Definition of Theft?

the issue with gettign rid of traffic has already been brought up, there has to be a way to sort the search so the things the person using the search is looking for are at , or near, the top of the results, otherwise one might just as well blindly throw a dart on the grid map and teleport where it lands and start wandering randomly to try to find what they're after

That's what the All search is for. Inflating traffic numbers is all about the Places tab search.

Yes, but trying to weed through places search is bad enough, it pulls up so many unrelated places, let alone trying to actually widen the search. I've done searches with names of popular stores before, and nothing comes up - but type in something like lucky chair and the store comes up. How weird is that?

Still seems like improving search and making it not only dependent upon traffic stats for search ranking would improve/take care of a lot of these issues on its own.

I think the person renting to Penny should've given a clearer/fuller picture as to actual traffic. But then I think when you rent a shop space it's like renting land for a home, you have to look around a lot, ask a lot of questions and be careful. Not saying it was her and her friend's fault but for instance, asking about actual sales might've been good.

Because of this thread, at a store I went to the other night when someone asked if I needed help, I asked, "Are you a bot or real?" No answer.

That could be quite good as a bot. Maybe the owner was logged in and the bot would send a message to him/her if you answered anything with "yes" in it, and s/he'd come over.

Indeed, my best sales this week are coming at a location with trifling traffic. The visitor to customer ratio is good though.

There are many reasons why good traffic doesn't equal good sales and bots aren't the only factor. Size of the parcel and where your store is are important, if there's a fixed TP point and your store is hard to find then that can be problematic. So the traffic there could be good and full of shoppers but people never get to your store because they've spent their money before they see it.

This is where Phil's point about stores having their own parcel comes into the equation.

Search itself needs to empower the person performing the search more. We should have more choices on how we list results. There should also be more information on how to use search, how many people bother with speech marks and boolean operators?

Update

Met some totally cool, amazing business owners from this thread. And just passing along that every customer that sets foot in their store, counts...all of you.

Revamped notecard recommendation system....and sent first new one out to group members, and people I met out and about, and to new business contacts. Some group members took time out of their day, and sent me a notecard raving about how helpful it was. And they went to those stores.

One of those store owners, I included, just passed it on to their group members.....so it just doubled, maybe more. One of my group members passed it on to her store group members.....more drops in the bucket.

The creators who I featured on those notecards, are now new business contacts and new friends.

Consoled some business owners who were put off by a sales figure and attitude that was published in this thread....and rather than being annoyed and discouraged, they will plug away....(I was just the messenger, a wise sage advised that they plug away). And we will plug away together.....drops in the bucket.

Studied all of the above search tips....started tweaking item descriptions a few days ago, and added a new el cheapo classified ad, tweaking key word use.....and showing up next to the big guys on some key words, now. Thanks for that discussion! Friday's traffic report at main entrance of my little store was 158....for Saturday it was 724. Might change tomorrow - but nice change for one day.

Also discussed the above search tips with business owners.....by the way....they create all day....they do not read every word in the forums....so it is wrong to assume everyone knows about everything discussed here. I'm even having better success when I use the all search now, for myself....thanks to those explanations, but we mustn't assume that a shopper is going to study this, for an hour or two.

Another Wise Sage told me to get out of the forum.....and get back to work.....so got new marketing up on new item, and had a huge sale day...marketing promotion led directly to blog photo page....and had biggest blog visits day ever, specifically for that item.

Had a promotion with some other business owners already in the works, before this thread....for an event....and it is going to be a blast.....but after this thread, and meeting another group of store owners, we will be able to double participation in future promotions.

Drops in the bucket.

Thanks for the Discussion! Not a wasted bot thread. I sent it to some business owners who spend all their time creating beautiful things all day, and are quite successful at it.....and they were unaware of the bots, and what they do. I'm sure glad they didn't mention that here, so that someone who does 1/20th or less, of their business pipes up.... to tell them that they do not know what they are doing in biz.....they may have passed out from ROFLTAO.

Now, they have seen those bots.

It is wonderful that the techniques we discussed here in this thread are paying off for you mickey! That is exactly the value of these forums...that we can share opposing points of view as well as the things that work well for each of us and that might benefit another person. That is also why I offer the free classes that I do in order to allow those who do not spend time dwelling on marketing to get some concrete how to's and hopefully not see marketing as overwhelming or impossible in light of the success of others or the enormity of the task. With hard work and by supporting each other, we can all succeed.

Don't you have a blog to post your diary on?

I hope those drops in the ocean (not a bucket) work well for people, and hopefully they'll get a few drops of business from it. I hope you didn't suggest that those business owners they read all of this thread, or they'll be bringing bots in in droves.

Phil, regardless of what you're saying about bots, I don't see how it helps your point to disparage other people's efforts, no matter how small or otherwise they might be.

Btw, I'll probably be closing up by the end of the year, if that makes you happy too.

I don't disparage other people's efforts, Yumi. If you read Mickey's post carefully, you'll see that she was 'having a go'. Notice all the "drops in the bucket" bits, and the very first paragraph tries to make out (lie) that customers don't count to some people - I wonder who.

Why would it make me happy? And why are you likely to close? I keep posting in this forum that businesses can make it if the owners *will* do it. I keep encouraging people and, if you've read my posts over time, you'll know that I specifically help people to make it - even competitors - so why would I be happy that you'll be closing down?

Basically, a) lack of interest, b) multi-gadgets, and c) working to pay for 16384sqm of empty land is wearing off fast.

Well, it certainly doesn't make me happy that you're ditching it, but a lack of interest is a very valid reason. I don't know exactly what you do, but I'm going to drop you a PM.

Can you find someone to rent-share with you?

I'm already rent-sharing some parts of the land, but even then, it still means I'm paying for 8192-ish which has no real purpose any more.

