, SL Boutique or SecondServer/Gigas will become much more used. After all, you'll be able to have access to a much better search engine than the current tools offered by Linden Lab.

Personally, while I sell much more on SL Exchange than elsewhere (90% of my sales come from there...), in-world I use the Gigas vendor almost exclusively (I gave up developing my own system ).

That said and done, this depends a lot of how much "development ability" we currently have I'd like to have our own "Neualtenburg system" of off-world management of vendors - a competitor to the three most used systems. Our advantage would be offering interested customers much more transparency and a decision level that is lacking on the three systems (where basically you have to accept what the managers of those systems offer to you, e.g. you cannot really discuss the comission values, for instance, or the way their sites are laid out). If a customer of the "Neualtenburg system" is a citizen, he/she will be able to vote on changes as well. That would be a competitive advantage, I think.

Of course, this takes time My own solution, began on last August and abandoned shortly thereafter due to my absolute lack of time, was using an open source solution for the web site, and integrate it with some XML-RPC calls. The latter was easy to do. The former, I started to play around with things like osCommerce and derivated tools, where most of the "e-Commerce" part would already be developed and tested by thousands of users world-wide.

So - this all depends on our own "development ability". Personally, since I failed to do anything worthwhile in the past 9 months or so, I guess I'm not really a good person to "volunteer" for this, although I would like to help, if I could scrap the time for that

If we are pragmatic about it, and feel that we don't have enough "development ability" available, I guess we could stick with SecondServer/Gigas as an alternative. The 3% comission does not scare me much

I'm really not knowledgable about the various vendor systems available. But here are some questions that come to my mind.

When we refer to "our vendors", it seems like we are concerned with vendors for two possible different purposes:

(1) Vendors which sell goods and services totally on behalf of the city itself, and

(2) Vendors which citizens use to sell their own goods and services, which the city mandates in order to serve the purposes of the city.

It seems there are few if any vendors falling into the first catagory, except perhaps the machines in the casino, which I guess you would not call vendors (?). To my knowledge, they are the only ones which provide their entire profit to the city.

All other vendors would be for the purpose of selling the goods and services of private citizens. The purpose of the city which they serve is the collection of sales tax. There may be other useful purposes which they might serve, but at this point we haven't defined them.

The idea that the city would collect sales tax is an original idea in the creation of Neualtenburg, and I have certainly supported it as a fair means to provide income for the city. But, perhaps, before we focus on alternate vendors of vendors, we might consider the sales tax issue entirely.

Sales tax was proposed as a primary revenue source in the Phase One Neualtenburg. However, as we moved into Phase Two, we realized that we were going to have to collect land fees in order to support the private sim, which was never originally envisioned in the original charters. Since land fees are a natural form of revenue generating in SL, it has been a reasonable shift.

At the same time, for various reasons, sales tax has generated an incredibly tiny amount of revenue; less than 1300 L since Jan 1, and perhaps 4000 L in 2004. Of course, there are various factors which have led to this, and some of those factors might change.

But, we may wish to suspend sales tax for the time being. Adding to the fact that it has brought in almost no money, the lifting of it might encourage more commerce, and more traffic to neualtenburg; ultimately it may raise the desireability and value of the land itself.

Also, removing the sales tax rationale removes the need for the city to be involved in the problem of vendors at all. Simply one less knotty issue to deal with.

And, well, I did say that I have supported sales tax as a fair and reasonable system for generating revenues for the city. When I say that, I am speaking only about the situation in SL. In RL, I am adamantly opposed to the sales tax. It is a cop-out tax imposed by politicians who have seen it easier to create a regressive tax affecting the lower classes of society far more than the richer classes, AND, at the same time, repressing street-level commerce in favor of large scale enterprise which is far less affected by it.

Please forgive my rant, especially since it applies very little to SL commerce. In SL, essentially all transactions that would be affected by the sales tax are what are reffered to as "disgressionary" purchases, things which you buy not because you need them to support life, but rather because you'd kind of like to own them. Sales tax is much more appropriate to that sort of purchase.

Sudane

I've been thinking the same thing. Now that we're supported by land-use fees, the modest revenue brought in by sales almost isn't worth the trouble. However, the drawback is that we'll lose the ability to track sales, which is something I have a lot of interest in, even if we don't collect sales tax.

Also, a possible exception to the elimination of taxes are sales of items from folks who are not citizens and on items that are specifically branded with the Neualtenburg name (Neualtenburg Chicken Hat).

Also, I'm currently in discussion with Adam (secondserver.net) and FlipperPA (slboutique.com), concerning how their services could help and be tailored to being deployed in a city-state such as Neualtenburg. There's a new version of the Gigas vendor coming out soon that's simpler to use and SL Boutique now supports advanced features such as artisan fee splitting and sales reporting (for instance to our vendor-tracking program). I'll report more as I learn more.

In summary, we can choose from many scenarios:

1. Vendor: City, private, unregulated (city, private, prims).
   
2. Tax: full, partial, none.
   
3. Tracking: full, partial, none.
   

For now perhaps we can leave things unregulated and let the next RA decide.

~Ulrika~