The Basic Cost of doing business in SL

I think I have come up with a product that I am certain will sell well in SL.

Since there is no cost of materials or manufacturing what are the costs to sell an object in SL?

Anything I need to especially watch out for?

Thanks...

Tess

Well, you'll need somewhere to put it, a shop or a stall or something. There are lots of options when it comes to this..

Renting a spot in a mall, buying land, renting land etc. Thats the only thing that you need to spend money on. If you own/rent land you may need to pay L$30 a week to list in find and more if you want to list in classifieds, but they're both optional.

What sort of results does one get using the no-up-front-costs sl shopping websites?

I see. Thanks.

What is the price range on Mall Spot rentals? Is there a classified listing of Mall Spot rentals?

Tess

I think that varies from mall to mall, best to look around and find what suits you best.

As for classifieds, most malls list themselves in classifieds. But you could always list another one specifically for your spot, the minimum fee is L$50.

SuezanneC made a good point about the 3rd party shopping sites though, I forgot about them.

You can get some good advice by checking out this thread too....

/108/54/119746/1.html



Actually I've found they're worth the small effort of posting the information... I get sales from both slexchange and slboutique, just that I get more sales in world though.

Labor.
Software tools (Photoshop, Maya, etc).
Labor.
Land maintenance.
Texture uploads.
Labor.

Did I mention labor?

Make SURE your item will sell. I couldn't even give away the glowing neon orange penis I made.

There are some free places you can put stuff still I think. Like in uh... Boardman? Theres open stalls that you can just sell stuff for free without renting a spot or anything, they're Linden run. I'm not sure what sort of traffic they get though.

I am happy to report sales of my flexiprim penis skirt are booming, however.

How emotionally attached are you to your product? Would you care if it was opensourced and given to anyone who wanted it for free?

The following assets are trivial to steal:

1. Sounds
2. Textures
3. Clothing
4. Geometry of modifiable stuff (and even if it's no mod, anyone can still make a copy just by eyeballing it)

Also, there was an exploit last year that allowed scripts from a number of items to be stolen by people who were using a hacked client.

You can be banned without justification ("you know what you did, and we refuse to tell you!" or hope of appeal (unless you consider writing email to the abuse team, which they are under absolutely no obligation to respond to, to be "hope of appeal", so if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time, any L$ you have, and of course your inventory, are (for all practical purposes) gone forever.

Think it can't happen to you? I know a guy who had an item set to "share with group" and another group member exploited this to rez a gray goo attack that wound up taking down the grid. Guess whose name was on the gray goo? The guy with the shared object. He had no idea what was going on until the attack was well underway, and now he's permanently banned.

I've come to the conclusion that if you treat this as anything more than an amusement, you are asking for a kick in the teeth.

Aww!!! I would've worn one!!

Costs :


also :
* Cost of renting vendor space or land for your vendor/offices
* Cost of advertising your product (time, money, and reputation if you're not good at it)
* LL selling fee (3.5%)
* Risk (especially if you put your earned money in Ginko)
* Cheque fees charged by Linden Lab for withdrawal of your USD-denominated balance
* Currency Exchange Fees! (charged by banks you use to put in / take out USD from LL)
* Paypal Fees (3.5 basic, 5.5 business, and a further 2.5% exchange rate fee on top of the exchange rate... *IIRC*).


Personally I have found the costs can be estimated in three ways :
1) Time (estimate how much you'll spend making your product, then multiply it by 5 to take into account advertising, support, etc)
2) Money (fees by LL, paypal, your bank, etc)
3) Honour/Ethics - depending on your business, it may start to sap at your moral integretity.... or you may at some point be faced with the choice of doing something immoral or going out of business. Good businesspeople are never faced with this choice because they plan ahead and always act ethically, but it can happen sometimes. Be prepared for difficult choices.

Don't forget staying on top of system changes that may adversely affect your product, not using preview as a 'plan A' development environment.

I will say this now, and not sure if others will confirm or deny...

I get nearly dozens of times the sales from SLX than I do from malls of any sort. Then again, perhaps I don't sell at the best malls...

I found that all my mall locations combined dont even add up to half the sales I get in the store on my own land.

I think being on the Places listing is a boost to your noticability.

I also think clasifieds help.

So to have your own land youll need a 512 at least , so might want to figure that price in of this seems reasonable.

My products used to be only on SLEx, and I got quite a few sales there - although it really helps to pay the L$1000 or so for inclusion in the front page rotation, at least when doing a new launch.

In world, the majority of sales either come from my main site or from other similar stores which I've got vendors in. Several malls I've been in generated no sales at all, a few have produced some but nowhere near as many as similar store sites.

