Selling on Xstreet just got more expensive

I was also apalled by the spin that this would "Make the Xstreet shopping experience better for people."

If you want to make the experience better, how about fixing the search so it doesn't provide 200 pages' worth of irrelevant listings every time I perform a search?

This is a bid for money, plain and simple.

Sure, server space and hosting costs money--THAT I can understand. But don't tell me this is going to make my life better in ways that it won't--that's just an insult to my intelligence.

Under the new regime, I'll only have a handful of items that will be worth listing (ie, items that can reasonably be expected to cover their own listing costs). Actually, at the moment, only two consistent performers come to mind.

I have sporadic sales of other items--but nothing that can be relied upon. I do not think my income from Xstreet would cover the costs to carry my entire product line.

It's a shame--a lot of my products probably WOULD cover their upkeep if left listed--but I can't really take the chance, and my present circumstances don't allow me to bolster my SL business with any real-world funds. I can't predict the market's capricious demands, and I don't know which of my items will sell at a given time.

I can be sure, though, that items no longer listed on Xstreet will no longer sell on Xstreet.

Well, whatever. My business will just be concentrated inworld once the guidelines go into effect.

Sorry, but I'm pretty ticked off. I can only hope that Xstreet withers and dies with the removal of its life blood that these new regulations seem to promise.

Totally agree. And as a very small merchant, the money has never been a huge issue; when I owned more land I just hoped to cover tier and have a little in-world spending money.

Eh, it will eventually all shake out one way or the other.

First off, I need to apologize to you, Marcel. I've always enjoyed your posts and perspectives and I admit I was in a really cranky mood the day I posted these two posts. I read the forums the first thing in the morning while I'm waiting the hour to eat after taking my thyroid med. I really need to stop doing that as I'm hungry, blood sugar low which adds up to a cranky Czari. For some reason this whole Xstreet issue just sits wrong with me for a variety of reasons, so on some points I am most likely over-reacting. I appreciate your response in kindness.

You're right; I've heard other merchants on other threads say their Xstreet sales have slumped lately.

And thank you so much for the compliment on whatever products you may have seen of mine...I appreciate that as well as sometimes I still fall into the "are my items good enough" trap.



Point taken and I stand corrected on this. I considered the commission a fee of sorts; however my items are priced so low it was often just 1L and not more than a few.



Now you're confusing me again by saying in the past we paid nothing when in the former paragraph you said we always paid via commissions. *grins* But I do see the difference.

I will readily admit that math and business projections are not my strong points as my background has primarily been in health-related fields and social interaction type work.

Off the top of my head I can't recall how many items I had listed; something like maybe in the 35-40 item range. For my small operating budget it still seems like a lot to pay 350-400L/mo for some items that rarely sell, but I need to try to wrap my head around that a bit more. I never used any type of paid advertising in the past so I agree it is likely more cost effective than other advertising methods; I just need to work it out in my mind a bit more.




I have honestly never looked at my Xstreet traffic stats. I didn't even know they were there for a long time. (I'm serious when I say math, even simple math, can confuse me; but I should be able to make sense of the stats. I will do that, though. Thank you for reminding me of that.



I think the stumbling block for me here is that I have tended to price my items too low, so even if I'm selling, the 10L/mo listing fee may not be recouped. As I continue honing my building skills, and going forward, I will begin pricing a bit more where the item should be. I have done research on some of my competitors and have had my jaw drop to the floor when I see what they charge. Example: One of the first items I learned to make was a trunk with an opening lid. Mine was very basic with minimal texturing. I originally charged 25L for it. Now I see variations on that trunk, mainly different sizes, square instead of rounded, but the biggest difference is the textures and sometimes keyholes and other details added. I've seen those trunks listed up to 300L and now I would easily to make something comparable.



I did pull everything but my 8 biggest sellers, my thinking being that if those were the only regular sellers, I didn't want to keep paying 10L/mo for items that only sold once in awhile.

Again, my lack, due to ignorance, of checking traffic stats. And the idea of cross-traffic never crossed my mind. Last year when I first began my business, I posted that I definitely do not have an entrepreneurial personality and could never begin a business RL. Plus I've never been in a job where I was exposed to marketing. I recall Phil saying that perhaps SL is where I can be what I can't in this respect in RL. I have already learned so much (well, more than I knew before) but as you can see, I have a LOT more to learn. I should be listening to you instead of debating. My mind just got in this groove on the issue. (I'm still not happy about how LL handled this entire issue, but I could reframe this into a valuable learning experience.

Thank you again, Marcel for your respectful and helpful comments and my apologies once again. (I'm almost afraid to read the next post since I know I was getting my "Irish up" by that time. )

Prefacing the post first with another apology.




Point taken again. I know I'm sounding like a broken record, but a lot of my attitudes came from not having run a RL business, nor been in any position where I had to deal with statistics or consider the issues you noted above. That does make sense.



That was a uncalled for comment on my part. Again, I sincerely apologize.

I really thank you sincerely for responding to my posts positively. This gives me a lot more food for thought and most likely a boost to my business.

In-game, if you use a scripted vendor, you can get a "wall" spot in a mall with just a few prims and sell a hundred variations on a product for the same L$60 a month. XSL will want L$1000 a month for the same product line.