That's unfortunate, Yumi. I hate to see any business fail. If you'd like to sell it, and perhaps do business by vendor (if that's possible - not sure of your business), I'm sure I could give you a spot.

It's kind of you, but the products just aren't selling anymore, and if I'm not supporting land there's a limited amount I'd have to do with the money anyway (I've never cashed money out completely - honestly, sales are so poor at this point that doing so wouldn't even repay the extra work time spent declaring the income for tax). The original "aims" that I had in SL, that I had been earning money to support, have proven not to really be possible - and moreover, due to the need to compete with people who do nothing but run their businesses, it's no longer possible to run a business on the side to support doing other things, which I think is a real loss in SL, but inevitable.

The problem basically is that most of my products were experiments when they came out, in neat new things that had only recently become possible on SL. They sold really well when new, but now there are many competitors for the same functions - including the multigadgets, which really hurt development in the scripted area generally. Since SL's feature set has become mostly fixed, the scope for further new ideas has fallen off quite a bit.

Ah yes, there is a ton of competition out there right now, in every field it seems.

I wish you well, and hope that you find a place of peace within SL.

you could put your stuff together and get in the busyness of combo-tools too

There's the new llDetectedTouchUV() coming up. And there's a new teleport hack I'd like to experiment with, if I had time in-world.

Stupid hurricane.

I generally try to avoid using "hacks" - I don't object to others using them, but I don't like the idea of bugs in SL not being fixable because too many existing scripts depend on them. Plus, I'm not on the right grapevines to find out about them

And, yea, I could make a combo-tool, but it'd be rather laggy (since the scripts weren't designed to be used in that way). I _do_ have a "grand project" to try and ease that particular problem, but that's a fairly substantial project which is extra-SL (basically a compiler targeting LSL, and inputting a mixture of LSL and Occam!), and I don't know how I'll market or distribute that (I'm not even worrying about that yet - even figuring out how it's going to work is huge)

Yumi, Ive been through it and know its a tough decsion to make but when I decided I realized the reason I came to SL was to have fun, not have a second job. Being in business here was fun but became the all encompassing of SL.

I stopped being in any form of business a couple years ago, sold all my land and concentrated on helping others and making SL fun once more. Im very happy with my decision and hope you shall be as well

Toy

I know of others who've had this problem. Running an SL business has to be your #1 priority and ideally your only priority. Poeple who try to earn money to support non profit activities and projects will generally fail due to the amount of time needed to be succsessful, especially nowadays when the competition is much larger. Personally I gave up all SL non work related persuits about 2 years ago. I now spend about 30 hours a week in SL and every second is spent on my business. I think this is the case for the small minority of people who earn a decent income from SL. If you want the big bucks you've got to look at SL as a second (or first) job and devote your time accordingly.

(nod) And unfortunately, I think that's pretty horrid.

The problem is - you can tell when products are made by someone who's passionate about doing a particular thing in SL, and made the product for themselves to use as well. Often, they are good products (although they tend to be quirky). But nowadays, they're often buried, because if you aren't working on marketing almost 100% of the time, you won't be seen compared to those who are..

Get someone else to do your marketing, Honeybear hinted at it. Obviously this won't change your mind and if your heart isn't in it anymore or you're feeling that it's not worth it then that's really the most important thing, it's what you feel is best for you that should take precedence.

I'm finding that out.

My passion is teaching. In addition to loving to teach, I had planned on the income plus tips to be my spending money in SL (including paying rent) so I no longer would purchase lindens. As fate would have it, right when I was admitted to faculty at this particular school, it closed. And this was a school that had been around a long time. (I took my very first SL class there and for the longest time thought it was the only school in SL...lol.)

I had been dabbling with selling things I made via SLX/XStreet and having a yard sale now and then where I sold items I no longer wanted and added a few of my products in as well and was amazed when they sold.

After the school closed, I decided to go premium and get a 512 parcel. 117 prims would provide PLENTY of space for the few items I had and planned on making. (Sidenote - yes I could - and still might - investigate other SL schools, but I chose the one I did because overall I felt it had the best quality of instructors. I have taken classes at most of the schools in SL. Some are better than others, some are very dependent on the particular instructor for a class, but none have the same "feel" I got with the other school.)

Shortly after purchasing the 512 parcel, an adjoining 1024 came up for sale during the time land sales were really low so I purchased it since the small monthly tier was manageable. Errrr....then another adjoining 1024 was for sale and I purchased that with another bump up in tier...still about the same as if I played EQ monthly.

Since we were still renting land for our home and now had enough prims to have our home and a small, quaint shop on my land, we moved over.

I had attended some classes on starting a SL business and marketing even before I met Jojo, but began paying more attention now. Then I got the impression from reading the forums that one thing the merchants had in common that had a lot of sales was a lot of items. The quaint little vintage shop that I had envisioned couldn't handle a whole lot, so I ditched that shop and, yes, purchased two more parcels so I could build a 3-story structure and expand.

So now I'm following all the marketing tips for keywords, etc. and thinking ahead to a large store, when I still have only a few products because I've spent all my time reading the forums on how to promote a business I really don't have yet. Plus, by the time I do all that, when my partner comes online I'm dead tired from that (apart from RL) and we don't have the fun we used to. Everything is about "the business" and now I *have* to make a certain amount of sales to at least offset some of my tier.

I now have a choice - continue on and figure that I'm in the building process of my business and once I get the building situated and more products made (whenever I can find time for that), I won't have to spend as much time on it.

OR

I can scale back, sell off most of my land, and go back to the small, quaint shop I wanted in the first place and enjoy other things in SL again and spend the time I would on marketing on creating new classes to teach...even on a volunteer basis or for tips because that is what I truly love to do.

*Sighs* and wishes I had just stuck with my first idea.