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My sales are suddenly in the toilet, again...


Myrylyn
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Should Be.PNGThis has happened to me twice now, and each time, my normally high sales (150$US/week) numbers drop off to nearly nothing... then take about two weeks to get back to normal. I track my sales data very closely and I definitely see patterns to the behavior. The last time the downturn occured began 2/7 and ran until 3/1. Those were lean times. The earnings data has an almost vertical drop-off and resumption.

 

Again, this week, as compared to the last, the difference in earnings is quite stark. Not the good, Game of Thrones "Stark," either: 

My weekly accounting period ends each Sunday-- with last week's take being $162.58.

Typically, over the Monday-Wednesday timeframe, I would have made around $50US. Not counting sales from my brand new chair, "The Frenemaker," I've only made about $6 since 4/16.

It's very disheartening to see such dramatic swings in my earnings; I'd like to be able to count on at least some level of consistency. Are these dramatic swings "normal," yet completely unexplained?

I was under the impression that search results weren't being messed with these last few weeks, except for the ill-conceived "madstyle" promotion. I guess that may be a way for Linden Labs to shift the focus of the content-creation away from adult goods, into more mainstream pursuits.

I can't imagine my store will ever benefit from a "humiliation" keyword promotion! :matte-motes-sour:

 

Can anyone else corroborate these findings?
Or have you, yourself, experienced anomolies like this?
What do you attribute them to?
What have you learned?

I'll show you mine, if you show me yours! :matte-motes-bashful-cute-2:

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I have a very small store so my sales figures are infinitesimal compared to yours; however, I *have* noticed cycles in sales since DD launched.  No clue if it's connected to DD but in the past I made approximately x number of sales/week.  About 2 weeks ago or so I posted that my sales had suddenly stopped.  Even with the small number of sales I make, a complete halt was odd based on the past years of sales history.

Just as suddenly as it stopped, I began making the usual number of sales/week after about 2 weeks.

I'd be interested, as well, to hear if other merchants are noticing this.

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I've noticed this pattern on occasion too. It usually lines up with Linden Lab's "Grid Status Updates".

Lindens break stuff or get busy "fixing" stuff, sales suck.

Lindens don't touch anything, sales rock!

That's my explanation for such high velocity change. I make & sell product in real world too & have seen nothing comparable to this kind of change, except for when a retail store has road in front under construction, sales go in the toilet similar to what you can see sometimes in SL, followed by a hyperbolic recovery once the road reopens!

So I think explanation here is the same - the "road" which brings customers to your door is under construction sometimes. For other companies you might see a "BETA" beside the product name until they complete this construction phase, but Lindens prefer to always run things live - no betas.

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My sales seem to be relatively normal anyway. I think more people might be a bit hesitant to shop on the marketplace until things look safer perhaps. I expect that to be more of an issue the higher priced ones products are naturally. Are your inworld sales taking the same hit or fluctuating the same amount?

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I think it's more of an issue with people not using the Marketplace not necessarily LL messing with anything. I hear in a lot of the group chats I'm in that people are not using the Marketplace right now. Everyone is scared to use it so they have been buying in world instead. If it's not that it could just be normal fluctuation, which happens a lot.

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As a shopper, I used to enjoy using the MP, and found it a great search tool to find products I wanted and many times, would stumble upon products that I had no idea existed but decided I must have. Nowadays, MP is such a mess, my interest in shopping has declined considerably as is my interest in SL overall. How an organization such as Linden Lab can be so incompetent in handling what one should think would be a piece of cake transition for a highly specialized IT company, is really beyond my comprehension.

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On this rare occasion, I'm not blaming LL (any more than on a normal day) for the lower rate of sales.

A bunch of people in the US just did their taxes, or, if they are still doing them, expect to pay penalties.

For most US users, this wouldn't much matter.

But for people who are making an amount of money different from last year (people with larger investments in SL, for example), such an occasion will tend to cause them to tighten up, regardless of whether they have more income or less income than before.

Money that would otherwise be circulating around SL has begun to stop circulating after a few days.

