Deja Letov

I think these are all great ideas. The only one I personally can't accomplish is the "see this item in second life" option. The problem happens when we redesign our stores or move product around. For examples, sometimes we need to expand the size (i just recently did this in fact) so what happens is the landing zone for the main landmark right now if I didn't have forced TP, would put you under my building in the water with no way to get out. And of course, moving things around in the store for marketing purposes to give your store a "fresh" look means having to update lots of items on the marketplace with a new SLURL. That's a ton of management. So unfortunately, I've gone the route of direct landing point to avoid people landing under my building but it means I can't take the most advantage of "see this item in second life", which I hate. Luckily things are relatively easy to find and if not I almost always have an assistant on to help guide people...but ya i wish there was an easier way to deal with that.

I know some people buy a lot from the marketplace But I would never give up my store in world. Number one reason is i know there are lot of people who are like me and go out of their way not to buy from the marketplace. I'm not a huge fan of shopping on the marketplace because I feel like its killing in world sales plus i love meeting people whil i shop so I may use the marketplace to search for items but I try to go in world to make the actual purchases. Plus there are certain business types...mine being furniture, that wouldn't do well exclusively on the marketplace because people like to try things out before purchasing. I just do my best to make it easy to shop in my store and give more incentives to shop in store to get people to shop in world and hope people choose the store over the marketplace...which right now is about 50/50.

My husband actually has your lycan AO. He doesn't play SL anymore but I remember he always would brag about it to the other lycan RPers on my sim. as for sales, my top selling in quantity is a tea set, but in lindens is a bed. its funny though because the next ites down are from my offshoot store, not even my main furniture store and it doesn't even hae the time in business my main store has. Now if I took just the last year, it's a whole other store. kinda interesting to see how things evolve.

Funny you brought that up. I was going through some of my older listings and some of my LMs in boxes are from 2 or 3 sims ago! I'm ready for that idea mentioned awhile back for universal updating of LM's now please. Until then...I am updating all day today I guess. bleh!

You can do this if you are in a MP store. If you are in someone's store specifically there is a new tab at the top that says "search this store". You can then type in your new keywords and only get back results from that particular store. Give it a try.

Perrie Juran wrote: Arduenn Schwartzman wrote: According to my latest microsurvey, 22 out of a 168 people questioned can't see all mesh. That's 13%. Please do it for the 13%: Make clear whether or not your item contains mesh. And as I stated above, there is the collateral damage. If half of those 22 are in some kind of relationship, their patner will be avoiding mesh also, pushing the percentage up to almost 20% impacted. Thats 1/5 of the Residents. That is too large a number to ignore. I think it's even higher than that. I'll definitely be making a note of mesh on my vendors. Thanks guys!

Perrie Juran wrote: Deja Letov wrote: I would be surprised if it's only 30% that don't use mesh enabled viewers. I have run into so many people who can't see mesh. Many of my own customers have asked me what's wrong with my store, cause some of my stuff looks like weird giant blocks or other strange shapes. Czari actually sent me a screenshot awhile back of what she saw at my place once, I think it was a mailbox...it was pretty jacked looking. lol Unless you are actually selling Mesh Building Supplies, you'd be wise not to use Mesh in your In World stores. I am among those who have problems with Mesh Viewers (and I'd upgrade if I could). I have started running into Mesh staircases and other things in stores. Because of the way Mesh is displayed in a non Mesh Viewer, it obstructs my view of your store and makes it impossible for me to navigate. I will simply leave. On a side note, if you are a club owner you are hurting your self if you use Mesh structures in your club. You lose not just one person but two each time. The person who can't see Mesh AND their date. On another note, neither I nor my GF will wear mesh clothes because the standard sizing is no where close to our shapes. I've seen her RL picture and her shape is accurate to how she really looks in RL. None of the standard sizes come close. On a final note, if you are a clothes designer doing Mesh clothes and you are not supporting the Mesh Deformer project, what the heck is stopping you? I actually haven't started doing any structure type stuff with mesh yet, it's all been products i sell. I haven't gotten quite that brave yet. Though I wish I could because there are some amazing pieces in mesh I'd love to include in my latest build.

If they had a better search method...absolutely.

I can see the points youre making Medhue...I actually understand them, LOL. I don't know about anyone else but I guess my main issue, or question rather is why it's happening now. yes that happened back in early 2010, but since I've started recording my own sales in August 2010, my numbers have increased every month. my main concern is why this month, things seem to be lower or at least tapering off. I say tapering off because if I look at my numbers from the 1st through the 22nd my numbers are lower than the last 3-4 months. Then all of a sudden in one day I caught up. maybe it's just the nature of the beast and I shouldn't run reports in the middle of the month. Maybe I should wait til the month is complete before I complain. but then maybe a better question is how to keep sales more consistent through the month so that there aren't huge lag spikes or drops.

