Recent economic changes have killed my sales!

Ok, this is getting annoying. I've kept track of all my sales for my art gallery and prefab building store, and I've done fairly well for myself and have sold consistantly at least a few things every day. Now ever since the recent economic changes that LL activated a few weeks ago, my sales have PLUMMETED. I'm not talking just slow, I'm talking I'll be lucky to sell one or two things every few days. Many days will go by where I'll sell nothing!

The changes that LL made have killed my sales, and I've talked around and found out I'm not the only one with this problem. There needs to be something done about this, because all it's going to do is make people either stay away from starting a business or will make them close their doors because of lack of sales at their business.

PLEASE Linden Labs, do something about this, you guys yanked too hard on the economic chain and now it's hurting people with premium accounts.

Thank you for reading, feel free to add your thoughts to this if it's hurt you or helped you or whatever too. Thanks!

E

Edit: Oh also forgot to mention I've been holding a 25% off sale as well and even that's not helping my sales.

I can't honestly say my sales have been affected, but then again they always have been crap.

Thankfully at the moment I'm not in SL to make money or have massive tier to cover... but it might not be that way forever.

Come check out the gallery..... its really nice to see something unusual and interesting in SL.

Lewis

This subject was discussed here recently. /108/34/125807/1.html

Recommendation: Reprice your product or sell something else. If that doesn't fix the problem, then maybe SL has become boring and SLers are leaving for greener pastures.. Uh-Oh, better keep an eye on the number of plots forsale...

Esch, what percentage have your sales dropped since the changes were imposed. Had this ever happened before? Is it possible your sales are suffering a natural ebb? Mine cycle a bad coupel of weeks every three months.

Do you advocate LL simply reverting to the previous system or do you have a better idea for them to implement?

Mine dropped drastically when the money mongers started pushing for no one to have any income in SL, meaning pushing to get stipends cut. THen they dropped again when basic stipend was removed..drastically and exactly as I said they would. Then again to almost nonexistence when the new cuts hit. I have stated repeatedly, if you remove a source of income for a populace you MUST replace it with something. Instead Linden has pushed for changes to make it so no one will have any income unless they wanna buy L's continually. The biggest problem is Linden does NOT care who things hurt as long as it dfoes not hurt the top 1% of the money mongers in SL. I'd suggest looking for greener pastures cause SL is not it. I am verry tempted to remove all my content and take strong steps to make sure it is never used anywhere except by people who legitimately purchsed it in world. I know this much, it ain't gonna show up in a certain banker's alt's freebie reselling shop.

Now, Now, lets calm down. The only Money Mongers I see are the people fussing that not enough free money was passed out to the general population, only so they can turn around, buy your widgets, and you can cash out the money for some USDs... If that isn't a money monger, I don't know what is...

The Nerve, demanding that free money be dumped on the people so it ends up in your pocket. Why, I do declare...

As I stated in my first post, I resorted to having a 25% off sale on my product, and that hasn't helped at all. I find it interesting you say to sell something else if my sales are hurting, because that doesn't fix the greater problem that I am seeing with the SL economy. Shuffling people around from one business idea to the next won't fix the overall problem. That's a bandaid cure to something much greater.



I went back and did some math, and my sales dropped 29% from the week of July 9th-15th to the week of July 16th-22nd. Then my sales took a 74% drop from July 16th-22nd to July 23rd-29th.

I don't believe my sales are going through a natural ebb because the drop is too drastic in my opinion. I didn't think anything of this because of the fact that it could have been an ebb, but the longer it's gone on, the more I started thinking something was up. I then started talking to other business owners and they expressed the same thing, and most even said "Wow I thought that was just happening to me."

Now as far as a solution, frankly, I have none. I'm not an economist, I don't know what could solve this for the greater good. I just want to address that there is a problem, and they need to look into it to find a solution. Anything has to be better than this. If my sales continue to stall out like they have been, I'm going to have to close up shop on one of my businesses and sell off the land to lower my tier. I don't have the budget to just sit here and let my store look pretty with no sales.

E

If people want your product, they will buy it if they get a stipend or not. Personally, I haven't noticed any change at all.

Now thats what I'm talking about... You got one vendor trying to blame their lack lust sales on the changes by LL.. And another (Luth) saying its business as usual...

