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Caroline Takeda
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Hi

I am thinking about going into the retail business. My plan is to rent small jobs on busy regions and resell relevant stuff. I am not expecting to become rich, its merly an experiment I will write about on my blog.

 

  • Which regions did prove to be good locations for small shops?
  • Anyone can share experience in that?
  • What is the price range I have to expect?

If you are a sim owner of a popular themed region ( including but not limited Adult themed regions) and you have shops for rent, please get in touch with me.

Contact me In-World (carolinestravels) or sen E-mail to:

caroline@siemensnews.com

Thanks in advance

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Where. No reason to let standards start slipping on your blog.

Is there any reason you're not considering marketplace.secondlife.com?

You get quick visibility, centralised search, and it's free.

Busy regions are not equivilent with sales volume, Marketplace replaces this awkward and impractical market. Malls were previously based on density and low value-adding tricks (or outright lying).

Malls post-Marketplace are either vanity projects or dead, I don't think there's any value investing in them.

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Freya Mokusei wrote:

Where
. No reason to let standards start slipping on your blog.

Is there any reason you're not considering marketplace.secondlife.com?

You get quick visibility, centralised search, and it's free.

Busy regions are not equivilent with sales volume, Marketplace replaces this awkward and impractical market. Malls were previously based on density and low value-adding tricks (or outright lying).

Malls post-Marketplace are either vanity projects or dead, I don't think there's any value investing in them.

Freya,

i came accrosss several full perm products on marketplace. They state in their TOS that one is not allowed to resell their stuff on marketplace, hence the reason I though about malls. Another option would be a "mainstore" and promoting it via different media including my blog.

Anyone else with an opinion about malls?

 

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Just as an observation, I don't think I'd buy anything from your store(s). 

You've made it clear that you want to "sell" as an experiment, and that you'd be reselling stuff rather than making it yourself. That's two reasons right there to make me think I'll choose to spend my money somewhere else.

Practical reason:   If you only resell stuff, I'd prefer to buy it from the creator, as then I have the option of decent customer service if I ever have any problems.

Ethical reason:  If you're just doing it as an experiment for blog-fodder, why would I choose to give you my cash?  

Also, malls are fine, but in my experience almost always empty. When I shop, I look on MarketPlace first, then visit the in-world store.

And I never buy from resellers. 

 

 

 

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carolinestravels wrote:


Freya Mokusei wrote:

Where
. No reason to let standards start slipping on your blog.

Is there any reason you're not considering marketplace.secondlife.com?

You get quick visibility, centralised search, and it's free.

Busy regions are not equivilent with sales volume, Marketplace replaces this awkward and impractical market. Malls were previously based on density and low value-adding tricks (or outright lying).

Malls post-Marketplace are either vanity projects or dead, I don't think there's any value investing in them.

Freya,

i came accrosss several full perm products on marketplace. They state in their TOS that one is not allowed to resell their stuff on marketplace, hence the reason I though about malls. Another option would be a "mainstore" and promoting it via different media including my blog.

Anyone else with an opinion about malls?

 

You can't resell them "as is" on the MP.. You also can't resel them "as is" inworld, you have to do some serious modifications to them.

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Rosie Eun wrote:

Just as an observation, I don't think I'd buy anything from your store(s). 

You've made it clear that you want to "sell" as an experiment, and that you'd be reselling stuff rather than making it yourself. That's two reasons right there to make me think I'll choose to spend my money somewhere else.

Practical reason:
   If you only resell stuff, I'd prefer to buy it from the creator, as then I have the option of decent customer service if I ever have any problems.

Ethical reason:
 If you're just doing it as an experiment for blog-fodder, why would I choose to give you my cash?  

Also, malls are fine, but in my experience almost always empty. When I shop, I look on MarketPlace first, then visit the in-world store.

And I never buy from resellers. 

 
 

Rosie,

a reseller can not provide customer service? Why is this?

Retail (as we call it in the real world) is an absolutly legimate way to market stuff. In RL we buy stuff from retaillers very often. In fact, most of the things we buy are bought through this very typical distribution chain:

Producer -- Wholeseller --Retailer -- Consumer

Why would that be bad thing in a virtual world? The retailer just needs to think of a value proposition, whatever that might be.  Could be lower prices, could be more choice (selling products from different designers), could be service, could be presentation or just being at the right time at the right place (i.e: a bikini shop on a beach)

Is building a business and writing about it unethical? Lets assume its succesful. Would the story how it happened not be of value to readers of the blog - especially for noobs? If you get what you pay for, why would you even care what my motivation would be?

