What are your SLM sales like currently?

[Sally Audebarn]

Many people have notice a reduction in their marketplace revenue since late February right into April and this post was created to shed some light on the issue. So share with us whether your sales have increased, decreased, or remained at a standstill if that be the case. If we get enough replies then perhaps we will be able to conclude that it is a problem being faced by most merchants and relieve many of the stress they are going through from believing otherwise.

[Josh Susanto]

I would expect sales to be down in the US during said period, but half or less of my sales usually come from the US anyway.

I assume that most nations have a similar tax season, but I don't know what all the tax days are.

My own sales are dismally slow today, but they had actually increased for a couple of days after the Japan earthquake after a more gadual increase in early March.

Then they dropped sharply right in the middle of March and were making a bit of a comeback until a little over a week ago, when they dipped again and have not come up.

If we had any reliable metrics at all (anymore), we could then argue about whether or not recurrent events, such as various national tax due dates and/or LL system updates, affect or do not affect sales.

But until then, LL seems to content to leave the door open to various types of criticism against which they could have better defended themselves when we had some graphs... better defended, that is, assuming that the position were at all defensible.

[Pamela Galli]

I think it is typical in the US for sales to be a little slow two days before ppl have to write a big check to the IRS. Takes a while to get over the shock.

[Tari Landar]

Sadly I can't contribute my sales info to help prove any sort of decrease, for once. Not that I am complaining.

But this has more to do with the fact that some of my newer products sort of have a niche market..kinda, and the sales for those products always increase when I first bring them out. I've added quite a few new things recently with more to be added in the next day or so.

So overall my marketplace sales are up. But I am really small potatoes compared to most merchants. Thus far I haven't found too many merchants who are having the same experience I am. Not all too long ago I wasn't having it either.

They sure seem to have done something to hurt merchants on the marketplace lately. Really stinks, and merchants have little to no recourse. It's adapt or die...but no one can figure out HOW to adapt when things get wonky. At least that's how I felt not too long ago myself. Granted most years that I have been reading these, well *any sl forums, I have seen merchants say "such and such time, expect a decrease" or "during this time, sales are always low". It seems to be expected as the norm. I probably should, but I don't agree with that opinion. I think if given the proper tools merchants could have way more "up" time than down and there would be no expected waves of low sales. But LL doesn't provide those tools or even help people better understand how to use the few tools they DO give.

I only know what I do because I'm nosey as heck and read a lot. If I were a new merchant, I would be entirely lost and likely ready to give up the first time I hit a lull in sales.

[Pamela Galli]

Yes, I have been reading forums for over 3 years now and there has NEVER been a time where a group of merchants did not claim there was a slump. I suspect it goes like this: at any one time there is an 80/20 split between merchants either experiencing growth or a slump. So there is always a group in a slump, but not always the majority.* But when someone starts a thread like this, if you are doing fine, you can get flack for saying so.

 

* But of course most businesses in any life do fail, so many are going to be in a slump and on their way out.

[Chelsea Malibu]

Interesting to see all the variations in business.  My sales are always up and down and seem to fit within what is happening in new home sales and new business start-ups. When those two are good, my business is good since they all need decor.  However, I have also noticed that search changes my rank position nearly weekly where I am doing nothing different to change it. When I am in the top spot, my sales rock but for each position I move down, my traffic moves down even though most above me in my key words have no relevance to what I sell.

January through March where good and April has been very slow. My numbers nearly always shift with in world sales and right now, both are not as good as I have seen in the past.

 

[Tari Landar]

Eh, search is skewed to high heaven. I wouldn't put much value into any results you get from it. Whether it's marketplace or in-world. Results change more often than most avs change their clothes. It rarely, if ever, has anything to do with things merchants are doing differently, which annoys me. It's all issues on LL's end of things. I don't really put much worth into "rank" for that reason alone. The system they use to determine it, is flawed, at best.

Funny how they want us to master the few tools they give us, to expand this great big virtual world, and make it marvelous(for them, so they earn more, of course...and if we want, for us too ). Yet  they can't even master the tools they have to run it. If I had that many employees slacking off somewhere, I'd be ashamed. At least, for now, I can claim(because it's true) lack of skills, lol. I can't build as well as some because I'm just not there yet. Someday I will be, but I make no promises and certainly don't make my customers "pay" for services I *might give them, eventually, perhaps, if I feel like it on a day in the distant future that doesn't end in "y". Linden labs has no excuse for "not being there yet". They have the money and the manpower and still can't fix minor issues. I don't get it. Guess I don't have to though, no one ever said I had to understand them.

Drives me bananas.....and yet, I stay, go figure

(in other words good outweighs the bad...but they still annoy me)

[Josh Susanto]

[ there has NEVER been a time where a group of merchants did not claim there was a slump.]

But there WAS a time when the claim could be disproved with metrics, if it were not valid.

And now LL no longer provides metrics as such, and actually makes it extra difficult to produce them, which makes me wonder what it is they don't want us to see.

 

[Abby10 Lenroy]

Nobody looks at the RL markets to try to compare them with the SL markets. Let me explain: People that play Second Life are humans. These humans have jobs. These jobs bring money. Now, with the real world economy in the recovery mode(depending which case) the unemployment rate goes down.

 

People have less money to spend for VW's because they need to cover the costs of the real world in order to survive the real world to be able to play in a virtual world.