What recent change ?
missed something ?

i noticed a slowdown some times ago (2 or 3 weeks ?), but when i said to some customers "last month was very bad but now it's better" most of them said something like : "Oh... maybe holliday. Myself, i was on holliday".

But... but... additionnaly, the VERY BAD policy on event (yardsale, yard sale, super yard sale, super grand rererererereopening yard sale, y4rd $ale, free stuff for cheap, etc ...) don't really help to have fun shopping, or to just check some random event...

omg! that's the smartest thing I have heard RBD say.

Sales must be improving. The last two days the Lindex has had huge volume. I noticed many more shoppers at my store than last week. It was nice to see.

This is hardly the reasons that stipends were cut. The reason they were cut was because LL wanted to have open registration. In order to prevent people farming accounts for free Lindens the startup money and weekly stipends for new accounts HAD to be elimated.

I doubt the "money mongers" had anything to do with Philip's decision.

I have not noticed any slump in sales this summer either.

The problem is simply down to need.

Most people decide that clothes, skin, hair, shoes and bling are "essential" in creating their in-game "image". There will always be a disproportionately heavy demand for items in this range.

However, the original poster sells art, created by other SL players, which is actually of a very high quality and would look great on the wall of any home in SL.

But that's the problem. Most people don't bother to buy a home, they just stay free basic unverified, and what's the point of buying something to hang on a wall if you don't own a wall for it to hang on?

My sales suffer the same. Amongst other things, I sell furniture. Who needs to buy a refridgerator when you don't have a kitchen to put it in?

What we are seeing is a direct result of people not going premium, not buying land, and not helping to build the world - rather just simply existing in it instead of being part of it.

I am quite sure that, if there were decent incentives to upgrade to premium, so that people actually had land which they could build things on, then people like me and Esch would see our sales improve.

As it stands, unless your property is sex or fetish related, a big club, a casino/gaming place, you might as well not bother to invest much time and effort in creating something in SL because nobody will come.

Why is it that there is so much emphasis on sex and adult activities in SL?

Lewis

And let's not forget that ultimately, SL works just like the real world. Few will really make money, other will only watch on the sideline with non-profitable little shops. It's not digital Utopia.

IMHO it's a good thing that the free linden$ were dropped. It's as if it was christmas through all seasons. I do understand the disappointment when a sudden drop is seen for certain shops, but it reinstalls the challenge to think about expanding or rethinking your business in SL completely. As mentioned, it's still just a game.

For a 5 day old avatar, you sure have an interesting insight to the history and experience of the issue.

Stipends are like the difference between a supermarket and a dollar store. You might buy something non-essential for $1, but when the item can be found in the supermarket across the road for $1.50, you wouldn't necessarily buy it.

Lewis

My sales in June/July has never been this good.

I contribute it to the massive amounts of new players after the new, easier registration system.

If your sales are down, I think you should look at other factors, like for instance:

1. Are your products compelling enough?
   
2. Are they priced correctly? Believe it or not, raising prices can have a nice effect.
   
3. Is the competition kicking your ass? Look at things like features, ease of use, ease of setup, pricing. This is a cut-throat environment. You need to stay on top.
   
4. Are you high enough in the classifieds? Do you have ALL the right keywords?
   
5. Is your classified text a good sales letter?
   
6. Do you hand out compelling sales copy in notecards from your vendors?
   
7. Are you making sure you give potential customers your landmark so they can come back later?
   
8. Do you give them a good reason to buy now, instead of waiting?
   
9. Do potential customers trust the quality of your products?
   
10. Are you getting repeat customers? It's easier to to retain a customer than it is to get a new one.
    
11. Do you offer help and service if needed? If so, do you tell them that before the sale?
    

A little bit of salesmanship goes a long way. Some basic marketing skills will also help. Look at the competition, how they do it. And it doesn't hurt to look at RL marketing for some inspiration. Ads that gets your attention uses tricks that would probably work in SL.

If you blaim the economic changes, maybe you target the wrong customers? A better target would be those that are willing to invest some RL money in SL.

I've read the other thread, and I have to agree with a point: the too much downtimes lately don't help sales and transactions.

You want to come to SL, shop around, enjoy... but 'The grid is currently closed for maintenance'. For Europeans, this means about whole day (afternoon + evening) dropped out. Oh well, next day you come one, you see a message 'don't buy, don't rez anything, asset server is unstable, you might lose anything you buy or rez'. Another day off from sales. Then you see 'rolling updates in progress, your sim will be restarted soon'. Or you experience massive lag... or problems rezzing items you bought and payed money for.

