How To Be A Vendor

I Been Wanting To Rent A Shop And I Wanted To Know What I Need To Do To Open One? I Sell Like Adult Toys And Lingere How Can I Get Started Please Help.

Sexylady Flagstaff

SexyLady, while I've not run a shop myself--I've moved this to General Topics for further discussion amongst fellow Residents of Second Life!

Since nobody is answering, do you have any land yet? Owned or rented?

I find it quite a work capitalizing every first letter in a sentence.
You wanna rent some place to put up a store? Just fly around your preferred area and ask the owners for renting slots, if I get what you mean.

A good thing to do is get yourself a vendor set up because if your just starting out most places that are inexpensive also dont allow for alot of prim usage . So having yourself a vendor thats loaded up and ready to go will make things easier for you to be able to rent from places quick and easy. Fly around to different malls , use the find button and check for vendor space or rentals.. ask around look for specials alot of places let you try out a spot for a week first before actually renting. Its worth looking into !! Good luck!

I too am curious to know what the usual steps are to setting up a shop. I fancy it goes something like this...

1) Have a product to sell

2) Stuff said product into Objects for sale

3) Stuff said objects into a Vendor

4) Stuff Vendor into a shop space (rented or owned)

5) Advertise

6) Hope for the best

Does this sound about right? Am I missing anything?

I do all except step 4, and while I don't get GREAT business, I get enough to pay rent on that vender (along with a 50 stipend), so be careful how much you advertise. Not saying that you shouldn't advertise, far from it... I just sometimes wonder if it is overrated.

That's about right.

Sadly, though, a lot of new folks decide to skip step one, which itself is the most crucial and back-breaking step -- a step that is itself, many steps in length. Developing product is hard work that requires significant time investment, especially as you build your skills.

Harder still is figuring out where to direct your energies before you build your product line. You need to find something that you enjoy doing, since passion is what sets products apart in SL, and you'll need to then isolate a means of translating that enthusiasm into a product that satisfies an unsatisfied demand in one of the following ways:

- Demand of affordability: Solutions exist within the market but are prohibitively expensive to an otherwise eager customer. Your product will provide solutions similar to the competiton while being lower in price.

- Demand of utility: The market has problems that aren't solved by any existing product. Your product will solve those problems.

- Demand of quality: The market is swamped by products that fill a given need but they are unreliable, poorly-built, unattractive, whatever. Your product will elegantly solve the same problems as these products, doing so with greater ease-of-use, panache or reliability (perhaps all three!). Guess what? You get to charge more when you do this.

- Demand of volume: The market is supplied by a small number of providers whose output is insufficient to meet market demand for volume, variety or both. Your product adds volume or variety to the existing market.

These are four basic examples, and I'm sure we can all think of more, but they're pretty effective differentiators to help guide your initial thinking. Find ways to make your product different and/or essential and you'll be fine. These concepts of demand apply to every single business and product anywhere, in SL and in RL. Whether you're selling clothing, cars, guns or houses, you'll do well to understand the sort of demand you intend to supply through your business.

Not easy! But rewarding, once you've thought it through. Don't force it, just let the ideas come to you as you travel through SL and make note of how people use and demand things. Anyway, those are the first few steps of step one. After that, you have to implement everything you've learned into a product. Then you've got step one. Everything after that comes easily.

In my first life I learned through a variety of sales positions that you really can't sell something unless you believe in it. You really do have to have a passion for what you sell in order to make other people want it as bad as you do.

Oh, yes. Absolutely, then you know exactly what I mean. During my time in sales, I felt exactly the same way. I could sell the hell out of Dyson vacuum cleaners, iPods, Whirlpool Duets, because they were all top-of-class solutions to fairly universal problems. They were so perfectly executed that I loved to use them and talk about them to anyone who would listen.

That becomes even more essential if the product you're selling is the product you're building. If you're building something that you want or need to love, you work harder at it, take more time, accept fewer compromises. If you don't care about what you're building, if you rush through it, it always shows in the final result.

SexyLady - if you have PG rated items for sale that you created, and you're under 90 days old, we have a vendor area at the Shelter that's free to new residents.

However, from your OP it appears your items are Mature in Nature. There are a bunch of paid establishments in game that offer special deals to new residents, and probably have way fewer restrictions than we do.

Checking out the classifieds or doing a FIND search might lead you to a few. One that immediately comes to mind is Wolfhaven, which offers rentals to new residents for L$5/week, if memory serves.

Hope this helps!

Great advice from you experienced merchants. Thanx!

I'm gonna let SexyLady know too, in case she hasn't seen these updates yet.