 

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carolinestravels wrote:

You can't resell them "as is" on the MP.. You also can't resel them "as is" inworld, you have to do some serious modifications to them.

Nope.

It says, you can resell them as is In-World but NOT on MP. Some even state that they are build for resell AS IS.

 

i dont think we are talking about the same stuff.. I think you mean reselling things that someone else made, textured and are selling for people to sell in thier stores in world, like a resell vendor.

I am talking about templates.

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carolinestravels wrote:


Rosie Eun wrote:

Just as an observation, I don't think I'd buy anything from your store(s). 

You've made it clear that you want to "sell" as an experiment, and that you'd be reselling stuff rather than making it yourself. That's two reasons right there to make me think I'll choose to spend my money somewhere else.

Practical reason:
   If you only resell stuff, I'd prefer to buy it from the creator, as then I have the option of decent customer service if I ever have any problems.

Ethical reason:
 If you're just doing it as an experiment for blog-fodder, why would I choose to give you my cash?  

Also, malls are fine, but in my experience almost always empty. When I shop, I look on MarketPlace first, then visit the in-world store.

And I never buy from resellers. 

 
 

Rosie,

a reseller can not provide customer service? Why is this?

Retail (as we call it in the real world) is an absolutly legimate way to market stuff. In RL we buy stuff from retaillers very often. In fact, most of the things we buy are bought through this very typical distribution chain:

Producer -- Wholeseller --Retailer -- Consumer

Why would that be bad thing in a virtual world? The retailer just needs to think of a value proposition, whatever that might be.  Could be lower prices, could be more choice (selling products from different designers), could be service, could be presentation or just being at the right time at the right place (i.e: a bikini shop on a beach)

Is building a business and writing about it unethical? Lets assume its succesful. Would the story how it happened not be of value to readers of the blog - especially for noobs? If you get what you pay for, why would you even care what my motivation would be?

 

No, a full perm reseller can not provide accurate customer service in every case. Such as .. the animations in your couch don't work correctly.. How do you fix that is you didn't make it?

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carolinestravels wrote:


Rosie Eun wrote:

Just as an observation, I don't think I'd buy anything from your store(s). 

You've made it clear that you want to "sell" as an experiment, and that you'd be reselling stuff rather than making it yourself. That's two reasons right there to make me think I'll choose to spend my money somewhere else.

Practical reason:
   If you only resell stuff, I'd prefer to buy it from the creator, as then I have the option of decent customer service if I ever have any problems.

Ethical reason:
 If you're just doing it as an experiment for blog-fodder, why would I choose to give you my cash?  

Also, malls are fine, but in my experience almost always empty. When I shop, I look on MarketPlace first, then visit the in-world store.

And I never buy from resellers. 

 
 

Rosie,

a reseller can not provide customer service? Why is this?

Retail (as we call it in the real world) is an absolutly legimate way to market stuff. In RL we buy stuff from retaillers very often. In fact, most of the things we buy are bought through this very typical distribution chain:

Producer -- Wholeseller --Retailer -- Consumer

Why would that be bad thing in a virtual world? The retailer just needs to think of a value proposition, whatever that might be.  Could be lower prices, could be more choice (selling products from different designers), could be service, could be presentation or just being at the right time at the right place (i.e: a bikini shop on a beach)

Is building a business and writing about it unethical? Lets assume its succesful. Would the story how it happened not be of value to readers of the blog - especially for noobs? If you get what you pay for, why would you even care what my motivation would be?

 

It's difficult to get technical help costumer service that way. Say, you resell a dress, the avatar has troubles with the alpha map that came with the product, and requests you to make a better one. Would you be able to?

Or you resell an animation. A costumer is too tall for the animation, their hands do not reach the table no matter what, and they ask if you could make adjustments to the animations. As the actual creator, that would be easy, but you as a resller do not have the .dae file and have absolutely no way of adjusting the animation.

Or you resell furniture, and the costumer has questions about how to get their animations inside. Or how to use the AO maps. Would you know all that to guide them through the process?