Likewise, when people start getting their tax returns, you may see a momentary boost in SL money supply, probably peaking in terms of effects on SL at the end of the peak period for return receipt, roughly 60 days after 15 April....

... that is; right about the time that the boxes get shut off and permissions are still not properly supported for DD, thus forcing a surge of new business in-world and setting up a possible total shut-down of the marketplace on 5 July.

But... as I said, today's drop in sales as compared to sales in recent days, is probably not LL's fault at all.

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I've only recently started doing in-world sales, as I have not wanted to sign on with any sales vendor services (such as Hippo) because I want to stay as "vertical" a buiness as possible. With my numbers being so small, I want keep costs down.

Therefore, I've built my own kiosk system which holds nearly all of my products. Because getting sales data from the kiosks is almost as important as getting the sales themselves, I had to learn some basic PHP, mySQL, etc. as well as create an entire database system within the kiosk itself. It was quite a learning experience for my wee, young brain!

But, to your point, I see very little sales from my in-world kiosk-- even though it is at a prime location in the South Side Snakepit's foyer. I've often spied on its usage and it appears as though people just use it to view my products and browse the photoshoots... then just hit the "More Info" button to buy from the Marketplace. It's frustrating, but I think people enjoy the security (receipts, records, etc.) that the Marketplace gives them.

It does make it hard for me to pay rent on a Hippo stall that doesn't actually make money directly.

 

So, yeah, the better the Marketplace becomes, the less sales I expect to see from in-world sales tiles or kiosks. More and more, I'd expect to see these kiosks as more of an advertising vehicle-- which is why I crafted my custom kiosk to work (and appear) the way it does.

It's an experiment-- an innovation-- that I hope will pay off and raise awareness of my shop. I would share a picture of the kiosk, but it is largely obscene.

 

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I was discussing the impact that paying one's taxes might have on the Second Life economy with some friends over lunch, and I am hoping that you're right, Kampu. However, I wouldn't have expected the belt-tightening to be so dramatic.

Hopefully, when they get their refund checks, their money will go into this economy-- and not the real-world one!

:matte-motes-sarcasm:

 

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> However, I wouldn't have expected the belt-tightening to be so dramatic.

It's dramatic because it's related to irrationality.

People are either realizing they've been spending irrationally in SL already, or they are irrationally imagining that it will somehow do them any good at this point to buy fewer platform shoes and assault rifles in Second Life to offset their cigarette expenditures in RL.

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Linden Labs is very good at screwing things up when they make changes. I was window shopping on the MP and everytime I clicked a link it sent me to a generic page not even remotely related to the product. That on top of I go to a specific product like womens shoes and maybe 2% of the products listed are shoes. LL has royally screwed something up again... No surprise there though. Kinda explains the last few weeks of 0 sales for me as well.

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>Linden Labs is very good at screwing things up when they make changes.

Everyone here must know by now that I'm the last possible person to disagree with that.

But I don't see that there's a change they've made this time that would have more explanatory value than the tax day thing.

From here, it actually appears that the market is working as well as it has for at least a week, possibly because of the reduced traffic.

 

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I see strange patterns in sales as well.

For my overall sales it can happen that suddenly there is a day that I hardly sell anything, and then it takes a few days to see the sales getting back to normal. Sometimes there is a reason that every merchant is suffering from, like Valentine days debacle or such, and sometimes there is no reason at all, or at least not a reason that I can see.

But apart from that I also see strange patterns on item level. I do have items that have very predictable sale figures. For large periodes an item sell x times a month. And then suddenly, for I reason I cannot declare sales stop completely. I call this phenomenon 'fallen of the radar'. Because it seems like the object has lost it's visibility on the marketplace completely. And it can take weeks before the object comes in sight of the customers again. And then slowly but steadily the normal sales patterns is coming back again. I think that it those cases something is changed by LL, what causes that an item looses his ranking on the marketplace.


