Sales STILL down. No idea why...

Talk about bizarre - I checked my traffic numbers, and for the first time, my annex store in a PG region surpassed my main store in a mature region in traffic. The main store used to get 3 times as much traffic because I advertise it more heavily. The PG region traffic has been slowing going up and the mature region traffic has been gradually decreasing since they released the new viewer.

But at any rate - people are buying stuff, and that makes me happy!

so has anyone gotten official information as to if these changes were intentional or a bug?

According to a blog entry two weeks ago the changes were made intentionally. I only hope LL adjusts the Mature settings on parcel level and not, like at this moment, on sim level or even most parts on Mainland.

By the way: punctuation has no effect. Instead of commas i used spaces between the keywords in my land description and classified. Listing results stay the same.

Well its spring early spring actualy so its very rainy and wet and damp. It still freezes at night and gets warm in the daytime.

I think they would call it "current functionality".

this bit of information is very interesting

I own a sim. I changed it from Mature to PG. Traffic DOUBLED.

I'm the opposite. At first I didn't understand your original question at all. I had to log on to look for an ALL tab. Have never used it! I use Classified for things I might want to buy and Places for named places. So I'm guessing other people could use different methods as well. As a user I don't understand the system used to compile the ALL list. I can see that it is alphabetical. I can also see that it is incomplete. I am unlikely to ever use it again! LOL.

As an aside I'd never search for clothes or clothing in any of these categories. Way too broad. I might look for a cocktail dress or stilettos or a cowboy hat. But not clothes. Again that's just me.

This whole situation is proving rather interesting to me. Although traffic at Lake Gnoma is depressed, my sales have actually increased. From this I conclude that I've never really had people finding my store via searching Places. I'm assuming customers find me through a combination of my classified, ads on SL websites, and word-of-mouth.

On the one hand it pleases me that my business approach is resilient enough to thrive even when searching gets wonky, but on the other hand this tells me that if/when LL finally allows us to set PG for individual parcels (I am yet another of the many PG businesses on M land) I need to do more to capitalize on Places search.

However, I refuse to go the route of campers. At least the SL version of campers; I mean, Lake Gnoma is a campsite in the RL sense.

1> Might be a valid reason.
2> Wouldn't spring break help it? Collage students not in school means more time in SL.
3> Tech Difficulties definitely is a yes. We never have enough of those.
4> There is a chance, but some people sell something so unique, others never think of it.
5> Theres nothing much to say about the economy. I don't think it's changed since I've been here.
6> Not sure what you mean by a bare market.
7> Freebies have never posed any threat to me, in fact i give out some and they also have had no customers lately.
8> I know SOME may be, but most people that find SL don't want to bother with creation, they just want to have a place to hang out and find places of interests.
9> Well we can't debate that one.
10> My prices are pretty reasonable.

Damnation.

coco

Double damnation.

WHAT THE HELL AM I SUPPOSED TO DO? I have half a sim in Rosieri.

coco

Here is what I am doing. I wanted to move the main store anyway because I don't like being between a free sex bondage place with nasty explicit porn pics and a Lolita club. Since land prices have gone up, I took my castle out of the sky and made my store as small as I could and started selling off pieces of the land. With the proceeds, I just bought a lovely parcel in an older PG sim (roadside even!) and I'm going to work on moving my store there.

Problem solved. I hope. I feel for you - at least I don't have half a sim. I was thinking about buying a huge chunk of land and expanding my business into other areas - but really, as unpredictable as Linden Labs is, I don't want to make that big of an investment. Good thing I specialize in low prim merchandise.

Coco, if it's any comfort to you: I'm still on Mature land and sales are getting better again. Not on earlier levels, but better.

The above postings prove in any case that the checkbox-issue REALLY affects sales , I have no doubt about that anymore. The bright side is that I've gotten to be so inventive in my promotion these last few days, that I will definately profit from that when everybody has checked the M-box again or LL has found a more fair solution for PG/Mature land.

Every disadvantage has its advantage.

Open a store in PG. I have a house rezzing thinger if you want help with it (cuts down on prims needed and space especially) for displaying houses.

Adopt advertising strategies that don't depend on the in-world parcel listings.

(in fact, given LL's tendancy to pull the rug out from under our feet with no notice, *never* depend on a single advertising method - you never know if it'll still be there next week. The more diverse ways you have to pull people into your shop, the better).

.

Well, the fact that we haven't been able to buy Lindens for a day now is not gonna help merchant sales (

Everyone should give LL a kick in the butt to get this fixed ASAP.
.

Thank you all for your advice.

What I PLAN to do is lobby the Lindens to make this thing like Classifieds. After all, they promised to do that in the future - well, I want the future SOONER, rather than later, like, say, YESTERDAY.

If they can spend their time coming up with banlinks and voice and all this other junk, they can spend a little time doing what they need to do to make up for the fact that they've purposely hurt a lot of people's businesses.

coco

Banlink is 3rd party software.

I sure hope so. Nothing against anyone on PG land but they now have an unfair advantage just because of the type of land they are on.

Moving cost money though. Plus of all the time it would take just because of LL.

It might be better if first you lobbied LL to find everyone's missing credit card information as well as fixing the broken system for updating payment information. As of the moment, even if Lindex were working the only peeps that could buy lindens are those who use Paypal. Credit Card payment is currently totally borked.

I find it extremely disturbing that LL has not made any public statment about this. Missing credit card data is a VERY significant issue to remain silent on!

I would LOVE to spend L$. Billing was completely down. Still this afternoon, PAYMENT DATA (credit card numbers, paypal) is still 3.5 hours behind, even though the blog states it is only 30 minutes.

MY spending is NIL because for a week, even though I have a lot of RL US$, I've hardly been able to buy L$ on LindeX or get money transfered from SLeX.

Linden needs to fix their basic infrastructure before the economy can continue.

Hi Jacer:

When I have tried to buy Lindens I get a page that says I have no payment information on file and that I should file my payment info, There is a link on the page "Delete and File Updated Payment Information." When I clik on this link I get an error page written in German . Once this afternoon, however that link did work. I re-entered the same payment information that I have had on file for months. After that when I tried to buy Liindens I got another error page. Is this what has been happeneing to you?

I have 2 separate Premium accounts linked with 2 different currently valid credit cards and two PC's. The above has been happening with both accounts on both PC's.

It is worth mentioning that economic statistics for March are now available and the number of residents spending money in world is still very disappointing.

February only 229,578 residents spent money in world.

March only 264,346 residents spent money in world.

Not a very large growth in consumers considering the size of the population. It makes one wonder if most are just cashing out rather than putting something into the system.

Estimated In World Business Owners - Unique Users with Positive Monthly Linden Dollar Flow for February was 25,365 unique users, and March the total was 31,929 unique users.

It appears that it is a very tight market in SL and only the most innovative will experience any growth in sales. I personally see these numbers as disappointing. I definitly wouldn't quit my day job after seeing these statistics.