Tips for other Merchants

[Medhue Simoni]

Figured I'd start a thread where merchants can post tips to other merchants on things that work for them. When shoppers have better and better experiences, we all benefit. One way for shoppers to have a better experience, is for them to be able to find products.

On that note, I'll post my tip. Recently, I was browsing thru my items in my Manage Listings page on the Marketplace. I noticed that almost all my AOs were rated M. They are AOs, and there's no reason for them to be M. I knew this before, but was just too lazy to want to fight with LL's naughty word BS. After spending an hour or so trying to figure out the word that was causing the listings to be rated M, I figured out it was "AOs" that was the problem. How crazy dumb is that? Since I made the changes, sales have improved considerably. Yes, I know it is a pain to try and figure out the dumb naughty word, but it can have a big impact on your sales.

1 way to figure out the trouble word in a quicker way, is to first check each section that  could be the problem. For instance, LL will say it is in your description, but it could also be in your keywords. So, make sure you test each area separately. I usually just copy my keywords into a notepad, and then delete them from the listing. Then I update the listing and see and the G rating held or not. If the listing is still M, then I replace the keywords, and then copy the whole description to the notepad. Then I delete the whole description, and update the listing. Generally, 1 of those 2 exercises fixes the rating, but now you have to figure out the word. For the description, you just have to delete whole sections of the description, and keep narrowing down until you find the offending word.

 

What's your tip?

[Tamara Artis]

I am still lets say a baby seller and just want to say its a great idea for the thread!, I hope to find a lot of useful information. 

[Polenth Yue]

My experience is malls or small side shops don't do much unless they're in an area that's fun to explore. I've never had much luck with basic malls, but I do sell stuff from a little shop in a hidden cave behind a secret door. When I tried various selling events, one with everyone in a plain grid pattern didn't sell anything, but Fantasy Faire with its decorative sims meant a lot of sales. So I ignore malls, unless they have shops integrated into a nicely built sim. Which is pretty much never, as they almost always put them away from the main sim areas and have a very generic build.

It shouldn't surprise anyone, as one reason for shopping in-world rather than on the marketplace is for the experience. There's not much of an experience in a featureless series of shops. But apparently this does surprise mall designers.

[Medhue Simoni]

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Tamara Artis wrote:

I am still lets say a baby seller and just want to say its a great idea for the thread!, I hope to find a lot of useful information. 

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Thanks Tamara! The only difference between a "baby seller" and a grand merchants is time, ambition, and knowledge. Good luck with your business!

[Medhue Simoni]

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Polenth Yue wrote:

My experience is malls or small side shops don't do much unless they're in an area that's fun to explore. I've never had much luck with basic malls, but I do sell stuff from a little shop in a hidden cave behind a secret door. When I tried various selling events, one with everyone in a plain grid pattern didn't sell anything, but Fantasy Faire with its decorative sims meant a lot of sales. So I ignore malls, unless they have shops integrated into a nicely built sim. Which is pretty much never, as they almost always put them away from the main sim areas and have a very generic build.

It shouldn't surprise anyone, as one reason for shopping in-world rather than on the marketplace is for the experience. There's not much of an experience in a featureless series of shops. But apparently this does surprise mall designers.

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I think it might depend on the products and the mall. My experience is similar to yours. What I find to be better, are places that have events or are rpgs, where my products are very relevant to whatever they are doing. This is why I have affiliate vendors, for those places to get commission off my products and they supply relevant products to their community.

[Tamara Artis]

Thanks  

I expected people to rush in and throw tons of advices/experiences but since this didn't happen I will write few things... I am working with merchants for a long time now (doing their vendor work) and was managing a store so I have some experiences already and plan to use them on my shop.

Often I speak with people who complain their products are not selling well and ask what to do about it? I check their in-world profile and see no infos about their shop, I ask about the MP link and they say ahh I need to work more on that, I ask in what groups are they advertising and get lol as answer. It seems that a lot of people assume their products will automagically sell once they are thrown on the marketplace and burried deep with other products.

