How Are the SL Web Based Business Doing?

I'm curious how the web based business are doing - from all perspectives - owners, sellers and buyers.


Anyone?

I don't know since I'm yet to use one of these sites. My nonbusiness won't matter to then anyways.

Wanted to thank you Merwan for helping me when I was new at a time when you were in the middle of yer problems with that other online shopping venue.

I think they're most certainly doing as well as they can be. For me the main issue is usability. I want a webservice to be so easy to use that one would have to be painfully stupid to NOT be able to use it with facility. I want an analog of "single-touch ordering" (tm - sorta), you know? I see an outfit I like. In a single click, I want it in my inventory ready to wear. I see a car I like. Have it drive ready in one or two clicks.

SL just doesn't support this kind of intimate integration yet, but we're molasses-slowly headed in this direction. In the meantime, I think that SLExchange, GOM, etc. are making it as easy as it can possibly be. It's just that it's not simple enough yet. =) My hat's off to y'all in any case; I don't have the patience, expertise -- or capital-- do do what you'uns are doing so well already. Keep it up!

I imagine that sales are pretty lackluster at most sites, at least for the vendors themselves, since I don't think web shopping has really found it's groove yet with SL residents. I think that SecondServer.net has really raised the bar for ease of use - it is the most integrated into SL. You don't need to pay money into some arbitrary account, or go to a terminal to validate yourself. You buy an item on the site, it sends you an object to pay, then once you pay the object, you receive your purchase. Talk about click, buy and smile I use the site a lot. When I realized Shiryu Mushashi had a new men's clothing line out, I went to the site and had it within a minute. Not bad I wish that Adam would kick up the promotion a few notches - I love buying things through the site and would love to see more content on it.

As much as I like Flipper, I am still opposed to the "go pay into an account" model. It just detracts from the impulse nature of web shopping. I would love to see Flipper and Adam collaborate more, as Flipper has some great content, but Adam is definitely the technology king It goes without saying how I feel about SLExchange.

On a side note, as a web based "business", Snapzilla is doing extremely well, and actually generating an income via referrals. The traffic has quadrupled - and in the past week alone, the site served up 62,000 snapshot detail pages (the page you get when you click on a picture to see the full version, along with the comments). As there are currently a little over 1200 snapshots, it does mean they are being viewed by a lot of people.

I think there will probably be more activity in that space. Hopefully upcoming improvements from Linden Lab will make it easier to create such sites without having to build all the communication infrastructure, which right now is reinventing the wheel just to do simple things. Integration between sites is also important. Vendors are hedging their bets across all three web store sites - it has to be a pain to setup on different sites.

A lot of people are viewing photographs.

I went to the site, clicked on the photos, used some of their bandwidth. My wallet was about a thousand miles away though.

Call me a cynic but my motto with online business is "Show Me The Money". If a free service is what you want to do from the bottom of my heart I wish you well, but if you're trying to make money, a site that just gives out free photos and the like doesn't have a sound business model. Anyone whose seen anything I've ever done will see I've always worked out what every last byte of traffic willl cost me, and how to get it back in revenues. i hope e-commerce sites on SL do well, but saying "This site is a firm sucess, it has a lot of visitors" reminds me of the pre dotcom boom times, when everyone kind of assumed if a lot of people were at a site "it must be making millions".

It depends on how you value success, Jsecure - from the cheap "Show Me The Money" reference, it is pretty clear. For my intended goals with my site, it has already been a huge success. I did not develop it as some get rich quick vehicle, I developed it as a way to give something back to something that has given a lot to me. Will business models develop around it? Who knows, that is beyond secondary at this point - but it does show that there is genuine interest in things that add something to Second Life, instead of just another way to get money out of people. That concept seems to be lost on many.

Never understimate the value of mindshare.

Thanks for adding the info on Snapzilla Cris even though it isn't a business web site per se. The almost immediate success of Snapzilla is an indication that there are still so many valuable contributions that can be made to our community - some of which could be under development as we speak.

i sell at secondserver.net and slboutique.com. i used to sell on slexchange. i did much better on slexchange, but it was never a significant percentage of my total sales.

if im going to shop at any its usually secondserver cause its spur of the moment, i dont have to have prepaid. but if im not in a hurry and i know what i want i usually fly there in world, i spend too much time in my corner of the world not to explore when i have the chance.

jester


.

Unfortunately,

a- Adam is a poor marketeer
b- slexchange has an important lead
c- adam has unfriendly business features
d- gigas is poorly laid out and doesn't properly advertise the best content

I can go on and on.

Have reasons to say this, or is this just your opinion?

Your Mom has unfriendly business tactics and that doesn't stop anyone from doing business with her.

