Traci Yiyuan

I agree especially with the last paragraph. Any account that hasn't been used for six months should be eliminated.

You may be right about this; if so, it will be LL themselves and mall/store owners who pay the price. As far as LL goes it would be their goose getting cooked. I'd like to think that they were considering contingencies when they enhanced XStreet and SL Marketplace, but that would be ignoring their actions over the past couple of years. As far as mall/store owners go, I feel sorry for those who've done their level best and not tried to cheat the system. I don't feel much sorrow for those who filled their sims with robots, sold trash or copied material, or expected this virtual economy to pay their mortgage payments. I'm just saying, I understand that we all pump money into this system and keep it running collectively, but LL owns it, and LL Directors, management and staff are the ones who pay the highest price if things go worng. If you're going to try to make money within an economic system you're foolish if you don't pay attention to trends and try to get in front of them.

Yes to those who say sales from their stores have declined. The "why" of this that people are inventing is rather interesting though. I recall about a year and a half ago the large retailers went through a spate of "going out of business" sales, at which sims were packed to bursting with people buying every last item offered at great reductions in price. One of these sales was accompanied by incredible drama over whether one of the wonderful creators had really died or not. I know people who proudly told me that they had bought entire store inventories at pennies on the dollar. Probably they increased their inventories by hundreds, if not thousands, of pretty high quality products. I resisted that urge but I did buy a few things. During that time I also learned how to make many of the things that I wanted myself. I've seen most users that I know become pretty picky about what they buy. Back to the original question though of why retail shops are underperforming while xstreet is apparantly doing better, I will speak as a consumer. As LL makes shopping on their website easier by improving the search functions, merging our inworld and xstreet pocketbooks, and other things, shopping on the web is a more pleasurable experience. As a consumer I now prefer to buy most things on XStreet rather than at in world stores. To the doomsayers, I have bad news. SLMarketplace is even better. From what I've seen they're making it very professional. I'd recommend that you pay some attention to it and configure your store their as best you can, because it's a pleasure to shop in, and it acts like other webstores in which I shop for things that come by UPS or FedEx. You can cry about the old days, or try to see the future and adapt to it. That's life in the commercial world. I'm a marketing professional in my day job and all I can say is that I'd rather try to make my SLMarketplace sales rock than spend alot of time crying over slowdowns in an "in world" store.