What sells on SL ????

I want to start a business on SL and have been looking around a lot to get ideas ..... a lot of different things are found, but what really sells????

Clothes are already widely sold....

Clothes, furniture, buildings, weapons, skins and shapes.Also scripting is in demand if you have the talent for it.

Land

With the impending introduction of voice chat I thought today that there is going to be a market for setting up the equivilent of dirty phone lines, XXX sex talk etc....ooooh im rubbing mushed up banana into my eyeballs whilst attaching coat hangers too my nipples..oooohh etc etc.

Could be big business.

People can never get enough clothes in SL

It's a simple formula:

A. Something unique and new
B. Something difficult to make or aquire that is in great demand
C. Something that is marketed well based on A and/or B

A+B+C= Sales!

Your best idea will incorporate A,B, and C, but any combination will be successful. The hard part is finding something with those qualities that 4 million other people, potentially looking for the same thing, haven't already found or made.

One of the sticky threads on how to make L$ in SL put it best. To paraphrase:

Clothes were my opinion as well but I see more and more people starting selling things at very, very, very low prices...

Any more suggestions?

Don't worry about what sells, when you are just starting out you want to make things that you enjoy. Otherwise this just becomes another job, and one that doesn't pay particularly well either. Build the things that interest you enough that you will become a craftsperson, SL is full of stuff made poorly because somebody decided to go into business and didn't really have a passion for what they were doing. Figure out what you WANT to make and then figure out how to market it to the people who want to buy it.

There is a big market for objects but there is also a lot of competition, not least from freebies. All my clothes are freebies or ones I've made myself. And (hushed voice here!) my skin is CS Passport Malibu, a freebie - I've looked at skins costing thousands of L$ but they are no more realistic.

I've sold a few items - the buildings I've designed and the car that I worked on with my advisor.

But I agree that land is what really sells. I buy underpriced 32m plots, stuff them with my sale goods (boxed) and sell the plot with the goods for a profit. But often the new buyer returns the sale goods to me anyway! I am rambling on now so I'll just repeat - land is the main saleable commodity in SL.

avatars, pose balls, animations (AO's too), services, and possibly pr0n depending on who your focusing on.

Sex...sex...prims that shine...and sex.

(now if you had real scripting or building talent this question would be moot)

Make the items you want, and you can't find. It's what I do. It's not the easy "make me a bologna sandwich" kinda answer, I know, but it's really the *best* way to make money in here.

(Ya, unless your name is Ansche)

Mari

When I first came into SL, I went to all the gadget shops buying a bunch of things like security orb, attack helicopter, scooter, laptop, etc... I quickly found out that some of those things are useless, but they attract those quick impulse buyers (like myself).

Clothing seems to sell well and sex items seem to sell well... but both of those markets look over-flooded. Do as others suggest, make stuff you enjoy making and build up a reputation with your clients. They will come back to a seller that is friendly and cares about the customer... they will also be willing to pay more for your items. Just constantly pushing new product without caring about clients gets you trouble... look at LL (ha).

What sells or what has potential for big profits? If you price it low enough, most anything sells.

Big profits:

1. Real estate
2. Real estate
3. Phone (voice) sex combined with sex animations (not here yet, but it will be huge as Porky said earlier once voice is introduced to SL.) Escort prices should go through the roof, if escorts become adept at verbal slutification. If I were an escort I would start writing scripts right now so I could develop unique fantasies and experiences for the "johns" that I wouldn't have to improvise on the spot. Who will know your reading from a script?

anyone has the answer about this?? isn't 32m2 too small? what can people use it for? Are people really looking for these pieces of land?

What you can use it for is land griefing: buy a tiny parcel, put an ugly sign on it, and force your neighbors to buy it at an inflated price to get rid of the eyesore. It is to be hoped that someday LL will figure out a social engineering hack to stop this type of griefing.

Put a gigantic rotating neon flashing particle-spewing pornographic eye-sore on it, and you might be able to force a neighbor to buy it at an exorbitant price just to be rid of its unsightly presence.

Extortion -- nice tactic, eh? Yet, it seems fairly common.

