Store in the sky

I am getting a bit annoyed with the lag in the sim I have my store in. Objects and images take forever to rez. I’ve bought some of the land around me and stuck a few trees on it in order to reduce the amount of lag causing material in the sim, but there are still allot of high rez textures, torus shapes, a giant prim, scripts and particles etc owned by the other sim residents. I have considered moving to a new sim but in the end they all seem to end up the same, few nice plots surrounded by crap. Private island is currently not an option. Investigating renting on a private sim but the current plan is to move the store 500m above the ground. The obvious pro's to this is to eliminate/ reduce the problems I’ve just listed, but I would like your opinions on the Con's.

The only con I can see is I wont be able to attract passing trade, but I think nearly all customers arrive via the search facility so not a major problem. So what other cons are there? I rarely see stores in the sky but I don’t get out much so I value your opinion. I have about 8000 sqm to play with so it will be a largish store and secure, i.e. people wont wandering around and go plopping off of the edge to plummet to their certain doom.

If you own a large store in the sky, have seen some or just like shopping and have an opinion then please let me know what you think.

Thanks Porky

Lorantha's store (sci fi & star wars stuff) springs to mind. It's been there hovering high in the sky longer than i've been in SL.

I would say that if you do this, make sure you don't skimp on advertising.

Some of the best stores I have visited do precisely whet you are suggesting - they build at 500 to 700 meters up. You can always leave a "lobby" with signs and a teleporter on the ground, to catch random foot traffic.

I do most of my creative work in skyboxes to avoid lag issues.

The only down side is that other laggy stuff at a sililar altitude can still lag you. One of my skyboxes is at 500M, and there is a big store nearby, at 600 or so. Normally it's not an issue for either of us. But a while back they had a huge event, and the store was packed woth people, and over in my skybox, I could barely move!

So, it's not a cure-all, but going up does help.

Ah yes, I went to that store quite a while ago, I will return and check it out. Regarding advertising I already have advertising in place that i am happy with. I was thinking that I could put an nice welcome area on the ground, nice complex eye catching little build that will attract peoples attention, Display a few images inside, entice passing trade to click the tp and visit the main store above. Either that or a massive intrusive billboard to piss of the lag causing neighbours

Are you in an older class 4 sim or a newer class 5?

I too build at 600m and spend all my time building and really like it up there! Currently just a couple of skyboxes surounding me at that height so as we speak its pretty lag free

If anyone can name cool stores they have seen in the sky than that would be helpful, then I could go and have a looksie.

No idea. Dont even know how to check. the sim is 'Ear'

i have my main shop at 500m and landing point set to there ..lag free vendors and everything working nicely check it out if you want

ive kept my store small though its about 20x30 or so

i have my theater up at 700m and i build stuff on a platform around 600m ilike it up there alot

Both of my stores are at 420m over The Botanical Gardens. I have landmarks to the stores from below and both are listed in Search/Classifieds. Luna Bliss has her store above her sim as well.....

I personally don't see that there is much value in fly-by traffic unless you are near a busy area (club/casino/mall.) With ban lines proliferating like rats in a junkyard, so few people just fly around anymore...

Yes I agree. I think in the old days before they introduced point to point teleporting then passing trade had to be given serious consideration especially if you were near a hub. As you said, unless you a near a busy attraction then it's pretty irrelevant. I am near a club that has reasonable amount of traffic but to be honest I want to get away from them rather than enticing their patrons so I think passing trade can be classed as irrlevant. I will check out your stores when I am inworld later, thanks!

Thanks for asking this question, Porky. I've been mulling over doing the same thing with my shop (although for slightly different reasons).

Some of my favorite stores are in the sky -- Bliss Gardens and Serenite come immediately to mind. In fact, the first time I visited those places, I didn't even realize how high I was because they were so cleverly textured and landscaped to obscure the edges of the prim platform.

Yes I think a very well designed store is in order and to be honest that is encouraging me even more to do it as designing and building the store is half the fun. Its setting up all the inventory that i dont like!

There really are two ways you can approach sky stores, one is to hide the fact that you are in the sky (as Beebo noted) the other is to use the sky and run with it. Since my products are Sky Houses, which show best when hanging in the sky, I took the latter route. I would probably say that your store architecture needs to follow which ever path you decide on. A traditional box store will look odd without some effort concealing that it is in the sky, whereas an open-air store with platforms that uses the fantasy of sky building, won't.

There are a lot of us with stores in the sky is because we have public nature installations below us that we don't want to obscure. Bliss Basin is below the Bliss Garden Center and the SL Botanical Gardens are below my stores, for example.

I can't really think of a single drawback to doing this. It's a better experience for your customers overall.. The only thing that occurs to me is that customers who like to fly around larger stores might have issues. Even if they have a decent flight assist, you'll likely have customers smashing into walls/displays etc.

So other than giving some extra thought to designing the store to be especially comfortable to -walk- through, it's a fabulous idea.

For a store that large, I would probably be looking at breaking it into "departments" and using a multi-destination teleporter to help move people around....

All the new sims are using class 5 servers. I'm not in world so I can't see where Ear is, but if it is on the mainland, and its not on the southern end of the southern continent, or on the new continenet to the Northeast, then its probably an older server.

I recently moved from Masan (horrible lag) to a new sim and there was noticeable improvement between the two. While shopping for my new land I compared "like" sims that had casinos or clubs in them....class 5 servers handled these loads MUCH better than the older sims.

Don't think it's a class 5 then as its fairly old, I know the person who used to own the region from whom I got the land so must be at least 16 months old I reckon. if im on a class 3 or 4 server then i suppose moving to a newer sim could be a viable option after all. Shall investigate.

Thanks for the great advise everyone!