Interested in building furniture, not running a shop

Hi, I have another post active about creating a higher end rental community but my primary focus is design and re-creation of classic wood furniture with accurate and realistic textures from piece to piece (It takes forever to figure out the combinations of rotations and repetitions that will match the wood grain from a large object to a small one...... particularly a base sphere, cylinder or torus)

Anyway, I have set up a shop and even placed a couple of classified ads, but the traffic has been light to say the least. In a week of business I have sold exactly 4 items. I really don't want to sell this stuff myself. Is there consignment shops or any of the big home and furniture stores that will split the sale with me for placement. I am almost done with this awesome and functioning cherry roll top desk and I know it will be a seller, but not if it sits in my lonely shop. I would rather spend my online time building than running around advertising and setting up at yard sales.

Any ideas???? A popular shop that would sell on consignment would be awesome.

You might try listing it on the sl exchange website.

First, it takes time to build a business in SL. More time than just a week. This is also a somewhat slow sales period that we are moving into, people have spent a lot of money over the holidays and are shopped out and broke. One thing you might want to consider is renting a booth at a mall that has lots of traffic. Listing your items at SL Boutique and SL Exchange is also a good idea. Listing your items in the New Products forums here and at the other big third party forum sites (Second Citizen and SL Universe) is also a good idea (and free!) Most of all, be patient.

You've already gotten good advice, but just FYI, I did a couple quick searches and didn't find anything. I found your profile, but you don't have any info about how to buy your furniture. I think, first and foremost, it's got be be easy to find your stuff.

Thanks for the advice. I have two ads placed that come up fairly high when searching for "furniture".

I know I have to be patient Time is a premium commodity for me and I love to build. My rolltop desk took at least 4 hours of online time to get it to where I was happy with it. Thats 4 hours I was not pounding the pavement at malls or answering questions in the shop.

Somebody ought to start a business consulting service. It is hell learning how vendors work and finding high traffic malls, advertising etc. I have building for awhile but only getting into business recently so I never focused on the various sales techniques and vendors. I have gotten some really interesting people stop in that I have met and chatted about business. Maybe I should focus on custom work.

Anyways, stop in to see me sometime !!! (Redspire 209, 19, 56)

One of the keys to building in peace is to do it on a sky platform. You don't need anything fancy, just send up a 20'x20 plaform high enough in the air that shoppers don't necessarily need to chat with you but can IM if they have questions.

An easy way to look for vendor space is to ask around, I will bet by tomorrow you will have a whole bunch of suggestions. You can also do a search for "malls" and look at their traffic stats, avoid any malls with camping chairs as those throw off the real traffic.

Make sure your classifieds pictures are good, I can't tell you how many times I've made a decision about where to shop based on what I saw (or didn't see) in the picture provided. Also make sure your shop is listed in your "picks" and also note it in the main section of your profile.

Setting up a business does take some legwork, deciding where to locate, getting an attractive shop built, choosing vendors and getting your marketing together. Once that stuff is done, however, it becomes about providing customer service and getting new products out.

I checked your classified ads in your profile, and saw that you posted both in the "Shopping" category, which in my experience seems to be pretty overrun. From personal experience, I would recommend posting new furniture items in the "New Products" classified section, which at the time of writing this has 488 entries, compared to >1000 for "Shopping". (I'm not sure if it's giving me accurate results, as I'm getting different numbers on repeated searches).

Selecting "New products" and searching for "Furniture", I get 31 entries, and a 60L$ classified would put you in the middle of this page. In contrast, searching for "Funiture" in "Shopping" gives me over 800 entries, and 7600L$ for bottom of first page, which is clearly outside your budget. In my experience, people do use the New Products classified section! But don't keep your "new" product there for month after month And it doesn't hurt either to keep an auto-renewing classified ad with your shop name in the "Shopping" section, I think that people do search for shop names in the Classifieds section, and that provides them with an easy teleport. But in this case, I'd recommend actually using your shop name as the classified title, and not some random keywords.

I'd say selling four items when you have only been here since December is extremely good!

coco

I'll agree that SL Boutique and SL Exchange are great low-cost ways to get started as a merchant. No cost for either one for start-up, and all you need is room in-world somewhere to place a single prim.

It does take time to get a 'following' and for people to notice the things you sell. Location is important. If they don't see your merchandise, they can't buy it, no matter how good it is. Advertising is also important. Even if all you do is take out a L$50 classified ad, and make sure it lists relevant keywords, that will help to draw people to your store.