/me slaps Kayin Zugzwang

shh you have been told befor about your fixations with mums.



Blaze, if you have these problems please drop the gigas team a IM, they are allways wanting to improve the services they provide..


On topic,

My usal rubbish is still selling and my services are still in demand, nothing changed here

Well since this seems to be a place for providing feedback on people who would just like to put something in the world, extract money from their fellow human beings, and make sure they get to their next class in college LOL, here goes:

I think GIGAS mall is the best-constructed, best-looking, best-functioning building of its type in SL. Why? It rezzes fast, it has nice fast-loading textures, it looks very well constructed, it has long corridors and shops that look well and don't give you weird camera angles.

You can fly in from the roof and that is always a plus for me in any SL building, I hate it when people try to make a RL-style doorway that you have to hunt for, for 15 minutes.

It's near the telehub, but it doesn't grab your av, magnetize it to some crappy vendor selling idiotic roadkill skins, and wrestle you to the ground and make you IM the owner for the code to how to get the hell out of that av-trap.

However, I have to say that the rentomatic thingies have about 10 more steps on them than they need to, and they simply have to be revisited, and I don't care if they are web-controlled -- the answer "but that's not my fault, it's all automated" when a customer sends a query is inexusable.

First, they just ask you too many questions, and have too many confusing options, and they hang between screens.

At no point does the thing ever tell you to right-click and pay lol. You have to figure that out all on your own. It keeps mining you for information, collecting data, and then finally it tells you to PLEASE BE PATIENT but nothing ever happens LOL. Finally you figure out, oh, maybe right click on this machine that is telling me to still wait, and pay it...but pay it what? I forgot...it's not telling me...hmmm...let me try this? No that...And it refunds back at you until you hit it. Nexus came in person to fiddle with this, but he approached the problem as one of "this user is clueless and needs to be told to just keep doing the same thing on my geeky cool script, WTF is he dumb," instead of the more appropriate business-like notion of "I have made something that customers can't intutively understand and I have to make it better so I get more and faster business, what can I do to make it clear."

In fact, on the boxes I use with Hank Ramos' script, I put a notecard in them that says PAY THE BOX. You would be surprised how many people don't know you have to RIGHT CLICK AND PAY THE BOX, especially if they are new to the game. They look at it, they walk around it in circles, they click on it, but if it doesn't immediately drop-down a menu that says PAY ME, they won't.

The other thing I find annoying about the GIGAS group is every day, dozens of people are summarily expelled from it. It's not only the spam, it's the problematic nature of these mass expulsions, which are simply for rent expired. I haven't seen such purges since the 14th Party Congress.

Other mall owners (including myself) give you a 2-3 day grace period, at least to come collect your stuff so that it doesn't all come rocketing back into your inventory, creating a mess for you. Other rentomatic type scripters have the script give you incremental warnings, i.e. 7 days, 1 day, 12 hours. This is reasonable. At GIGAS, I got ONE e-mail that said "You're expired". But

People who start businesses in SL need to approach the problem of CUSTOMER SERVICE. This is a woefully lost art and culture especially for the younger generation. What this means is you don't approach the problem from this perspective: "How can I put in a mall, extract rent and sales and dwell, then capture all the purchasing and rental information and sell it or capitalize on it some way to make more money." That's one side of business, and sure, do that. But the other side is making a customer base, a satisfied customer base, which is both merchants and shoppers.

What I DO NOT see when I go to GIGAS are shoppers. I see merchants. But not shoppers. This is common to many malls, including my own. One reason is that people are using SLExchange and the mall is just a kind of showroom or a place to store your black SLEX boxes or whatever. BUT another reason is that THERE IS NO STORE DIRECTORY.

Problem one, there is no way to be in FIND PLACES when you are in a mall. Actually, there is, I thought of one, so try it at my mall LOL.

But once there, you see no directory, like you would in a RL mall. No signs, no teleporters, nothing. With all the capacity for spinning, glowing, clickable stuff in this game, that seems inexusable.

Might also be nice if the mall owners would make a yellow pages of all their customers, a note card director with all the landmarks.

The landmarks should take you RIGHT THERE to that store in GIGAS. I can't tell you how many times I've spent looking for my own store.

Oh, you're talking about WEB BASED business? But that doesn't work. I can't get the av linker thingie to work in the game. I gave up. So did the guy next to me trying to work it.

You like listening to yourself talk, don't you?
Some people enjoy shopping on web pages, others like malls...
If you have a feature request, either drop one of the Gigas team an IM or submit a feature request support ticket.