With the inflation, things cost more. And the more the food costs, the more you need to spend, the more you take out of your SL budget to cover the basic needs.

 

I am not saying it's their fault and I am not saying it's not their fault.

 

If your sales are low, i dont think you can blame LL for it. Look in the RL, and see whats going on there. Because once again, IT IS the Real Life economy that fuels the Second Life economy.

[Madeliefste Oh]

 

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Abby10 Lenroy wrote:

Nobody looks at the RL markets to try to compare them with the SL markets. Let me explain: People that play Second Life are humans. These humans have jobs. These jobs bring money. Now, with the real world economy in the recovery mode(depending which case) the unemployment rate goes down.

 

People have less money to spend for VW's because they need to cover the costs of the real world in order to survive the real world to be able to play in a virtual world.

With the inflation, things cost more. And the more the food costs, the more you need to spend, the more you take out of your SL budget to cover the basic needs.

 

I am not saying it's their fault and I am not saying it's not their fault.

 

If your sales are low, i dont think you can blame LL for it. Look in the RL, and see whats going on there. Because once again, IT IS the Real Life economy that fuels the Second Life economy.

 

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But the strange thing is that other virtual worlds do grow during this RL economy. For example IMVU grew more then 600% during the last three years. Habbo Hotel grew significant as well. So, I doubt it's just the RL economy that causes the stagnation of SL.

I can be a factor that plays a role, but why is that SL is suffering from the RL economy while other worlds are not? There must be more factors, than just the RL economy. A remarkable difference between IMVU and SL is that IMVU is advertising her world, you see them on many sites when you browse the internet for virtual world related content. But do you ever see an advertisement for SL?

Another factor is that LL still did not find a way to bind people once they have signed up. There are about 10.000 new residents coming in each day, but still the concurrency is not growing. This simply means that people don't stay.

[Abby10 Lenroy]

When I was still part of the Teen Grid, I used to play Habbo Hotel. Back then, they needed to merge the Hotels together in order to not lose money. CA hotel merged with the US hotel and so on. That is one of the reasons Sulake is making profit from this VW.

Second, Sulake, Owner of Habbo, doesn't allow it's residents to withdraw the currency which is known as Coins. So the company retains 100% of everything that goes in to the game.

Third, Habbo is a virtual world that is dedicated to Teens. Teens did not get affected much by the economy, and if they did, I dont think its a very important thing.

 

As for IMVU. I don't believe it is a game that you can compare to SL. IMVU is quiet an easy to use platform. You chat in rooms and you can change your clothes.

 

Linden Labs way to market Second Life is terrible. I think they should be changing the Marketing team as soon as possible because Vampire and the Animal campaign are well not at all describing what SL is.

 

There should seriously be a lot of investement in Product Developpement asap because while they try to bring more people in, the game won't be able to hold up for long. The lagg is an issue, the sim crossing and along with the long list of things that need to be fixed should be on LL's top priority.

[Tari Landar]

Yes I know there has never been a time when merchants *didn't make that claim. Doesn't necessarily mean it was a valid claim though. Or that all of those merchants were correct in their assumptions there was a grid-wide slump.

I wasn't saying slumps don't happen, or sales don't dip at certain points naturally, even. In fact I said quite the opposite, as until recently I was having all the same issues other merchants were.

[Josh Susanto]

I actually agree with LL's resistance to advertising as long as they are ahead of their competitors, provided that it is a considered strategic decision and not merely an expression of complacency.

I have pointed out elsewhere that the concurrency stats do not reflect people leaving SL so much as they reflect less over-all use by those who are using it., regardless of whether the total number of regular users is increasing or decreasing.

If people are using SL more efficiently, they may not need to use it as much, or they may choose to use it more for the same reason. I, for example, spend more time sculpting when things are working correctly, and I spend most of my sculpting time logged off; I imagine that something similar would be true for a lot of other content developers, including some of the most harcore users.

(Also...)

If people have less money in RL, they may turn to SL more frequently for cheap entertainment, or they may do so less, depending on whether they need to spend RL money in SL to have a good time. 

People who find or lose regular jobs may end up having more time for SL or less time for SL when that happens, and just the opposite situation might eventually result from that over some period of unemployment.

How the SL economy relates to the RL economy is a really complicated question, but I submit that if LL manages to maintain ANY profitability both in growth quarters and in recessions, they shouldn't be in a big hurry to change anything about the way they are doing things unless there is some very clear and specific threat of mass defection to competing services. Explosions of use by competitors are clearly consequent to advertising campaigns, and may therefore be understood as potentially dependent upon advertising in terms of sustaining those concurrency numbers. If they at some point have to cut their advertising budget, they may lose concurrency. LL may have other problems, but they at least don't really have that problem.

To reiterate/clarify, though... my essential gripe about the apparent plummeting of sales after system updates is 1) that LL actively dismisses the possibility of any causal relationship by dismissing any possible chronological correlation 2) continues to withhold previously existing analytic tools which could otherwise be used to address the issue scientifically and 3) thwarts data utility in a way that vexes users attempting to provide the needed statistical analysis, themselves.

If LL could just say "our update screwed up your sales, and we are sorry", I think most of the whiners would just drop it.

But, instead, LL hides all the globes and tells us the Earth is flat.

I mean, really, guys... "WTF"?