HORRIBLE luck with sales in Marketplace

[Ziggy21 Slade]

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Josh Susanto wrote:

 

9) Given how much conviction you show on listing enhancements, I am considering experimenting with one after I have 1000 items in my box. This is a fair thing to do, and I would not be setting a good scientific example if I did not at some point create ample opportunity to have my established theorology subjected to falsification. What product would you suggest that I promote, and how would you suggest that I promote it? Please let me be clear; I will take full responsibility for the cost of your failed suggestion.

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Man, I am so glad you asked me that!,

I would do this - take about 20 of your items and put them in a pack, make sure they relate to each other, so for instance sandstone castle walls with several medieval sculptures, call it the medieval builders pack and include the maps, textures and finished prims and sell full perms for between 500 and 1000, probably nearer 1000, enhance it on the homepage for a month , and if you don't make more than the $2899 enhancement fee, I will gladly pay it for you.

For this experiment to work though it would help if you had a little more faith in your own ability to actually sell something rather than practically give it away, this can't be another '5 minute product', you are aiming to sell for 1000 so think of it as 100 x 5 minute products, or about 8 hours production time, it will require a bit of effort to produce something worthwhile but I am sure you will reap the rewards and as you have pointed out, you can sell in perpetuity. 

Sometime ago I started a thread about living and working in another country, my plan was/is to do what Dart said and make use of the low cost of living elsewhere so I could live a comfortable life just on SL earnings, I figure if I can work up to an average/ above average wage wage here in the UK, I can live like a King(ish) in Belize (this was top of my list before someone said the internet is bad there) or where ever, so I have to say Kudos to you for doing what I haven't dared to yet. 

 

[Josh Susanto]

My other products can very easily cover such a fee, so it's sort of inevitable that I would come out ahead by at least some tiny amount by the end of the listing period, even if no one buys the promoted product; I would just earn less than usual. Thanks for offering the subsidy, but that's just not my thing. It speaks well, though, of your confidence in LL and other merchants to allow me to sell at least 1 of the item each week. As I have said before, it's not myself in whom I lack confidence.

I'm gradually raising almost all my prices to 9L anyway, so a collection package of any more than about 60 existing items would be a good deal, assuming that someone actually wants every item. Of course, I can probably find 100 items of sufficiently related qualities to make a package for 500L, and we can assume that even if someone only wanted a few of the items, having them all handy in one order would be a sufficient convenience to warrant the larger expenditure, especially considering that even the less compelling items make pretty decent gifts.

A problem with producing a large number of completely new items for the experiment is that my production rate is limited by what I find for images that are sculpt-viable, or which can be made sculpt-viable.  As I have said, the most profitable products are those that take 5 minutes to produce, but when I just don't have a lot of such images lined up, I do go into hack mode to produce something from other, less cooperative images. As a rule, the more time it takes to produce something, the more slowly it will sell, regardless of the price.

The best case scenario is more or less what you suggest I should expect, if I understand you correctly; very modest increase in total order numbers, with a few very profitable orders of the promoted item.

What I fear will happen, instead, is a massive increase in orders for the other items, such that half or more of them will not be delivered, and a repeated flagging and delisting of the promoted item; all creating a huge amount of additional work for me that has nothing to do with development of products or collection pay.

My email filter is now working correctly, and I have rezzed a second box, with dismal results I shall discuss elsewhere in a new thread. I could wait for Direct Delivery to fix the delivery failures, but I suspect I'd be waiting a really, really long time, so I might as well just proceed.

Most of my higher-demand items are just relief planes that make rock walls or floors or such. In cases where they have sold well enough and the next effects are viable, I have produced square/or round relief columns with the same surface textures, and some spheroids. 

Do I correctly understand that I should try to make the collection seem like something that could produce a complete or almost complete castle that doesn't look like a jumble of randomly selected components? I think I could probably do that.