Nefertiti Nefarious
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Posts posted by Nefertiti Nefarious
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Ive been offered free space inworld, and all sorts of places, but i dont think im ready,
If you don't think you are ready, then don't do it. It's that simple.i dont believe i have enough items, or a set theme, and none of my pictures match. I dont have regular items coming out.
These are all part of having an online or in-world shop, but more important for in-world. You can have 5 items on the marketplace and it's fine. Stick 5 items in a rented 10x10 shop and it looks like you are out of business, unless it's 5 multi-panel vendors full of things.I think i need more help with getting it ready, with a steady flow of sales before i can have anything inworld.
Definitely. Wait until you have enough products listed in the Marketplace to fill the shop, with some to spare, and enough Marketplace sales to pay the shop rent and set-up before you launch. It takes much of the stress out of having a shop.
If I closed my in-world shop, I would save way more on parcel rent than I would lose on sales. 95%+ of my sales are from the marketplace. I have it because it's a quiet place to build, give classes in texturing, and to play with. Occasionally someone will make a run through the vendors and buy a few things, or a few dozen things, but it's the steady Marketplace sales that keeps the parcel going.So i think i need people helping me. I guess, what im trying to say is, what are the "keys" to a good store, weather in-world or on marketplace or both.
For both:
Good product, in an area that is not overstuffed with product compared to demand. Skins, fashion and furniture are very competitive. You can do it, but you have to make some niche for yourself - in style, detail, theme or whatever.
Good pricing ... this is very subjective. High prices are not a guarantee of high quality, and pricing something high because it took you a long time to make won't work. Look at your competition, rate their product quality and features, and decide whether you should meet the price, go higher, or lower.
I sell inexpensive stuff - I'm one of the ones people gripe about for "ruining the market with cheap crap" - but it's good quality, good niche, and I sell a lot of it.
Good product photos, clear and well-lit with legible text, if any, with the product easy to see. If it's not clear in the thumbnails, people are less likely to click. Practice taking and editing photos.For Marketplace:
Good ad copy ... can the potential customer tell from the title what the item is? Will it show up well in search if the customer searches for the words that describe it? If the creator of this one - * Bahar Vega * ANASTASIA - had written a better title, he/she might not have had to pay thousands of lindens for a featured spot.For In-World Shops:
Good layout with dividers if necessary, so the shop can rez the part the customer sees quickly.Good section labeling and shop organization so if you sell several product varieties I can quickly find what I'm looking for.
Good vendor pics - sized to show detail, but load as fast as possible. Easy access - a teleport to the entrance is best, a teleport to a mall shop finder TP device is OK. A teleport to the middle of a big mall with yout shop somewhere in the mess is not OK.
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Looking to rent a space for my own shop - seems like a good idea to ask for people's input before I do something stupid
. Got loads of questions !My advice would be to skip the shop until you have enough products listed on the marketplace with sales high enough to pay the rent. And enough to fill a decent sized shop. And some new stuff you can keep adding to the shop.I sold on the market place with a rented 1-prim spot for my Magic Box for several months, then went premium and had a Magic box and shop on the 512 for a while, then started making enough money to rent something larger.But 95%+ of my sales come from the marketplace, so it's not essential for a merchant to have a shop. Furniture, vehicles are the exception, but those you could sell as DEMO with a 1-time temp rez.3. Do you think it's important that I find a place selling stuff similar to mine - so maybe people passing will be interested in taking a look ?Similar theme, but different products, if you want to rent in a mall - cute bunnies and goth gloom don't mix.4. How do I find out whether the landowner is reputable ?It's a crap shoot. Look for how long the underlying parcel has been in their name ... mine has been owned by the same landlord since 2007. I'm not moving!5. Is there an advantage to mainland over estates?Yes. With mainland you can buy (rent, actually) the parcel from Linden Labs and have no landlord, no covenants. it's yours!Since the worst of the ad farms were evicted, mainland's a pleasant place.********************You need to make sure you can set the landing point in your shop, not have a forced landing point for the whole mall. -
Most of my products are unboxed because they are single prims.
For multi-object sales, or for a group of textures, I rez a plywood cube and apply a nice texture from the group or that relates to the product.
If I'm feeling extremely creative, I'll add a low-prim bow on top of the box.
All the buyer has to do is right click, open and copy or move to inventory. No script needed.
