Advice on Sales!!

Amara, if you're online, your STEAM hunt gear containing the prize and next store's LM needs to be set for sale. There was a problem with the original scripts in the gears: they weren't giving out the contents, so vendors were contacted and asked to set the gears for sale for L$0. An updated LMs list has been given out to the hunt group, and Talon Faire is listed as: "Gear Not For Sale, IM sent". I don't know if your IMs get capped inworld, so I'm letting you know here, too.

Damn it all!! I had that happen several times when i set it up- and had two differnt people try it with the Note giver thing- and I totally missed the sale one!!! argh!~
goin over immediately - thanks much!!!!

I hope you're inworld already, Amara. Our region got redmapped and I was logged out. Immediately before that, the server refused to deal with a notecard I was editing. Now, all I'm getting is, "Despite our best efforts..." and I can't log in. There's no login screen, either. Something just seriously got borked.

Edit: And now I'm just hanging at the interminable login. *sigh*

Yes- i got in immediately- changed the perms and sent an IM to the Engineers - and one to someone who had IM'ed me - i then got logged out in a TP and could not get back in-

Oh my... the sky is falling (I am beginning to feel all 2006 again..)

Hey everyone,


Would any of y'all be willing to come take a look at our marina/mall and give me honest and constructive feeback on what you think we could do there to improve the customer experience and boost sales?

If you could send me a notecard with your critique, I would be so happy!

Here's the SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Yachts/126/129/30/


Servian Serevi,
Jetset Yachts/Jetset Designs

I'll pop over - and bumping this for you!

Thinking before acting
==============
Well I learned a lesson to do calculations before action

This week I decided to rent me another homestead, simply because there was one available at my current landlady. After paying the purchase price (first week tier plus a small fee) and browse for terrain files, I decided it would be smart to look at my sales once more. I can easily afford the two homesteads from my sales, that was not the point, but still.

To my surprise, the combined sales from my current homestead did not justify the expansion! Eventually there would be no more profit from there, provided that the sales would not get a boost from the split. And doing only business to pay my rent is not an option anymore, I want profits So I immediately canceled the rent and lost 10K with this foolish action.

Adult move
=======
After I got the email from LL about having still adult content listed on mature land, I decided to get rid of my 4096 parcel, and only sell the animations from Zindra. Which in the end meant that since that day I did not sell a single animation pack in-world.
Now comes the funny part: I can still sell my animations from mature land, as long as I do not advertise them as being adult! So if I put up a parcel with all animations, and do not use prohibited keywords, I can sell as much as I want. Even with the poseballs active. According to what Blondin said, that is. So lets go and browse for a parcel

Furthermore there are a few parcels in my sim (double prim) for sale at 43 linden per sqm, Bay City prices. If they really sell for that price, my Zindra venture will close down completely, because I will sell too! Somehow I doubt though that those prices are realistic...

I rented a little adboard a stone's throw away from Marcel's Zindra store- It is on a roadside and only cost $25/week- i got two because my advert just works better that way- I am not expecting much success to be honest- AdBoards, to be effective need huge traffic numbers which this locale does not upply- but was a test.