Each product needs to be optimised for sale:

1. clean, professional and consistent vendor look (no price on the vendor, no fancy hard-to-read-fonts, not too much text, no huge textures that need ages to load, no heavy editing and specially no morphs);
2. carefully chosen keywords and detailed description for each product on the marketplace - read those instructions we got from LL;
3. if you sell shorts don't put it in general Apparel category, same goes for the enhancements. I hear many people complain how they spend fortune on those and never get to see their product but at the same time most of these people chose either the MP landing page or the general category for the product. If you think about it for a moment, and lets say I search for blue shorts, I will open the MP landing page once and then go to Apparel - Women's - Bottoms - Shorts. So put your ad there.
4. Use sharing options and share your MP vendor on other social sites (assuming you have profiles there and if not hire a person to do it for you). 

Now for the in-world shop, I find it important to have one even if its just few prims somewhere in the Mainland sky, that little link on the MP that says "See item in-world" shows you are a serious seller. 

Don't know about other people but I find it annoying to land outside of the shop, walk to the entrance and get lost inside trying to find that one product, most likely I will give up. My advice is to put the landing point inside the shop and preferably in front of the best selling or new products area. If a person wants to check your landscaping skills they can walk outside but we assume they came to spend their money so make it easier for them to do so. Also its wise to connect each in-world vendor with the MP ones and use their own slurl on the MP making it even easier for people to find what they came for.

Delete all doors in in-world shop and try to use buildings with a lot of room for the camera. And make sure each product that is set for sale has that little "show in search" checked and with a nice name and description. It helps  

In my in-world shop I have no doors or roof, all vendors are simple, high quality snapshots witout too much editing and each product I made is shared with bloggers and posted on at least one social site. I am pretty lazy about it so I still didn't finish all the landscaping but I plan to make it as light as possible (mostly water without too much grass, trees and other distracting items).  So far I made only around 20 products but if you type "poses" in search my shop is first in places - allthough its rated adult and the sales pay out my homestead rent  

[Christhiana]

Those are some good tips and I agree on every one of them!

What I would like to add is, get it right from the start. Make sure the snaphot(s) you take of your product are top notch. And if you're not good at this, hire someone to make you the best possible snapshots. Shopping, especially on MP, is a visual thing. If I can't see the product well enough and from the angles that matter I probably won't buy it. The same goes for mesh clothing and demos. No demo, no sale!

[IvanBenjammin]

I meant to throw in my 2 cents when this thread was first posted, but I got distracted.

On the subject of maturity ratings: I agree its very important, especially if you're selling G rated stuff. Personally when I'm shopping I filter out adult rated items, especially in categories like 'home & garden' (it doesn't mean the same thing in SL as it does in your local home depot type store...).  The last couple of times LL borked the marketplace maturity filters I was able to correct it, but having a bunch of items flagged as adult did have an impact on my sales.

Regarding malls and satellite stores: In my experience satellite stores don't help much with sales, but they do help with brand exposure. Don't expect to make a lot of sales from a small store (especially somewhere with only enough prims to have some vendors and posters), but if you have a landmark giver and info about your main store, it will encourage people to visit there. Different niches might have different experiences - I sell building components so I don't get a lot of impulse buying (except from the wealthy landed gentry).

Product listings: Absolutely agreed with what's been said already. Clean, professional looking design, plenty of info about your products. My inworld vendors give out notecards which have similar amounts of info to a marketplace listing, and I try to have other posters around the vendors. I find it good practice to have one 'scenic' looking image to grab attention, but also have other posters which detail components and/or options included. Posters should be bright and clean, preferably with text that's readable on a 512x512 poster - 1024k posters are (IMO) utterly wasted texture memory. Don't make anything excessively dark, even if you're selling 'dark' things, as people use a wide range of display brightness settings and what's visible to you may cause me to squint.

Finally: Be nice to your customers, even the angry/irate/difficult ones. Be easy to contact via IM or notecard and try to respond promptly. Due to my timezone I'm usually asleep when SL is at its busiest, but I have a note in my profile explaining this and that I will respond asap. If you can remain calm and polite in response to an angry/disappointed customer then chances are you'll be able to diffuse the situation and maybe even win them over.