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Sally Audebarn wrote:Haave you noticed a decline in your sales since yesterday (August 8, 2011) ?
Nope. My sales tripled.
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Mickey Vandeverre wrote:Ihave my marketplace sales set to issue a message when a sale has been made. On each sale, an IM is sent to email. Doing that, causes your IMs to get capped.
If your account is set to have your IMs sent to an e-mail account, you will not have the problem of them being "capped". You also will not have the frustration of seeing that you have been offered inventory and having to log in to read it. If it's a problem, you will know.
I can tell when things are purchased by looking at the time stamps on the e-mails.
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Here's the PayPal Statement: When some sellers receive payments, we may hold the money in a pending balance for up to 21 days to help make sure that there are funds in the seller's account to cover potential refunds or claims. The funds may be released early if PayPal determines that the transaction has been fulfilled and customers are satisfied.
Note their use of the word "SELLERS" ... when you cash out from SL, you are not selling anything.
We had the same hysteria sweep through tyhe Yahoo Contributor Forums - and the answer there was that the massy payments like the ines Yahoo! sends (and SL) are not subject to this. It is 100% aimed at eBay sellers.
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Incidentally, abandoned land -- set with proper permissions and reverted to original terraforming -- is about the best neighbor you could hope for on the Mainland. It's sort of like living next to a cemetary: the neighbors are very quiet. No crowd of avatars, no shouting genitals / lucky chairs / fake copybot detectors, no additional textures to lag the viewer, and no breedable critters to lag the sim.
And you can put off-sim landscaping on them to make your place even prettier.
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Melita Magic wrote:I notice that some people's textures are crystal-clear and some are fuzzy. Any thoughts on what makes the difference?
Careful editing and sharpening outside SL, and using an appropriate size texture and repeats so you aren't stretching a 64x256 across the side of a barn.
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Dang you Bastien, stop snooping in my workshop! -
StoneDwarf wrote:Assuming I want to work with 1024px textures, I guess it would be better to re-scale in Photoshop and do some adjustments where needed, then upload. This would result in a better comparison to what I see in Photoshop and what I see in-world, right?
Yes ... work in whatever you want, the rescale and sharpen and whatever to one of the possible SL sizes BEFORE you upload.
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I have a self-paced tutorial in a skybox at my parcel.
Look me up in world and TP to my place, then take the teleport that is by the building with shoes and stuff in it (away from the pond)
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I have heard - RUMOR ONLY - that uploading mesh will be restricted to those PIOF accounts who take and pass some sort of a tutorial about the prim cost and the requirements for mesh.
If so, it's not going to make a huge gap between "rich" and "poor" ... but it might prevent the problems we've had with insanely laggy textures and sculpts, and the ripped -off texture problem.
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I have used them both and for SL use there are only a couple of Photoshop tools I could really use that the GIMP doesn't have. Or have YET. I haven't upgraded it lately.
Also, if you work with the GIMP and get good at it, then switch to Photoshop, you won't find it hard to switch. They do the same stuff with different menus and names, but they use layers, masks, bezier curves and all that stuff.
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Ask the merchant what skin was used in the ad.
And check for Goth, Geisha and Vampire skins.
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If you shrink the texture for the system skirt about 10% it matches the size of the texture on a top better.
But you are right, RL clothing does not match at every point on every seam. You match the prominent points on stripes and call it good.
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I took one of the Eloh Eliot skin files and deleted everything but the shading layers and saved that file as "Clothing Shading Top" and "Clothing Shading Bottom". It gets rid of over half the layers
THEN: When I am designing clothing, I get the basic clothing done first with a few layers for Front, back, sleeves, trim options, etc. I use this to test the seam matching and other details.
LAST STEP: Use "open as layers" in the GIMP to open the shading file as a layer stack inside the garment file ... adjust opacity and brightness, and turn layers on or off as needed to get the effect I want for that clothing.
SAVE AS: Save the visible layers out to the final upload file, and keep the shaded layered garment file in case I want to make variations.
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You could just save the shading layers as one layer in one file and import it for every garment, but that gives a cookie-cutter look to your clothing. Some things need more emphatic shading than others, and the attention to detail is what separates the good designers from the rest of us.
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Your title should make it clear what you are selling:
Title: Storyteller Deluxe === I see a snowman, but you refer to a script. Which is it?