Edited to add: looks like I was beat to the post. But at least this here newbie is catching on in SL, lol.

You can erect a clock tower around the griefing prim.

I'm working on a series of low-cost, low-prim panels to block the damned ad farms and other visual crapola.

haha someone tried this with me in a sim once i had a big picture window up on that side they put all manner of things in the box so i removed the window .. they eventually gave up but it was fun to watch

i put the window on the other side gave a decent view as well

wonder if they ever managed to sell that plot

once i showed up to see this box containing a massive picture of a kid sticking his tongue out

then another time it was spewing red smoke

then all manner of strange and demented religious sayings on it

then i moved the window

then i watched and continued to laugh i think he gave up eventually but it was truly fun to watch

Well said Isablan. This is really great advice.

when I talked to ron inworld once he asked me how i made money and how i came to the decision to do the stuff i do ..

well the answer was simple actualy it just happened i had already been in SL for 8 months i had fun learning to do things made a game or two made a few houses and other doo dads then one day i made something I wanted but could not find from there it just kind of happened

In many cases I think the harder you look the more time you will waste and frustration you will incur. The goal I have in SL is to have fun first and foremost

I agree with Isablan. If the activity isn't something you *enjoy* doing, something that you would like doing even if you didn't get paid for it, then you shouldn't do it in SL just to make money. SL pays a fraction of what your time is worth in the real world, unless you're somehow living in an impoverished 3rd world nation yet somehow still have the fancy computer and high-speed net access needed to access SL.

I make clothes and furniture. Both sell well enough to make a profit over the overhead it takes to run my mall locations. Both might do better if I spent more of my free time designing new products of those types. By themselves, the profits there wouldn't cover my lunch at a fast food place, once a week.

I also sell textures. Mostly detailed 3D textures for building and making things in SL. I have a lot of fun making them, and they sell very well. I don't get much per texture, but they sell in bundles and they sell repeatedly. But what I make wouldn't sell if I didn't already have a lot invested in my Photoshop and 3D rendering software, and in developing my skills as an artist. If I was starting from nothing, there is no way that making textures, by itself, would pay for purchasing a copy of Photoshop.

Seriously though, if all you want is a way to earn more L$, then get a RL job, or a second part-time RL job, and take some of the money you earn, and just buy L$ with that. Even the worst entry-level, part-time, minimum-wage job pays more per week than all but the most lucritive SL jobs.

Know how many people actually make a profit in SL every month? Comparing the number of unique accounts that have logged in over the last 60 days to the number of unique accounts with a "Positive monthly L$ balance", that number is about two percent of all the people in SL. Two percent. And that counts anyone who made or cashed out more L$ on average than they spent/paid for, even if it was only a handful of L$ in the black. If you compare it to the number of unique accounts that logged in in the last 30 days, it's less than one percent of the active, unique accounts that have a positive cash flow. The other 99% pay more into SL than they draw back out of it, every month.

/me proudly raises her hand! Both hands!

Yup, that's me too.

There is no get-rich quick scheme in SL any more than in RL. If you want to make money, real money, then you have to invest both time and money to begin your business. And you have to work as hard as you would for a part-time or full-time job to make an equivalent income. That's assuming you can find a product that sells well enough to be worth that investment. Otherwise you'll be working a part-time job for significantly below minimum wage.

If your business venture isn't inherently enjoyable, you're guaranteed ulcers. SL is hardly a stable environment and sales are always subject to a beating when the tech side of SL in on the fritz. Which these days is very, very often.

I started a shape business because I couldn't find the images of women in SL that I happen to like. I've spent more money on this business than I've made, and probably would be significantly farther in the hole if I hadn't already bought land and happened to already have Photoshop and other graphic tools from my RL work.

The business I've created is fun: it gives me an excuse to shop for clothes (as if I needed one) and to play with my avatar's appearance. At best, I may someday break even with expenditures on advertising, props, clothes. But if I don't, oh well.

For most of us SL is a money pit. Like playing golf. Chances are you'll never ever become a golf pro. You spend money on golf to entertain yourself, not to make money.