Sales Slowdown?

Ok, I know that earlier I said one should never admit sales slowdowns (because few ever do) but I am curious to see if we have any people out there willing to be honest and straightforward.

Has your established business (new business dont count because hopefully your sales ARE up if you're new... otherwise you are not penetrating any market) been experiencing lower sales?

I'm not ashamed to say my established enterprise has seen a probably 30% reduction in sales over the past week or so. Anybody else seeing a sales slowdown or are established businesses seeing a boom?

IT has been strange Cow. Last 2 weeks actually have been at 50% for me. Some due to griefers but something was definately wrong. No one wants to admit it but something was going on. sales have picked up though again.

Am i the only one who thinks there's also some sort of upgrade, grid fix every damn week,. I'm getting so tired of this now.

THE FIC IS NOT RESPONSIBLE I REPEAT THE FIC IS NOT RESPONSIBLE WE DID NOT DO THIS I REPEAT WE DID NOT DO THIS.

just sayin'

My sales have been down a bit for the past week or two, and last night I figured out why! It's all the updates and downtimes.

Some of us, like me and you, haha, get on SL every day, and when it goes down when we want in, we hover till it comes back up! And then we get on, no matter WHAT, because we have, well, in my case, business to take care of!

But more casual players (and customers) tend more to go play other games instead. Like, for example, let's say 7 pm is their game-playing time. If SL isn't up at 7 pm, or its acting wonky, they just log out and play WOW or whatever for the night.

What I fear is that some of those will get out of the SL habit and into some other game and just never log back on. All the time spent in other games is time, interest, money, and energy committed to those other games, friends made in them, etc., and not here.

I hope they cut back on the frequent updates for this reason, and that they get a handle soon on the server problems. Then I figure things will improve, even for those who may not have seen any decrease in sales.

Although I will say I believe that cutting back on stipends, especially the $50 for basics, has had a deleterious effect, too.

coco

2 things.

1. people are experiencing bad rez/never rezzing of images in sl. I thought this was just me but it appears to be quite a few people have this problem. Ask around.

2. Summer, less people around due to summer holidays.

Please don't complain again or they'll close it down to investigate!! lol.. But yes - previous comments about people leaving due to all the upgrades, fixes, etc is true. I myself found myself going back to work (consulting) and go back late at night.

WE also need to understand one thing- it states that SL has more than 100k residents. Bullcrap! not true. Have you ever seen more than a couple of thousand avatars in SL. I sure haven't in the last couple of months. These must be inactive avatars or my best guess- multiple avatars that people are creating. If SL comntinues to be updating, etc- people will get tired and play other more stable games. DArn- another update WEdnesday- GO FIGURE!!!

These peopel must not be true gamers cause they should know- shutting down the way they do bores and irritates people to the point of giving up on this game!

Thx

This thread is probably more suitable for the Land and Economy Forum rather than the General Topics Forum. Anyway...

Over in Europe it's the summer holiday season and those gosh darn elegant and enlightened Europeans like to take six-week vacations and do unnatural things like go to faraway places and relax. The Australians, as it's winter there and they live in the future, are most likely getting clipped repeatedly by downtime and upgrades. Meanwhile, in North America, it's hot and when it's hot people go to the mall or drink refreshingly cool alcoholic beverages and then pass out from mixing too much heat with booze.

Might be any number of factors. Sunspots. Not enough foil hat glue. Too much foil hat glue. Etcetera, etcetera. Might be as simple as lots of currency tied up within accounts that are off gadding about in RL Land.

Two-weeks really isn't a long enough measurable period to surmise whether or not there are presently any grand problems within the SL economy.

Might help if you had the name of your store in your sig..
that was NOT sarcasm!!!

My sales have seen a serious drop recently, too. Honestly, I kind of just thought, "Okay, I'm a new merchant -- maybe my initial spike in sales was just because nobody already owned my products, but now a lot of people do." So I was thinking maybe it was just me.

But maybe ... maybe it's more than that. And things are taking an eternity to load -- honestly, my poor (slightly) aging system can barely handle SL anymore. It's like performance has taken a massive hit, while quality has gone down simultaneously. God, I wish we could go back to the previous version.

My sales are UP significantly for the past week. Admittedly this is from a very small base; still, it's encouraging.

It has been slower for me, but there have been some unusual spikes that have made up for the overall pace. So, revenue-wise, things are the same.

