Store Location Question

I have a couple of gadgets and plan on expanding the line and want to open a store to so that I can start selling them. I am not a premium account holder, so I can't own land and I had planned on renting some sort of land to begin with.

My question is, from experienced store owners, have you had better experience with opening stores in a Mall type location or just opening a store on an empty plot of land? I figure either way I am going to have to rent it and pay for classifieds and I hope to put the products on slex and slboutique, but I do want to get the best bang for my buck.

Any thoughts?

I'm no expert, but I'd think that if all other aspects were equal, you would do best in a mall that already has a good amount of traffic. That way, in addition to your classified ad and your SLExchange and SLBoutique ads, you could benefit from lots of walk-ins as well, benefit from the ads and traffic of every other vender in that mall.

You could also try for the best of both, like a small stall in a busy mall, with some of your products and a landmark giver that directs people to your main store with all your stuff.

-Atashi

I've never tried having a mall stand as main location, only as secondary locations. That said, while malls do have the advantage of walk-ins, they also have a couple of drawbacks: you can't change the parcel description in Search > Places and it'll likely be a generic "clothes weapons jewelry omg everything" description (unless you happen to rent at a really small mall where the owner is willing to add your store name to the parcel description). If the mall has incoming teleport set to landing point, people following your classified ads will still have to go from the tp point to your store. Also, Malls often have some restrictions on which vendors you can or cannot use - shouldn't be a problem unless you already invested in a vendor system, but I thought I'd mention it just in case And finally, there's always the lag aspect to consider - with all those shops around, malls can be rather slow to load.

If you decide to open your own store instead of renting a mall stand, there are commercial land for rent offerings around, which don't require a premium account.

I've had a stand alone store for about 18 months. I did try expanding into 2 popular malls last years and my revenue only increased by 3% over a 2 month period. This didnt warrant the additonal expense so I reverted back to just using my main store. Feedback from my customers indicated that nearly all of them accessed my products via a classified search rather than browsing malls or searching 'places'. This may be simplistic but the more I spend on my classified ad, the higher my sales are for that period.

This being said I sell prefabs, so not sure if passing trade was the best option for me. People window shopping may stop and impulse buy some shoes or clothing but generally not a prefab.

Personally, as a shopper, when I want to buy something I search the classifieds and visit them in descending order, so I think my L$ are better spent on my classified listing rather than rental space.