Couple' more tips & tricks ... When looking for a place to rent to set up your vendors / boxes, shop around and compare a lot! There's huge differences both in price / prim and general atmosphere between places, don't just take the first mall you find. Also, if you don't have much L$ to start out, look out for new malls opening - a lot of landlords offer a week or two for free to anyone who rents a spot for a couple of weeks. Watch the "Properties for rent" forum for that kind of offers.

Advertising: use the New Products forum here, and don't forget to include a picture I also like the in-world classifieds; at 50L$ / ad it's affordable, and I think it gets good exposure. Be sure to chose the correct category though, and don't forget the "Mature" checkbox. (You can add classifieds in-world through your profile, it's on the fourth tab).

The classifieds are really overrated. Most of my customers find me through the "find places" panel or by word of mouth or by forum classifieds. You have to be on the first page in order to have a efficient classified ad ingame.
Well I would rather invest in a small plot of land and get listed under find places instead of spending so much in classifieds.

Welcome to SL, and to the wonderful world of retail sales!

I think the first and most important thing is to make sure you have a quality product, and that you price it appropriately for what it is. That means shopping the existing merchants, seeing what they sell, how well their similar items are made, and what they sell for.

If you're selling clothes of any sort, and I would think especially if you want to sell sexy stuff, where people tend to take very close looks at the people wearing or using them, make sure your seams all match! If you just slap something together, you may get a few sales. But if it looks great from every angle, you'll sell a lot more.

Try to get at least 10 things ready for sale. For each one, make a box - single prim, that you put the item into the contents of. Texture that box with a good picture of the item, and set the properties on the prim to set the contents of the box for sale, at your desired price. A good picture can make a world of difference in sales!

Now go find a good place to rent mall space. It will probably cost you L$50 per week to L$100 per week to rent a small space, with an allocation of 20 prims or so. Put your boxes on the wall in that space. Watch as people slowly start buying your stuff.

Consider placing one minimal classified listing for your store, just so people can locate it in Find. But honestly, I never advertise myself. A good location does more for me than advertizing.

I can hook you up with a friend of mine who can rent you a merchant space inside an adult-oriented business, a large strip club where you'll get plenty of traffic that is already thinking in terms of sexy stuff - escorts, strippers, and their patrons. For what you're talking about selling, that would be much better than a general mall space. IM me in world, hon.

When that first rented store space starts making a profit, spread out and rent space in a few more malls, in other sims. Pay attention to location! Put your store near other businesses that attract the type of customers you want to sell to. Not necessarily folks selling the same type of items, but other 'sexy places', in your case. Having multiple sites helps a lot to smooth out sales profits. You won't always get sales at every site. But each site you have increases sales.

Once you have built a reputation, and once you have developed a lot of things to sell, consider a more complex vending system, and consider either renting larger space, or buying land and opening your own store. But wait on building a store until you have a customer base! The traffic in a mall will get you more sales, for free, than the advertising you'll need to do for promoting a stand-alone business.

Do you have any tips for identifying Demand of Volume in SL? I assume the "Variety" version is most common since stock in the mast majority of stores is infinite.

Volume comes into play mainly with custom work. The existing stable of contractors can only provide so much output within a given period. If you can provide any level of customization that addresses demand that would otherwise have to wait a long time or pay a lot of money to get a slice of the existing limited volume of custom work, you've satisfied (some) demand for volume.

Variety is much more common within the scope of SL business and is probably most powerfully in play within the clothes and skins business.

Wow, Ceera! Nice chunk of advice there. Much obliged for the pointers.

I have another question tied to this subject... How does one get a hold of a vendor? I've seen the real nice JEVN ones all over the place but can't seem to find any info on how to actually get one of my own. Can anyone tell me what a body would need to do to get one?

Vendor kits are sold at stores like most other things.

JEVN is a networked vendor which costs a fair bit of money (around L$3000, I believe), and you really need to own or have control of a bit of land to put the server on: several places have basic, non-networked, vendors that are given away for free.

You can, of course, also go the simple route of using the For Sale control, but that's rather more limited.

Vendor kits are sold at stores like most other things.

I've been having a tough time finding a store that sells vendor kits. The Find feature doesn't pull anything up for me. Am I missing something?

There's a box of free, non-networked low-lag vendors available at the bottom floor of Furnation Sky Mall in Furnation ALpha.

those vendor scripts are for the renters group only

Vendor machines at slExchange

Items are sorted from most expensive to cheapest iirc, and on last pages there should be some that are literally free.

I guess Hiro Pendragon put up 3 kits of free vendor around, just cant remember where Ive seen it, maybe look for it at his land?