The list goes on and on, costumer support isn't just about refunding things and knowing your product, it's actually being able to be hands on with your product. In the market today your costumer service has to be outstanding to get word of mouth advertising.

Also, 99% of the things on the MP do not allow you to resell things 'as is'. They allow you to resell their creations with limited permissions as part of a complete build. 

If you want to resell straight as is, then franchise vendors are the way to go, but there you do not hold the actual product in your inventory and can give even less costumer service.

I'd suggest you sit down and create your own things, or use the full perm stuff as intended, as part of a build not to resel as is. 

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carolinestravels wrote:

Good Points Syn

what about doing a customer service deal with the actual content creators then, also just like in real life.

Building myself is not an option simply because I suck at it, but I am good at marketing hence the idea of a retail business.

Yeah, you push your blog every chance you get...

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carolinestravels wrote:

Good Points Syn

what about doing a customer service deal with the actual content creators then, also just like in real life.

Building myself is not an option simply because I suck at it, but I am good at marketing hence the idea of a retail business.

Well, as a creator myself, I personally wouldn't strike such a deal. Why? Because you would buy my full perm product once. And then resell it on to say five other people, getting 100% of the Linden. Now why should I take time out of giving support to my direct costumers, time spent creating and time spent advertising to help your costumers? What incentive would I have since they paid you for the product, and not me?

Marketing is very necessary for a merchant to become successful unless they have sheer luck or have such an outstanding product that it makets itself through others (think Lola's Tango, Slink, Breedables etc.) Some are amazing merchants but utterly fail at marketing, some fail at creating but are very good with advertising. What I would suggest is, to perhaps join forces with a creator. Become their marketing wizard, do all the networking for them, the advertising and so on.

You can do that for a fixed rate per week, or and I would think this would be more fair, to get a certain % of each item sale. Which gives you more incentive to market better because the more sales, the more Linden you and the merchant make. It's perfectly symbiotic.

Now of course you would need to trust the creator to give you that % for as long as you work for them, but if you do find someone, it should be worth it a lot more than you merely reselling what someone else already offers.

 

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Caroline, 

I take your point (and thank you for explaining to me what RETAIL means in the real world, clearly I only exist in SL and therefore need such explanations) that it is possible to have customer service from a reseller.  

My experience is that resellers provide the same goods that I could buy from the creator, but with no added value whatsoever, and far less interest in providing prompt and helpful customer service.  Plust, the stuff resellers tend to sell is outdated, compared to the stuf I like to buy.

What would your USP* be as a reseller?  

Your suggestion that "the right place, the right time" would be a USP is weak at best. Assume I need a bikini, and am at the beach. I am in SL. I therefore have access to the Internet. I therefore have access to the MarketPlace and can buy ANYTHING I WANT wherever I am in-world.  SL's handy like that.

A personal dislike of mine is arriving at a beach and having to walk through miles of dreary generic malls all selling the same old stuff that's been around for years.  If I want a bikini, I will find one that I like, put it on, and THEN go to a beach that isn't littered with stores.  

Clearly I am not your target market.**

Building a business and writing about it is perfectly ethical. I have a nasty feeling though, that (based on your previous blog and forum posts) you will do a half-hearted job as a shopkeeper for a short time, write something ill-considered about it, and then spend 3 weeks posting the link to your blog on here at every opportunity.

You're right. Your motivation*** is none of my concern. But I still won't be buying anything from you. 

 

 

 

 

*USP means Unique Selling Point, and is the special secret magic reason why someone would buy your goods over someone else's similar or identical goods.

**Target market means the customer you are aiming at. 

***Motivation means the reason you do something

 

 

 

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Ardvina

what is wrong about that? 

Most magazines on the planet live from selling advertising space. They create traffic and interest with editorial content and sell adverts. In fact : This forums here does exactly the same. They create user generated content and earn money from adverts place on the top and on the right. Did you ever ask the Lindens to share their advertising revenue with you?So what the problem? There is nothing evil in making money!

My post here is a genuine question and I apreciate the answers.

NO, Links from the forum (so-called nofollow Links) or posts on the forum do not help my SEO. Only comments on MY blog would help SEO as Google values UGC (user generated content).

 

"I post this only for information purposes."

Yeah and pigs do fly after all.

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*USP means Unique Selling Point, and is the special secret magic reason why someone would buy your goods over someone else's similar or identical goods.