Don't be discouraged. Keep building, and keep improving your work, and the sales should come, eventually.

Anyone who has a JEVN server system could set up a vendor to split sales with you, to do a consignment sales option, as you suggest. Most of the other server-based systems also allow for splitting sales between a vendor owner and a content creator. I'd offer you a consignment split deal in my own furniture store, but I'm maxed out on prims and have no room for another vendor.

There is also a fairly new system called APEZ, that allows content creators to place their wares in a pool for others to sell, on a profit-splitting basis. Haven't tried it yet myself, but some friends have, and they think it's great! Essentially an APEZ Merchant can sell their own things plus any 'shared' items that others wish to contribute, and the shared items split profits as the content creator specifies. See http://www.apez.biz/ for info on that system.

That is good advice about placing my second ad in New Products. I have to complement Something Something (that's really his avatar LOL), the new owner of one of the mega malls. Not only did he stop in to see me, he gave me a tour of the mall and future projects sights as well. He was very helpful with suggestions like a logo and vendors. I want to look inot the Holo vendors since some of my pieces exceed 40 prims. A picture will never do them justice, but then I cna't afford to set them up in a mall.

BTW, business picked up since my last post 3 sales in the last 24 hrs and I have already beat my "allowance" from LL. Now if I could cover my $40 tier

I posted on SL Boutique last night and will do SL exchange tonight. It didn't look like the furniture categories had many sales....... most items had no "Buyers also bought" But its free and hopefully will bring people into the shop. As I perused things on SL Boutique, I made some notes of places I want to vist, but I wouldn't buy sight unseen (unless its really low price item . Nonetheless, I picked up more information about the various vendors there than I could in a week of bouncing around the grid.

Thanks for the help guys, I hope to be able to offer my own advice someday to early stage entrepeneurs.

Lincoln, as you noticed, a lot of people won't buy sight unseen when it comes to things like furniture and houses, so make sure you put the name of your store and location in the product description. I find that SLX and SLB drive a lot of traffic, and sales figures aren't always a good indicator since people do like to actually see the items first...

Just an update on my business. I opened on January 1 with my furniture and have expanded into hats..... mainly because my neighbor thought the one I made was really cool. Beleive it or not, I am averaging about 450L a day and over 10,000L so far in January.

It just goes to show that you can stumble into something. Clearly my 30 & 45 L hats are popular and I stumbled into it. I am still selling furniture, but the hats are paying the bills

The advertising advice was very helpful. I am running 5 ads now and getting good responses from them. I set up in a popular free yard sale and am selling there as well.

Its all good !!!!

Fantastic actually!

I recently started using the Apez vendor system. It allows you to control your products in your server but give other people permissions to sell your product out of thier Apez vendors at their stores and locations, and they can make a commission on each sale.


Another thing to consider is that there are 100,000 furniture stores out there in SL so you have a lot of competition. Your product will have to be very special to stand out from the rest.

I just wanted to say that I bought some of your furniture and I think it is very nice merchandise. I am looking forward to more furniture designs from you.

Thanks Armand!!!!

I have placed a classified ad generally between L$2000 and L$4000 per week for ages. About 6 months ago a friend suggested I place a second ad at just $50 with the logic that most new content creators will place low value ads and allot of people will check the listings from the bottom up in order to check out newer stores and give the new sellers a chance. Wasn't sure if this logic was valid but placed the ad. After 6 months this ad generates around around 15% of my traffic as determined by the teleport stat on the classified ad in my profile. For the sake of L$50 a week this was a very profitable experiment.

I personally have found that the amount of searching I will do in the classifieds is proportional to how important the thing is to me....... well, no duh. LOL Anyway, I would assume that when is searching for something expensive, one tends to check more ads. I was looking for a prefab office structure and willing to pay over 2000L. So I must have teleported to 10 different locations from ads.

I know I have no chance to compete on ads that are found from a basic "furniture" search, so I have tried to specialize in wooden furniture. Most of the customers I have talked to have told me that the "wooden" was the thing they were looking for. I have also found that good pictures make a difference. I am selling cowboy hats so I put a picture of Clint Eastwood from The Good, The Bad and the Ugly in the pic space and it does wonders. I think we get used to seeing images of SL renderings and when we see a RL picture, we look more closely. A purely unscientific observation.