Mysterious drop in sales

Hi Conifer,

Just checked your profile and you have no classifieds. Not sure if you ever had any, but if you did, that might explain it.

Ed

Well if you were only selling one or two items aday its not surprising it stopped as the number is already close to 0.


Classifieds/listing your land help. People won`t know you exist otherwise.

One could do some sort of modeling of sales as a semi-random process. If the expected number of sales per day is 1-2, the chances of getting a run of no sales per day is probably not tiny.

I've just started selling stuff since this month, and I had a nice rush at first, then it dropped off to very little, and the last few days the volume has shot up again.

As noted on another thread on this forum, random classified ads that were supposed to auto-renew were purged instead.

So, if you were running a classified ad and you've experienced a sudden drop in sales, chances are good you lost the ad and will need to republish one.

I didn't notice because I had just launched a new business and didn't have any sales to drop. :-/

Don't worry that much Conifer, with only five sell point in SL there are days I sell about eight to ten things and days with no sales at all.
Classifieds, profile picks, SLX and ad panels are some things to rise the probs.

SL has been a little tempermental since that last update, especially when theres around 30,000 residents on.

my sales have dipped slightly as well.

People WILL SAY OR DO ALMOST ANYTHING to "TEST" a NEW AWESOME SCRIPT with you
and promise you the world
as soon as you "ACCEPT DEBIT PERMISSIONS" their "FANTASTIC SCRIPT" will empty your account.
do NOT EVER accept DEBIT PERMISSIONS on something you do not KNOW or impeccably TRUST

be careful out there.

as for sales. fgoing from 1 or 2 to zero isnt unlikely, especially when Second Life is having massive database issues. I never buy during those times and I DEF do not buy or mess with NO COPY items,

as a Power Shopper Supreme I am finding I have pretty much bought everything I want right now...I keep an eye out for new items, but I've prety much shopped myself out for now.

wow - hopefully this person who is stealing gets banned - quickly

A good point as well. I have experiences sales attempts timing out occasionally.

Can anyone confirm that is really happening and that is not a hoax?

(No offense towards the poster. One cannot be to carefull, this is true... but keeping a clear head is also important )

Morwen.

In all probability, it's just the temprmental and erratic nature of doing business in SL. Even for well-established merchants, unexpected "dry spells" do happen.

One thing to check though. Go to your vending locations with "Highlight Transparent" active, and make sure some thief hasn't placed an invisible prim over your vending points in an attempt to steal what your customers are trying to pay you. It's a pretty lame theft attempt, but noobs do try it from time to time. If you find something like that, get a screenshot that shows what's been done and AR the thief, before deleting the invisible prim.

I agree that it is probably just random statistics. I have never put sale objects on classifieds but rely on passing trade.

But it is worrying if someone can set your account or sale objects to divert cash to their accounts.

not only that but people who cant log in - or cant tp - or cant move -or get logged out

Cant buy anything =)

Not possible. Unless you have set your sales system to accept "modify" from others or have your land set to "build" for anybody, there is really no way for others to steal your payments.

Also, who's selling script are you using? If you wrote it yourself, you are safe... but if you got it from shady or free sources, there could always be hidden code in there which diverts payments.

I have noticed a pattern to sales dry spells. It usually starts on Wednesday, when everyone expects Linden Labs to pop an update on us, right into Thursday, when we're recovering from the update. By Monday, it picks up, because everyone is thanking their lucky stars that the weekend of the usual crashes, slowdowns and such, is over.

And remember too that there was a recent spell where LL was recommending on log-in and in the blog that people not mess with their inventory while they tried to identify and resolve their issues. When the Lindens are telling you things have gone haywire, I think most people are reluctant to buy things.

EDIT: Another note: I was rezzing and examining some 'free' vendors to see how they worked once, and I found hidden in the script code of one of them that they diverted $1 of each sale to the creator as 'payment' for using the free vendor. Yikes!

