Want to buy land for shop.

I am fairly new to SL. I want to open a dress shop. I am thinking of buying a small plot of land. Any advice would be appreciated on what is the best way to start. where to buy and what to look for? thank you ladda

Do you already have a large amount of inventory for your store? If not, you may want to wait on buying land, and consider renting some space in a mall to start with. There is a lot of competition in that area - a lot of women's clothing stores - so profits may be slow at first.

If you do buy land, you should probably start with a small lot (1024 or under) so that you aren't overextended while you get your business off the ground. Try not to buy land in a sim that is too laggy or that has a lot of campers in it. You can view the statistics bar to see how many people are currently in the sim and what the sim FPS is. Try going to some different regions to compare and get an idea of what is acceptable to you as far as lag. Because you are selling clothing, you will probably have a lot of textures in your store for the item images, and if the sim is too laggy, it will take too long for the textures to download and your customers may get tired of waiting and leave.

Roadside land is nice if you can get it too - some people do their exploring along the Linden Roads and may stop in to your store. Even better would be to locate where there are other stores nearby so that you can catch the attention of other shoppers.

Another consideration may be whether or not to buy on Mature land. Although opinions may vary on the degree to which this affects sales, there's no denying that if you're not selling Mature content, a store on PG land could be an asset right now.

It's not a boost that will necessarily last long, but if you're just starting out any little nudge to favor sales could help.

Land is double the price of its historical norm due to rampant speculation. Like most speculative bubbles, I also would expect it to crash. My advice: do not buy mainland land, let the land speculators continue to buy and sell to each other until prices burst or fizzle (and they will). Rent a small shop on an island, and see how things go. Paying hundreds of dollars U.S. for a tiny bit of server space is not a wise use of investment.