Splitting a marketplace store

[Deja Letov]

It's bugged me for a long time that we can't have multiple stores. I personally have four stores in world, 2 of which don't generate much income so I'm not worried about those. But two of my stores make up a good portion of my income and I'd like to be able to track sales separately for each. I also run into the problem with marketplace search results showing products that don't match the search simply because its in my store name. It's a big mess to say the least.

id like to use one of my alts to set up a second marketplace store for my second store. I'm in the process of contacting sculptors and animators I've bought from to see if I can transfer the items full perm to my alt. but I'm kinda stuck on how exactly the best way to separate it would be.

obviously I need to recreate the listings on the new alt store. But sales will probably stink at first because I will lose potentially years of sales plus ratings, etc that will probably land me on the last page for awhile. This will be hard making my tier or awhile losing all those sales. Is there any issue with TOS to leave my old listings up for a time until the new listings are doing a bit better? I know this could cause some confusion but I'm not sure how else to deal with the separation of stores. Has anyone else done something like this? I'd appreciate any advice on how best to proceed and still maintain my revenue.

[Chav Paderborn]

Annoying, isn't it?

[Amethyst Jetaime]

I'd say its risky because you are not allowed to list the same item twice, it is considered item spam.

From the SL MP Listing Policy

Item spam is listing an item more than once, for any reason, and will not be tolerated.

The emphasis is mine. 

If you don't make a notation on the original listing that your alt is also selling the product then your alt may gain a reputation as a copybotter or content thief. She may anyway if you do because many people don't read everything before they complain.   If you do note it then competitors or others will probably report you for item spam, which you will be admitting to in your notation. Whether or not the Lindens will agree is unknown.  I suspect they would not consider it fair as I've never seen this done, or at least double listings of this nature survive if it has been done. And if they did allow it, then why isn't everyone selling the same thing under a few alts  to increase the number of listings they have?

A better solution is to take advantage of the SKU field and use a suffix or prefix to indicate which store sells the product, then download you sales to a spread sheet and sort it accordingly.

I'm not sure what you mean by a problem with search.  I looked at your listings and didn't see your store name in the names of your products for the most part.  If I put any of your store names, other than your texture shop, in search Merchants the store came up.  If you mean putting the name of your store in general search and other products come up you don't sell, that happens to most merchants whose store name is not a 'real' but rather unique word. Personally I rarely search by store name but rather by creator name or a generic term.

I do wish they'd allow us to have more than one store though. 

[Deja Letov]

No not searching for my store name, just general search terms.for example...searching for gothic furniture is bringing up my top sellers in my other store which have nothing to do with gothic furniture. But because gothic furniture is in my store name it causes weird search results. I once released several new products time the same time, then ran a promo to my customer base that required them to buy from the marketplace to get the discount. Well of course all those sales made my listings jump to the top which is great for one of my stores....but unfortunately they knocked out my best sellers from my other store when searching for the other keywords. I guess with the TOS not allowing duplicate listings I won't have a choice but to take the hit ad let them build themselves back up. Maybe I could just move a few products each week instead of all at once. This could let me build them up without taking them all down to zilch so quickly.

[Nefertiti Nefarious]

---

Deja Letov wrote:

Maybe I could just move a few products each week instead of all at once. This could let me build them up without taking them all down to zilch so quickly.

---

Start by creating and posting some NEW products in the alt's name opf the type you want it to specialize in, and then when it's getting some sales move a couple of the older items a week into the new store.

That will minimize your financial hit.

 

[Deja Letov]

This is exactly what I started dohng tonight. I did decide to take all the new releases I did in the last two weeks and go ahead and move those to the alt since they are new and didn't have time to really build much history yet. And anything new will definitely be going under the new alt. Then maybe in a month or so ill move the rest over. Thanks guys!

[Amethyst Jetaime]

---

Deja Letov wrote:

No not searching for my store name, just general search terms.for example...searching for gothic furniture is bringing up my top sellers in my other store which have nothing to do with gothic furniture. But because gothic furniture is in my store name it causes weird search results. I once released several new products time the same time, then ran a promo to my customer base that required them to buy from the marketplace to get the discount. Well of course all those sales made my listings jump to the top which is great for one of my stores....but unfortunately they knocked out my best sellers from my other store when searching for the other keywords. I guess with the TOS not allowing duplicate listings I won't have a choice but to take the hit ad let them build themselves back up. Maybe I could just move a few products each week instead of all at once. This could let me build them up without taking them all down to zilch so quickly.

 

---

That happened due to the store name more than likely.  Another thing that causes it is having related items in a listing that is related to the search.  All in all though the search feature could be greatly improved as no matter what i do when i search it always shows me at least some irrelevant results.