I do, however, run several types of businesses - this helps to spread out where I make my money (each is in a different area), so a slowdown in one area is usually made up by more business in another area.

-2fast

was bad for me also over the past couple weeks of updates. below 50%, and my sales have been pretty consistant for over a year. this was more and longer than my average lows and highs. cleared up in the past 4 or 5 days. i blame updates/asset server problems the other day

Understood, Panda. Understood. No implication even implied.

Right, I was asking only of established merchants.

If you have a low base and are new, sales should necessarily increase or you've flatlined before you've even become established.

Cow, i think its the FIC, they did say they were going to break your fingers.. hehe
jk jk jk

darnit someone beat me to the joke.. meh

Sales were down about 15% the week before last, last week as a total I was up about 40% over average and this week seems to be following that trend, being up a little over 30% on average. (It's actually about the same as last week, but with last week in the average, the average is now higher)

My average is based on my sales since I moved to my own island at the beginning of May. I have been in business for 7 months.

I don't sell anything but do track the economy and have noted a reduction in loggedin residents which I think is due to the summer months in the northern hemisphere. Along with the slowdown in loggedin residents there has been a reduction in volume traded on the LindeX. On the week ending 16 July $320.6K worth of L$ traded while the last two weeks saw $285.1K and $278.4K respectively. Also it can't be blamed on the reduction in stipends since the June numbers were L$50.1 million and July saw L$59.5 million. There appeared to be a few thousand new premium accounts added the week they announcd the reduction to L$400 weekly so hopefully most of those were upgrading residents and not merely L$ farming alts.

That's true, it is summer.

Good stats, Svar, but I still think the no-stipends-for-new-basic-players may have hurt me, as a lot of my things are for the beginning player, and some may rent land.

And then there's the rezzing issues, too.

It's just really hard to tell what causes these things. Slower times have happened before, and usually it only lasts a week at most. I'm not like lots of y'all, I don't keep figures about my sales! Terrible, I know. But still, this week seems slower than others.

On the OTHER hand, a HUGE amount of my feeling about the slower sales could be due to my increased amount of anxiety about it, because I just purchased a bunch more land!

There's probably nothing like purchasing a bunch more land to make you overly-anxious about a slow sales day or week!

coco

Interesting. These are indeed valuable stats. Thanks for providing them.

Well it is too early to tell but the Monday data already shows an increase in activity. The logins are running slightly higher than last Monday which showed the highest peak recorded to date of 8665 reisdents. Much more important is the volume on the LindeX is running over L$3 million higher than the same time last Monday and almost L$2 million higher than the more normal Monday two weeks ago so residents are again buying L$ to spend ingame. I hope the merchants have a much better week this week than last week.

Yay! And good to know we have a go-to guy for these stats! (I don't have much patience for numbers myself these days. Been numbered out, I guess.)

coco

I have experienced a recent slow down in sales. For the last three weeks, my sales have been much lower than normal. So last night, on a whim, I checked my Classified ad. It was gone ... even though I had set it to renew each week. I lost a lot of money as a result (yes, for some items, partcicularly expensive items that are not impulse buys, the classified ads do work).

To those who have suffered a significant down turn in sales, check to make sure your classified ads are still running.

That happened to me about a month ago, and yes I did notice a real drop in sales while my classified was gone. I now check daily to see that my classified is still in my profile.

Hi Hon!

I seen this as well (SL is still taking their fee ). However, it has not seemed to affect sales for me. In fact, sales have been a bit better these past few weeks.

I have the records of every sale I've had for the past year+ and to be honest, there just is no pattern to be found. Even when the telehubs were removed, it didn't have a big impact on sales (on a weekly basis anyway). So I've pretty much given up trying to analyze the SL consumer.

I posted about this a week or two ago - but sale are down in my mall vendors that i rent out in but not my main store.

Check this out - As A Shopper - you want to buy a pair of sandals - you go to search and type in sandals in the search window and press search - you get a huge list of everything BUT sandels so you refine your search and use the pull down option where u have a choice of 'business' or 'shopping' or 'store' to search under.

Now - As a Business Owner who owns a store for shopping - in your about land - you can only pick out one option that you pay 30L for per week to be listed in the seach function and 'store' isn't even on your options.

So I personally think that sales are down because the search functions are not in sync with the option in 'about land'. Do we really need to have 'Business' - 'Shopping' - 'Store' in search. Wasnt it easier to search when you had just 'shopping'. And how come 'store' isnt a option in 'about land' window? Confused?...lol!!