The opposite can also happen. An item is sitting on the marketplace for some time already and was only sold a few times, and then suddenly it seems to get a visibility boost, inexplicable as well. Maybe a comparable item from a competitor is fallen of the radar?
One time it happened to me that a customer declared me such a unexpected boost. She had bought the product and had a question about it. She said 'when I saw it in this blog I needed to have it'. Blog? It turned out that a fashion blogger had used the item in serial of pictures. So the sudden inexplicable rise of sales of an object might have an external reason as well, when you don't happen to know by chance, you will never know what is behind it.

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I have also noticed a pattern over the past month where I have a normal few days (both on Marketplace and inworld) of sales and then several days of almost zero. The most dramatic drop is on the Marketplace. This trend has repeated weekly for about 4 weeks now. It's a little demotivating to be honest. Normal sales patterns net me about 30 sales per day. On the downslide, it's about 2 for a few days, then it goes back up, rince and repeat. It's weird because prior to the past 4 weeks, it has been steady growth, month over month.

I'm doing the same advertising as usual. I've introduced new outfits. I've had to close (sadly), two of my satalite stores to reduce costs. I'm wondering if it's a shift in SL buying patterns overall. The tax theory makes sense to me. Let's hope it's a temporary trend.

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Kampu Oyen wrote:

On this rare occasion, I'm not blaming LL (any more than on a normal day) for the lower rate of sales.

A bunch of people in the US just did their taxes, or, if they are still doing them, expect to pay penalties.

For most US users, this wouldn't much matter.

But for people who are making an amount of money different from last year (people with larger investments in SL, for example), such an occasion will tend to cause them to tighten up, regardless of whether they have more income or less income than before.

Money that would otherwise be circulating around SL has begun to stop circulating after a few days.

Likewise, when people start getting their tax returns, you may see a momentary boost in SL money supply, probably peaking in terms of effects on SL at the end of the peak period for return receipt, roughly 60 days after 15 April....

... that is; right about the time that the boxes get shut off and permissions are still not properly supported for DD, thus forcing a surge of new business in-world and setting up a possible total shut-down of the marketplace on 5 July.

But... as I said, today's drop in sales as compared to sales in recent days, is probably not LL's fault at all.

Mine isn't a "drop" in sales - it's no sales whatsoever for a period of time, then back to what is normal for my shop.  Also, the sales began picking up again the week before and during income taxes, for whatever that's worth.

 

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Myrylyn wrote:

But, to your point, I see very little sales from my in-world kiosk-- even though it is at a prime location in the South Side Snakepit's foyer. I've often spied on its usage and it appears as though people just use it to view my products and browse the photoshoots... then just hit the "More Info" button to buy from the Marketplace. It's frustrating, but I think people enjoy the security (receipts, records, etc.) that the Marketplace gives them.

 

I have experienced something similar - I will get notice of a person who has purchased an item from my MP store, then when I run a list of visitors to my in-world store, very often the person has been in the store but purchased from MP.  This happens fairly regularly.

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Well, I can safely say that this week has been an absolute disaster. Down from the previous weeks' earnings ($200, $160) to nearly zero.

Something has surely occurred.

 

Perhaps its that I didn't carpet-bomb my listings with "madstyle."

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this week seems bad for MP, i have made NO sales today and i have a few freebies that sell regularly every day. if the freebies aren't moving, i know something is messed up.. ^^  that said, there are a lot of fairs and expos going on right now, so possibly people are busy with other things too. but MP right now is painfully slow (again).

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This morning I tried and failed to log into the marketplace a couple times. So far today my only sales have been in-world and sparse. I just assumed that was the connection - that market was being borky today. But who knows?

Regarding single items flip-flopping on popularity - I always figured that was word of mouth. On person bought it and then their friend wanted it. I'm very rarely blogged about so that cant be it...

I was never so suprised as when I heard a large creator that I admire a lot say "wow, I have had NO sales today". From then on I just figured that lousy days WILL happen. I only crunch numbers at the end of the month - the rolling average is all that counts I guess. But it is fickle and unpredictable even without LL breaking things. Which makes sense - nobody NEEDS anything in a virtual world - so this is all discresionary spending.

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