Ignoring the possibility of a severe LL bug, it is not possible for an object to take your money unless you accept a DEBIT PERMISSIONS request. Be VERY careful about answering "yes" to this request! (I don't remember the exact text of the request, but it's pretty clear, something like, "X object owned by Y is requesting permission to take money from you."

Frankly, I doubt I would ever accept unless I own the object. (That's in addition to trusting the object's creator.) I own it and then come to suspect it, I can delete it and it can't cause any more mischief. If I don't own it, I'm entirely at the mercy of its owner and whoever wrote the script.

Of course, businesspeople have to do accept this request a lot, for example vending machines, casino games, and tipjars generally have to do this. Vending machines need debit permissions in order to give money back when the customer pays the wrong amount. Casino games and 'sploders need to pay out winnings. Tip jars must pay the worker their percentage. Therefore, business owners have to either have a lot of trust, or else carefully watch payments.

I had a customer that wanted to be able to watch payments from a script carefully, and limit the amount of money the script had access to. My only suggestion was to create an alt avatar for that sole purpose. Objects can't own money, so you can't give money to an object for it to dole out. An object can only use money belonging to the avatar it got permission from.

BTW, I posted a product on SLX and got nearly one sales per day for about 10 days, and then less than one per week. This isn't unusual and can be caused by market saturation. It can also be caused by competition.

The simplest kind of market saturation is if your products are merely sitting in some vending location that doesn't get a wide cross-section of SL visitors. At first your product will be new to most visitors. You'll quickly sell to the interested regulars, and then sales will slow down to a rate that's a proportion of new visitors.

definitely never allow any object to debit your account that you dont own 100% (not even group owned is safe)

unless you have some dummy account set asside where you tightly control how much money goes into it.

Its like giving someone your credit cards and saying "here dont use this unless you need to " then watch them drive off to the mall.

Conifer, do you remember where you were when you ran into this scam artist?

Katie

I've come across a box of those recently.

I dont know if i'm allowed to post where from, but its a popular place with new people and has good standing. I dont know if they realise that the stuff in the box has those scripts in the vendors.

My Girl has several Sales points where she vends her swords. it isn't unusual to go days without sales only to sell Five, or more swords in under an Hour (Or in one case, one of everything all to the same Buyer). One person will "Discover your product, Buy it, show it off to friends, "Ooo Great, where did you get that, do you have the Landmark?" you sell a few more over a few days, them it slows down again until someone else "Discovers" your product.
You don't really get a steady market, the Sales come in spurts.

Re: the "Free Vendors";
Since, as you say the place where the Vendors are located is a reputable establishment, Have a quiet word with owner, and show him the script you are speaking about as Proof. I'm sure if it IS a reputable establishment he will either have the Item Removed, or have the creator advertise it a little more truthfully.

Angel.

One thing I noticed on Tuesday I believe was that I recieved 0 sales.... it was the day the grid was a disaster. The great majority of my sales occur in the evening from about 6 PST to 12 PST. Obviously, this is when the most people tend to be online. If there is a grid problem during those hours...... and the problems are always during those hours..... you will lose sales because people just can't teleport, move, etc.

I received some excellent advice when I first started selling in January on this forum..... CLASSIFIEDS!!!! I now carry 5 of them and my sales are 10 times what they were before I had them. I happen to sell cowboy hats and furniture, well its the cowboy hats that bring them in. Thye look good on the AV (my opinion !!!) and they are inexpensive. I advertise that fact with various pictures of Clint Eastwood and John Wayne and it brings them in. My price point is low enough (nothing over 50L) that if they bother to teleport from the ad, they buy (about 75% of the time..... I actually compare my vistor counter list with my sales list to see!!!)

Advertise !!!! but make sure you do it in the way that will reach your target group. The search function is boolean (it searchs for words) so make sure you describe your product using key words that other people would search with. In my case "cowboy" is obvious, but I also use "western" "country" "texas" etc. to catch people that may be looking for western wear in general or are just touring SL looking for the country theme.

If you tell us about your product, maybe we can help you word some ads that will pay off for you.