**Target market means the customer you are aiming at. 

***Motivation means the reason you do something
 

 

Thats the revenche for the retail explanation? :-)

I know very well what an USP is, and I believe its actually the most critical part of the endevour I am about to start. 

 

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Ok let me emballish a bit on the topic blogposts and Google rankings.

Google has integrated a technology called "Panda" into their main search ranking algorythm. This technology basically is a "MLP" or machine learning process. 

The way it works is this: 

First so-called quality raters are given certain websites to evaluate their relevance to certain search terms. They evaluate the sites based on the "search quality guidelines" and put them into one out of seven categories from "vital" to "unratable". Then the software analyes the sites about what common pattern they have. 

After this the entire index is analysed and sites sharing the same pattern are put in the same category and ranked accordingly. The last step is analyzing the users behaviour on the sites (share, like, comments) to further fine tune the ranking and also to find common pattern in the users reaction to the content provided.This includes "sublemental content" such as comments, links to additional resources, likes, shares and reviews. The better the discussion and the more relevant towards the topic the better. 

In short: if you post on the forums, you add user generated content to secondlife.com not to any other site and you help them to increase their advertising revenues not mine. Their advertiser is the Google adsense programm and my advertiser is Linden Lab. I am actually promoting Second Life!!

I am a Noob-Maker!

However, another ranking criteria for sites are incomming links to a site. Hence one might suspect links posted to my blog here had the purpose of improving my rankings. This is definetly NOT the case. The reason being is simply that forum owners usually place the HTML rel="nofollow" attribute in the HTML source code  to outgoing links in posts. This tells search engines NOT to follow and not to count the links for the purpose of evaluating the targeted website.

In short: A link here does not influence my rankings at all.

Hope his clearifies.

 

 

 

 

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Hi

Yes, I just checked that myself and was surprised that they dont use it.  Then I checked if I rank for all in anchor ( Caroline´s Noob Blog) and tataaa : Number one. That means the links do indeed flow pagerank and anchor text. Neverless it was not my intention, as I assumed they were clever enough to use the nofollow attribute. But I will not complain about it either and hope their webdevlopers dont read this here :-)

This is actually very unusual and could be the reason for those hundreds of Linkspam postings. However, why are they not able to prevent automated linkspam? Its actually easy to do. 

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carolinestravels wrote:

Hi

I am thinking about going into the retail business. My plan is to rent small jobs on busy regions and resell relevant stuff. I am not expecting to become rich, its merly an experiment I will write about on my blog.

 
  • Which regions did prove to be good locations for small shops?
  • Anyone can share experience in that?
  • What is the price range I have to expect?

If you are a sim owner of a popular themed region ( including but not limited Adult themed regions) and you have shops for rent, please get in touch with me.

Contact me In-World (carolinestravels) or sen E-mail to:

caroline@siemensnews.com

Thanks in advance

If you aren't planning on sticking with this, why bother? You will only piss off people that buy from you when you vanish.

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You could just ask here in the forums: 'Hey people, I have a blog, I want to earn money with it, please help me a bit: come and visit it.' But you preferred to
pretend
interest in a discussion/thoughts etc.

As far as I know a blog is created for the readers and not predominately for the results of search engines!

Ardvinna

were did I pretend interest?

I clearly stated why I am interested in getting a discussion on the blog going. It creates traffic, interest and better search result rankings. I (not you) made that very clear. I also stated that discussions do add value for the user as the user gets mutiple views on the topic not only mine. Adding value for users, gets repeat visitors (important ranking signal too), gets even better rankings, gets even more traffic, gets even more money.

That the ultimate goal of such a blog is making some money, isn´t a secret either as the adverts are pretty clear to see for everybody (I hope so).

So how much more honesty do you want? Want to see my tax registration number? My shoe size maybe?

Yes, a blog is created for readers and search engines get those readers to come to the blog. That my blog is build predominatly for search engines is your assumption, possibly based on the fact that you dont like the blog much. Which is fine to me.

But hey, I suggest you do something productive or something fun with your time instead of bashing/stalking me or are you the ethic police of the forum? The "blockwart" maybe? What about a new thread entitled "Caroline is Evil" were you can bash about me being a mean capitalist , search engine manipulator,  a immoral **bleep**, the cause for ww3.

I am off In-World looking for suitable shops now. Crowd Sourcing for such information doesnt work obviously.

 

 

 

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