I am wondering if Zindra will just be one massive FAIL.


~~~

@ Servian Serevi - went to your Yacht's place last night- it is a lovely build and rented fully as the notecard i received mentioned. The prices for stores was quite reasonable and you are lucky in that you have a huge Pixiedools there- so folks coming there may wander about. I did not see someof the things one typically does seen in malls- the Freebie rings and MM boards- little incentives... However that said... while those things draw folks in (traffic) it does not do much to generate sales. That much is of coure to the business owners and what their product inspires. You as the Mall owner, could perhaps sponsor a contest or a live music venue or some other short time event that might generate the traffic that hopefully will then end up in folks stores.

Perhaps a sidewalk sale prominently advertised in Events? Maybe one night a month of a live show of some sort.. Many Mall owners find themselves in this situation- Myself I rent for tops a month somewhere- if the revenue does not justify the expense I am gone. As I said, your place is full- so they must be doing business! Keep up the good work and kudos for wanting to do more.

Oh- just a sidenote- have you thought of carts? Smaller retail rentals for very few prims - could generate further interest in your space from renters and might add a sea-side charm to the mall in general. If you do give me a holler- I favor the little cart rentals as adverts for my store.

Try Fhelzgud Free Public Yard Sale, no profits to split, clubs to join, rent to pay, easy way to test your products and yes we still have shoppers.

Fhelzgud in Sammamish, hmmm copy/ paste suddenly gone bonkers grrr

Just so you know Ray- this thread is NOT about self promoting rental places etc- in case you missed that since it's only been obvious for that almost 4000 posts...

ama...ray's place is for free and in my early days in biz i used it...and was thankful for being allowed to do so. ray offers something very worthwhile to people and i think offering it here is no different than any of us helping each other. thanks for posting ray. waving...

I stand corrected Jojo- I do not know Ray and it sounded promotional. My apologies Ray. Thank you for sharing.

/me opens the thread to muttergrumble that Xstreet needs a multiple image-upload capability.

/me returns to twiddling his thumbs between each single, two-minute upload.

That sure wd help! Do we open a JIRA?

I suspect one's probably already there, and being ignored (as usual). I have nine images to upload for one item here. *sighs*

Been far too long since this thread fell off first page so reviving it-

Got this interestingly amusing bit in my email today-
"The new AdFusion format has been launched: the 2x3 Sandwich boards. These boards are worn by SL residents, they are smaller than a regular 5x3 boards, and have the vertical orientation. You can see the new board example here:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Shubelik/18/16/42/ "

I recall early on we talked about something similar- just thought i wd toss it out at y'all.

Well it's about time for a new update I guess.

Mature vs Zindra
===========
Probably I mentioned before that my latest business, an animations store, moved to Zindra. Well, after getting confirmed that I was still permitted to sell on Mature land, as long as I would not use certain words in ads (and land description for search). Even though I got my free swap, and had 4 double prim parcels in Zindra, I decided to open up back on Mature land, so I rented a plot from a friend

Since was already thinking of moving all my businesses to mainland, I decided to put up the double prim land for sale. Half a sim of mainland is quite expensive after all, even with the low pricing.
Took me quite a while, but all 3 parcels were sold, against pretty steep prices too. Double prim mainland is valuable after all. With the money I earned there, it was easy enough to buy me a mainland plot, 35008 square meters. Which got me into the US$ 125 tier level

Still financially it will hardly change a thing. For my Homestead I pay 8000 linden a week, resulting in about US$ 125 dollars. For my Zindra parcels, my tier was 25 dollars. Making a total of US$ 150 for my land costs. Which got me 1875 (zindra) + 3750 (HS) = 5625 prims. My new parcel is 125 + VAT = US$ 148.75 for 8012 prims. So for even a dollar less, I get 2387 prims extra!

Will take weeks before I actually have done the entire move, but I am looking forward to it!

In-world sales
=========
Sales seem to have dropped for may people, including me. Still no complains, but it is something to watch the next weeks/months. If it was only me, it would be easier to solve, but it seems a slump that many fellow merchants experience.

XStreet sales
========
The move towards the new website did worry me, but I do not experience much of a difference. And the last week, I even have had 2 days with almost 100 views, which is pretty good compared to the past. Using 4 to 5 homepage featured items, costing me between 12 and 15 thousand lindens, seems to help a lot. Especially since the animation packs generate more then enough revenue to pay for the features, while at the same time the rest of my sales benefit from it.

I get no sales really guys....
I did this for my entertainment so if I didn't get many that was ok too.
However it would be nice...and I spent some time getting together what I had ready to go.
I had my own store, which is now just a small thing along side my venue. I have more items at what I cal my mainland main store on a great sim. This sim doesn't get a lot of traffic.
Not because it is not great, its beautiful a friend has set up like a European village with other shops and things. I have an X Street account going, which I did invest in bumping with there advertising. I have my classified too in world.
I just haven't had the heart to invest all my time in world to do this much more intill I see something, anything come back from what I have already accomplished.
What else ..I just don't know what else I can do. I don't think my items are over priced... and I have some nice things, not just tooting my own horn.

morgaine, send me a notecard in world and i will send you my notes from my marketing classes....i barely do classifieds, have very little on xstreet and mostly rely on using freebie groups, my own group and forums posts to generate interest. ive had my biz now now for two years and i did not see a huge in increase ever. it was a very small, very steady increase over the course of at least a year. at one point i had 10 store locations for exposure but now i have one huge store on my own land.

building up a customer base took daily marketing and promotions on my part for over a year and now i still have to work at it to keep the numbers up.

my sales have been down over the last few months but almost entirely due to my own efforts. ive been creating less and more sporadically, promoting less etc. but in the last 2-3 weeks, ive been doing more with great results.

hope this helps.

will do thank you !

So - been frequenting other fora recently, but this thread only lives here - so....

I direct your attention to this:
https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/commerce/blog/2009/09/17/changes-to-xstreet-sl-listing-popularity-ranking

Brief excerpt:

"Here's what we heard:

•The Popular items feed that is showing up on the secondlife.com dashboard and on the link to the Marketplace from the top Mega Menu unfairly gives an advantage to items that are 50L$ or less.

•While ordinarily this shouldn't be a problem, some merchants appear to be placing a number of items in that price range to try to generate additional traffic. This creates a substandard experience for buyers who should see a variety of content and prices. This also creates a race to the bottom in price for merchants, making it harder to sell quality goods.
•Merchants were concerned that the Featured Items link in the mega menu didn't bring enough attention to the Home Page Featured Enhancements"


So- how are you guys feeling about adverts and enhanced view stuff and so forth- I figured I wd give them another shot and just plunked down $899 for a month's worth of views - Discuss.

They apparently dealt with the problem with a patch they did last Wednesday. How it works now, I have no clue Here's the link to the blog post tho: https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/commerce/blog

Die you know that anyone now can be included in the Lookbook IF you have friends in the right places or lots and lots of linden to pay Modiva for advertising!

im pretty much over xstreet...i have very few items there and really dont do anything to enhance my presence...my in world sales are still good when i work at it and that is fine with me. i dont see the value in giving more money to LL to promote my stuff on xstreet

And speaking of adverts... http://iheartsl.com/ - can anyone tell me how the little advert that flashes thru a couple pix is done? You can see mine there and I am glad fo rit- but wd prefer something with more impact.

"The New Item Feed displayed in the Commerce forums will now return the last 100 new items from Xstreet SL, not limited to 20 as it was previously. "

I like this part - but u better keep putting out new stuff! - Damn gotta go find the stupid blog profiles now and fill them out - *grumble*