So ask friends if you can display in their stores (remember that will attract a greater range of people to their store too), and if you're going to display in malls, check the traffic ratings and make sure that the traffic is coming to the mall. The absolute worst in my experience are rento malls that people put up next to other major builds, most commonly clubs, to bring in extra money: almost all visitors to the area head straight to the club, the lag discourages people from hanging around to shop, and they often overcharge rent.

I think the costs of startup depend totally on what you are going to sell. Lets say you are making a car. For selling something like that you'd want to have a display spot so people can come look at it and test drive it, etc. Sites online won't work there.

Certain types of gadgets also are easier to sell in a store as well-I know that at times I'll search for something in SLExchange but when it comes time to purchase I will go to that person's store and look it over, and if that store is shoddy and and the land is for sale, I won't purchase......but that is just me.

For clothing items or anything where the appearence is important-ie other people are gonna be seeing it, a store is important, and here is where having a mall vendor is handy since people go to one store and if they see your product across the aisle you pick up cross sales.

Advertising is important, store space, and most important of all the quality of the item are the key features in success.

There is a mall setup by one person here for people just starting out where people give a percent of sales instead of rent-handy idea if you ask me.

I get most of my business at my main store, and depending on what you are selling, it is a good idea to have a store that people can come to and see your products. I also have several of my items, mostly my more popular ones, in SLexchange. There really is no reason not to put my items on SLexchange, as there is no upfront costs, and it is helping consumers to "discover" my business. If youre just starting out, there is two free yard sale places. One is Spirit Realm, ive had my things there before, and actually did sell some items! The other is One Love or something, not sure if thats the correct name, but I havent put anything there before. Malls are very tricky, and I think they only work if you are in a mall with "real" traffic. That means finding a mall with no campers, that people actually come to shop at. I always have classifieds, and you can see how many people teleport to your store from your classified, so that can give you an idea of how effective it is. I just get the basic L50 one.

Hopes this helps! and Good Luck

I don't know how it goes for other products, but I find almost no-one buys aircraft at malls. SLExchange is heaps better. After all, SLEx is "everything in one place," but malls are "everything all over the grid."

Still, you should have at least one in-world sales location for those who don't want to use SLExchange or any other site, and this should be in your picks.

I get occasional sales via SL Boutique. It's certainly worth the effort to upload stuff there, and the small percentage cut they take on each sale is painless, as you never have any outlay of funds up front for that sale, aside from your development costs.

Cost of materials? That's texture uploads. And don't forget that in many cases, especially with clothes, you have to upload a texture several times to get the seams right, tweak distorted areas, etc..

Labor costs? Laugh and look the other way on this one. You'll never get close to what your time is worth per hour doing anything in the real world. On the other hand, the labor is presumably fun and comparitively easy work...

Store overhead? Varies a lot. One mall I have a vendor in charges L$250 per week for prime spots on the ground floor, and L$50 per week for less desirable spaces on the upper floors, that are bound to get less foot traffic. Most malls that I have stores in charge L$50 per week for a single 'stall' of space and 15 to 20 prims in your display and vendor. Those that charge more usually can justify it with higher traffic and sales volumes.

You're probably best off with 3 to 4 good locations rather than only one store, or trying to be in every sim on the map. Be in too few, and no one sees you. Also, if you're only in one or two sims, and some of them go down or get reconstructed, you might suddenly be out of business. Spreading around a bit increases visibility and reduces risk. On the other side of the coin, the more you spread out, the harder it is to keep all your vendors updated. You soon find it necessary to use more complicated networked vending systems, just so you can keep up on updates.

Right now, I'm down to texture sales in one location, plus clothing stores in three sims, plus sales on SL Boutique. Two other sims that I had stores in are re-arranging their mall areas, and so I'm temporarily unable to sell there. I haven't got a large enough selection of merchandise yet to justify setting up my own store, on my own land, or for renting more than a single stall in any one mall. I'm right at the threshold where using networked vending systems might be worthwhile.

But even adding all my store and SLB sales together, I get more than 10 times as much income from my work as a builder/landscaper/sim architect, which is almost entirely promoted on word of mouth and satisfied customer referrals. My only "Ads" for that are my sig here in the forums, and a "Pick" in my own profile.

You can technically start with no expenses at all, if you sell exclusively on the shopping sites, like SLExchange.com.

SLEX offers free in-world hostig of your SLEX box that holds and delivers your items to people who buy them on the site. You could start there, build up some revenue to buy ads, then use that money to fund a land purchase in world.