Your pictures should clearly show the object:
Title: Royal Robe Picture is a dark blur of something. I'm not going to buy it if I can't tell what it is.
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Ask in the Building and Texturing forum.
it's possible, but you have to make it match outside SL, with graphics software like the GIMP or PhotoShop, then upload.
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Josh Susanto wrote:I'm actually not at all worried about legitimate competition, and I have no secrets. In fact I'm eager to explain my crude-but-effective methods to anyone who is willing to try to make sense of my explanations.For about 99% of everything I do, I use Randimaginator, Lunapic, and the old 092 version of Sculptypaint.I look for images that want to be sculpted, help them want to be sculpted some more, and then I sculpt them. Making them seamless is one way to help them want to be sculpted, but not the only way.(snip)Does that help?
Yes. I can spend a bazillion hours with Sculpty Paint getting good at your method or spend a few lindens a week buying your stuff.
Lemme think here, what's the best use of my time
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Josh - I've been meaning to ask you this: How DO you make your stuff? I have no plans to compete with you, it's just my overwhelming curiosity working here.
PM me in-world if you don't want to blab all. Although YOu could blab all and 99.999% of the readers would think it's too much work.
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Snow Frostwych wrote:Hihis all, I'm trying to post a child avie on the MP but having a bit of a problem with banned words. These are the keywords I'm trying to use: kid,kiddie,kiddy,child,girl,gradeschool,preschooler,kindergarten,minor,juvenile,young,prepubescent,preteen,brat Which of them are banned??
Why so many? Instead of a thesaurus dump, just use a few of the common words that your customers would normally use. Who would search for a brat or a minor?
The words "young", "preteen", and "prepubescent" are redundant, because it's a CHILD, which by definition is all of the preceding.
What was the title and the description?
It it's similar to this: ~*By Snow*~ Kinder-(Almost Complete Avie) -with keyword of""kid, child, girl, preschooler, kindergarten, brat, PG, By Snow,~*By Snow*~" You are wasting prime wording space with that title because only the Germans would be searching for "Kinder" and "~*By Snow*~" is meaningless.
The listing is already in COMPLETE HUMAN CHILD AVATAR location, so a more effective title would describe her as "Girl, med brown skin, brown hair & 3 eye colors, yellow outfit.
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VonGklugelstein Alter wrote:New subsite called Bargain Basement .... any item under 10L should go there. This way people who do not want to invest money in the game have a clear place to find alternate product.I know before I put down some hard cash for this game I bought a bunch of free and really cheap items until I was sure that I will stick around a while... I believe SLX had a section for free items. It was a great tool...
Most of my items are <10L, not because they are shoddy, but because I think that inexpensive and high quality are not exclusive. It's mostly 1-prim decorative items, and I sell enough to pay my Premium membershop and rent a nice parcel for a low-key shop.
Buying inexpensive items does not mean people should be relegated to your "Bargain Basement" and it doesn't mean they are not investing money. It means they are being thrifty.
It would be easy to clear out the dead wood with a simple database procedure that flips the "listed/delisted" flag on any number of parameters. But, our Linden overlords haven't done it yet.
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VonGklugelstein Alter wrote:and what is up with clothing templates polluting the texture categories?Clothing is not a building component. its an AV accessory..
The templates are components because they are used for building clothing for resale - they usually contain the alpha channels and shading layers for the user to customize.
But they have become common enough they need their own category.
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What tools are there (tutorials, videos, blogs, etc) that I can use to learn more about creating custom content for sale?In SL, click on SEARCH, select the Events tab, and then click Education for category. Take classes in building and clothing construction.has lots of tutorials.I did read about settings [on products]. I would assume that I would want to set things to NOT copy, probably NOT customize, and then allow Transfer? Are these typical settings? I'd love to get some opinions on typically settings that creators use for their products.The "right" settings are a matter of opinion: I won't buy clothing or furniture that can't be modified because that means I can't change the size to fit my avatar and the setting.Most of what I sell is Mod/Transfer so it can be resized to suit the buyer, and can be given away or resold. A few are Mod/Copy so the buyer can make lots of them (the cups in tea sets, for example).
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How Many Prims did you save with 64 meter prims?
in Building and Texturing Forum
Posted
Why didn't you use mega prims a long time ago?
For many purposes, large mesh prims have no advantages over megaprims.