In response to this, I have updated the renters, as for the directory, it's on the todo list. On a second point, I would love to spend all my time in SL 24 hours a day, I would get sooo much done and would not get sick of it, however I have stuff to do in RL so I can't spend all my time on SL. I can never clear my todo list and it really frustrates me when people expect it to be done on the same day in the same hour RIGHT AWAY. I just don't have all the time in world to spend on SL, I wish I did, but I don't!

Nexus, I hated like hell to interrupt your math class.

But I didn't like having to interrupt my RL workday making RL money to feed your RL-money rental machines when they wouldn't take my money, when they notify me of an expiration after the fact, but not before, and when the server hangs, the instructions aren't clear, and you so summarily expel everyone from your group -- "because they don't need to be in the group," as you so wondrously put it. Your expulsion rate is way, way over those of Anshe or Blue or other major mall-owners, so you have to revisit this issue.

--Are merchants getting repeated and timely notices of expiration in their IMs, not just if they register on your website, but inside the game?
--Do you give them a grace period of even 8 hours to re-pay or collect their stuff?
--Is it easy for them to pay inworld or do you force them to a website?
--Is registering and confirming the avatar on that website really working? Have you ever done consumer surveys?

You seem to be disgruntled that someone would expect you to perform services in SL, and even seem to castigate anyone who would be inside the game expecting something from you in the way of service and interrupting your RL LOL. And yet, you cheerfully collect their RL money, which after all, has to come from SOMEWHERE, and it doesn't always come from Mom and Dad.

Here's the culture clash: you started a business to help you have extra spending money or help pay for college, and you put lots of hours in it, but you still have to go to college. I don't mean to single you out. You are others in the game who look at this as mainly a venue to use their computer programming skills to make some cash. And that's all good. And you have made a good business, but it needs staffing. You can't just set out a mall, extract money from other players, and go away. If you do that, they will go away from you too, no matter how pretty your mall is. You need to hire a mall manager, and yes, you do need to staff a giant mall with hundreds of stores in it with a live website 24/7, perhaps by parting with some of the money you extract from the rentomatics, and hiring some mall managers, possibly living on different time zones so that yes, they can be available 24/7. It's very useful to get help from ppl living on another time zone, that's what I do, and this game makes it possible.

Yes, it is a game, as long as this culture clash goes on. It's not a virtual world where people even have some scant reference to the norms of behaviour and good business practices built up through the millenia. It's a game where people entertain themselves playing store, and trying to extract money. Trust me, I'm happy to play store with you. But since I"m spending money that cashes out as RL money and RL time on that store, and you are collecting play money that cashes out as RL money, I want you to play store *just a little better*.



Feature this: a rentomatic that tells you how to pay it? I dunno, just a thought, a silly thought, don't mind me....

I think SLExchange is built with the PHP Nuke engine, which is definitely a very widely used & popular system for content mangement. It seems to be easy to use as well.

-AP

Honestly, Profoky, do ALL of your posts have to take up my entire screen?

No.

You can keep scrolling downwards.

SHORTEST PROF-POST EVER!

<adds to favorites>

Well I did say that if you were running it as a free site I wished you all the luck in the world. But the world of charity and giving is several worlds away from the world of commerce. Linden Lab charge. I charge. My colocation provider charges me for every binary bit that enters or leaves my server. Everything costs, and I am a businessman. I won't apologise for the fact I have a clear focus on pounds and pence.

SLExchange is doing well with strong and steady growth. I think number of items listed and number of sales about doubled during the past 4 weeks. There is now 6130 active items for sale with registered shoppers online 24 hours a day 7 days a week.

I also get many tickets and orders for my normal business via ANSHECHUNG.COM.

Having said this, any predictions that the Web would kill in world commerce are not coming true. Most people consider SL one leisure activity and like shop spontaneously while enjoy themselves.

Prokofy Neva - Your comments in this post have been taken into account and the services will soon include help for people such as yourself who find it hard to pay money into a cube.

Now please stop filling the thread with your personal attacks and send them via IM.

Lafflafflaff I run a rentals business myself so I DO know how to pay a box, duh. The point is just that your boxes (if you are in GIGAS) hang for ever and don't let you pay them, and don't provide a prompt to right-click and pay with a screen showing an amount on the extentions of time (they apparently do on the first time, but not even always there). It's a glitch that needs a lot of refinement. The reason there are such high explusion rates in this group is that the merchants are not finding it easy to come and pay their boxes to extend their time. You simply have to put two and two together: hugely high expulsion rate from group = merchants unable to easily extend their time. Please stop talking about trouble tickets and web-based services which just commodify your customer into little profit centers you exploit for cash and mine for data. Please put a little bit more customer service human kindness into this affair.

OK, I'm going to edit one post to remove a personal attack LOL.