They say they're going to fix this, with color variations in a single spot, but I'll believe it when I see it.

What gets me is that I read a group chat log concerning that and it's supposed to be BEFORE the fees are in place. And yet, the blog posts states that the fees are supposed to take place anywhere from 30 to 90 days after the announcement.

Given our experience with LL, coding and time frames.. I'm going with "highly unlikely," but praying that LL surprises me for once.

Edit: They also have more motivation to not coding it than for coding it. Say you have 8 colors of one item.. that's L$80 removed from the system and can be sold by Supply Linden. All the colors on one listing is L$10.

Just like all those plots you see inworld that never have anyone on them get abandoned, right? Once a small charge goes onto your credit card people often pay no attention to it, especially if they know they spend money there.

If people want to pay to list crap that's their choice to do so just like EBay

So very true. And so much yet another proof that the new policy is NOT about solving the clutter problem.

Ok for a moment considering you if were the average lazy person on a limited income what would your response be to the following situations

a) You stop playing a game but your stuff in there cluttering the world slugs your credit card $10 per month

b) You stop playing a game and your stuff cost you nothing to leave there cluttering the world for free.

Perhaps all those 16m are owned by rich people, more likely from what I've seen they are owned by alts as part of a network of parcels used to monitor land for sale in sims, I have one in my sim, has an invisible object continually sending data somewhere, an there have been people here before state their objective to own a 16m in every sim.

Maybe the new policy isn't 100% about clutter..........

Free???

How many such people (who abandon land in SL) are exempt from paying both Premium fees and tier?

That is a handsome concession from you (and I'm not being sarcastic!)^_^

Well maybe it isn't, the forums are full of people assuming any policy implemented is totally about fixing a single problem. I'm sure the people using multitudes of disposable alts to sell stolen content just love this idea, many of their alts posting here seem to anyway.

Ummm lifetime members would be one group

But otherwise I wasn't necessarily refering to Land, I was trying to point out if it's free for people to leave prims siting in sandboxes and other peoples land for the next 10 years do we really think they would bother cleaning them up?
As opposed to if they were continually charged every month I think ou would find a lot of people getting motivated to log in and clean up.
The same applies to Xstreet, as long as it is free, people will leave outdated crappy stuff there for 20 years without logging into SL, start charging and they will pull their non-profitable stuff as soon as they notice it's burning their credit card each month. If they are too rich or stupid to notice then nobody can fix that of course.

I may have lost the thread here, and forgive me if my reply is non-sequitur, but with the old policies, people could leave entries on XSL at no charge.

If they lose their land, they have no XSL box. Currently, I don't know what they do if an item is repeatedly unavailable (in any reachable box). LL's comments indicate that they do nothing, and that charging fees is a solution to this. It's a solution, but certainly not the only effective one.

If you can find a friend who'll provide a place to park you XLS box, you can leave the stuff listed at no charge.

But my guess is that LL are being disengenuous here. They could solve the "stale listing" problem without charging maintenance fees. It's not a good reason to justify it.

I also feel they're being disengenuous about freebies; that *customers* complain about freebies. Perhaps some merchants do. I've heard a number of merchants complain about them on this forum, always to the hearty jeers of the consumers!

I wish LL would be forthright in their communications and foster trust (even when they're doing something many will dislike), rather than providing these facil justifications that don't really hold water.

If they say it's necessary to charge maintenance fees to keep the database costs down, I'd have to take their word for it. (If that's not their real reason, then they must have their heads up their orifices.)

I so very much agree with you.

It's not that I expect ANY for-profit enterprise, LL or any other, to disclose every detail of their reasoning. But surely LL could refrain from the kind of whoppers they've been vending lately.

'Don't outright invent "reasons" that are insultingly and obviously false, because it's unlikely that your customers are completely lacking in intelligence' is basic good business practice.

No need at all No offence was taken here anyway. Of course, even when not needed, they are accepted!


It is not too late to look at those stats, as you can go a long way back. Definately worth looking into, you might be surprised.
As I said before, most of having a business in SL is about these things, not about building nice stuff. Sometimes that can be pretty boring, but it is all part of the deal.
The good thing though: it hardly costs anything if you mess up Provided your tier is not too high, that is

*hugs* and good luck!

Marcel

I haven't checked into the forums for a few day as I've been frantically trying to get at least a few holiday items out there. I just *have* to either start planning farther ahead or find my working "groove."

Always good to return to a hug though. *Hugs back*

As far as tier, atm my only in-world shop is at Primal Arts (THANK YOU again, Rhia!!). I only own 512 sqm where my home is currently, so no tier issues. When I purchased a lot of land last year, I wasn't ready to really "set up shop" and sweated out the tier each month. Even though it was fun to have that many prims, even just for my home, I realized if the tier was causing too much stress, to sell off land, regroup, and concentrate on getting a decent inventory of sales items going and then perhaps expand (slowly) again.

I was thinking of something and am hesitant to post on the blogs since the one time I did my email box began bursting at its seams from post listings I had not posted to nor even read in some cases.

So, back to the new fees at Xstreet:

Has anyone heard where these fees will be deducted? From the Xstreet $ balance? If there is no balance, then from the linden dollar balance on the account summary and if not enough, then from any USD$ that are there...then finally go to the payment method on file?