And hell, when you see you can't play on wendesdays, maybe you'll come on SL less, and look for other games online... and pay THEM.

My sales on Wednesday are the same as any day even with the updates. For some reason even though SL is down for part of the day, sales are higher before and after the update.
I would be great though if there wasn't a need for a weekly update.

I haven't seen a drastic drop in my sales either. I sell a variety of things as I haven't quite found my niche completely yet although if it works out I have a great idea in the works that could lead to my niche

Lewis you have a slightly failed premis there. Basic does not equal homeless. There is a booming rental market right now. I generally can't put houses up fast enough. Several of my tenants used to be premium but found renting to be cheaper and end up with more $L to spend at the end of the day because of it.

Also, to those who's sales have slumped, when's the last time you released a good ammount of new product? Are you announcing your new products on the forums and with product launching events? Are you using SLB and SLX as free advertizement for your goods? (you can always put them at higher prices there to cover the commission cost and tell people the stuff is cheaper in world).

Also sometimes a remodel can help freshen things up. Mix up your display every once in a while and sometimes people see things they haven't before. (Be careful not to do this too much or people might find they can't find anything hehe).

Maybe we need to see a thread "Beating the Slump: What do you do when sales are lack luster?"

And lastly I will mention that I'm hearing sales across SLX are down and they are attributing it to it being summer and people are on vacation. Real Life retail goes through a slump now just before the back-to-school rush so I would imagine SL goes through something of the same.

By and large I agree with most of this post.

Lets face it SL is a closed system, in other words there is no real way from here to there, or to put it another way it is not easy to invent something that will sell well in SL that also carries over in real life.

There are two major exceptions to this point though and that is sex and money. Devise/invent something that has a sex or money theme and it stands a chance of making a profit because it carries over (at least in theory)

Put it another way, take the home web page of SL, the one with the photograph of the lady in a corset. Do the avatars who have a female aspect really female in real life and would they dress in real life as they do in sl. The same applies to some of the alpha males.

I suspect if they believed they were in a safe environment with others of the same interests they may do so.

So design sexy clothes and carry that over into real life by organising themed holidays for sl people...there is one idea from me pro bono as they say (and don't tell my wife if you do it and if we ever met in real life


Money also sells...that is the thought of doing something to make some more. On that point try to put yourselves near the top rather than the end of the food chain. I have my own ideas on that and there is a limit to what ideas I give out free of charge.

Finally regard sl as either pure entertainment and/or the most interesting thing that has happened in virtual reality since the dawn of the computer age. This idea/concept (Second Life) is now either going to fly or crash big time, it has got too big and has attracted too much publicity to remain a small time operation. There was a two page spread in the London Times on Secfond Life last weekend and IMHO when publicity reaches that level it will not go away. So here is one final ideas, sit tight be prepared to spend a few dollars a month on entertainment and when Second Life goes PLC status consider buying the shares providing the risk factors are within your comfort zone

I would guess that the vast majority of people do not look anything like their real selves in world. I am one of the few that have made my avatar self represent my real self, and would be happy to show anyone who is vaguely interested.

I'd guess the average 'alpha male hunk' or 'hottie babe' look more like this in real life





Lewis

For someone who puts down anyone that turns a profit here, you are pretty upset about your lack of sales. Hrm.

Welcome to SL. Clothes, skin, hair and shoes have always been what people buy most of. But the other side of that is there are zillions more people who make them so the competition is way way up there. Selling these things will not automatically get you rich either.

You must, at all times, do market research with your current customer base. I know what kind of people buy from me and what they buy. The majority of my sales always comes from those clothing, skin, hair and shoe deisgners you like to complain about. They need poses to sell their items, and I make them really well. But with that, it also seems that people buy everything they do with a certain style in mind. I have a unique style that shows through in all of my work. That really is the essence that seperates the artist from the pack.

Furniture has never been a big seller anywhere. Some have hit it big and you have some really stiff competition. I'd also like to inform you that your attitude here towards those of us that do make money here is also going to hinder your sales. I wouldn't care if you made that one piece of something I really thought I needed, I wouldn't buy a thing from you.

People like sex, no doubt about it. But those of us who don't create such things for various reasons still have a pretty large market out there. You create because you enjoy it, not because its what everyone wants.