mtwtfss71 wrote: Deja Letov wrote: Actually I have to highly recommend that course of that action to you! I am not someone who can spend all my time in SL, so when I do, I want to spend it building more than anything. I hired someone about 2 months ago and I have to say it was the best thing I ever did. She greets customers in the store, is on call for my "paging" system if someone needs help, manages all of my blogging, reposts those to facebook, she's even recently started to help me do some minor building projects and honestly is just an absolute gem to me. It has taken such a load of stress off of me and now when I log in, I just sit in my skybox and build build build. It's awesome. Best thing I could have ever done for myself. My only advice would be to try and find someone who loves your products because if you don't have a ton of money to spend on that sort of thing, you can hand out your products left and right along with some linden and it makes them happy. I even have some special stuff I plan on doing for her around Christmas just to show her how much I appreciate her and everything she's done. I would never want to lose her! Deja, thank you for confirming for me something I've been thinking about for a while. Can I just ask how you found the right person? That's the part I'm struggling with the most. They are your voice, after all! It's kind of funny. I posted an ad on the forums for a helper which netted plenty of applications but I really didn't "click" with anyone. I hired one person from the list of applications, but something happened in real life and she never did start working for me. So I let it go and had my grand opening when I moved to a full sim back in August. It was actually during my experiment where I increased my hours. She was a current customer and she came by during my grand opening. it was insane, way more people than I expected and she could see how frazzled I was trying to do it all on my own. So she stepped in as a customer and greeted customers for me so I could set up the hourly sales that were happening. Actually it was her and one other person, who also does a little bit of work for me now and then still. But after the grand opening was over, she told me she was looking for work and I was like oh hell yes. I hired her right away. The cool thing is, she knows and loves my products already. I didn't have to hardly teach her anything. She has also been managing other blogs for other company's in SL. It's just worked out so perfectly and I absolutely adore her.

My most spur of the moment thing in SL that turned RL was back in 2008. I was RPing as a vampire queen on my own sim and this guy came in and started RPing with us. Within a week, he was my "king" in the RP sim, then we were talking in email and on the phone. A month later, I asked him to come see me (he lived in Louisiana and I lived in Georgia). He was out here a week later and not only did he come visit, he never left and just moved in from that one plane trip out here. Now he's too comfortable on my couch to leave. lol I married him in 2011 and we are 5 weeks away from expecting our first baby together. All those things were crazy reckless and nuts, but it has been the best 4 years of my life. We caught a lot of grief at the beginning because I'm 12 years older than him (he says I'm a MILF so i guess that's a good thing). But that man has been my life raft since the day I met him. Crazy and spur of the moment yes...but the best thing I ever did! ....plus I am married to a younger hottie...how cool is that? lol

Nancy Deimatov wrote: Hey! I'm a photographer on second life, and i take this job very serious cause its a way to earn an extra money on realife, and actually it helps me A LOT! I have a studio, a store and such, but lately i'm being target of scammers that steals my pics from my gallery, or some clients that simply dont pay for their pics and mutes me. If i try to ask my money, they report me for harassing.. i really dont know what to do. I could get payment upfront, but wouldnt fix my stealing problem anyways. Is there anything i can do about it? legaly? Like a copyright that is valid on SecondLife, or make my clients sign a contract, a VALID one, that i could use it against scammers? ty! xoxo I had a photography studio for several years in real life and I can tell you first...you don't need a contract of any kind to claim copyright over an image. Copyright is established when the photograph is created...you don't have to even legally file anything. Just because you are doing it in SL, doesn't make it any different. If someone uses your photo for a use you don't allow, guess what...copyright infringement. I run in circles with other photographers still and you wouldn't believe how protective they are with their "art". I used to be the same way, after all it is your livlihood. A friend of mine actually sued one of her clients because she scanned the 4x5 proofs she got, posted them online and made her own prints from them. This is essentially what your clients are doing. Sl won't get involved, but you most definitely have legal recourse if you want to...although, hiring a lawyer is expensive and unless you've suffered significant damages, it will cost you more than you could possibly make. I would do two things. 1. Get your fees 100% all up front. If people balk, then you can always offer a guarantee. 2. Never hand over the final texures until they are happy with the proofs. And your proofs should be watermarked (and I'm talking heavily water marked due to the nature of SL) and put them on your own prim...don't hand them files. You'll never stop stealing completely but just doing some basic things to protect yourself should cut it down at least a bit.

Madeliefste Oh wrote: My inworld sales are this month lowest since ever. Few years back it was 95% in world, 5% xstreet - for items for the general customer 25% in world, 75% xstreet - for builders and creators items First months in 2012 it was 50% in world, 50% marketplace - for items for the general customer 15% in world, 85% xstreet - for builders and creators items This pattern changed for my brands since June this year, while I changed nothing the way I advertise and promote. Since June the average is like: 20% in world, 80% marketplace - for items for the general customer 5 % inworld, 95% marketplace - for builders and creators items I'm making about the same amout of money as one year ago, but I have a lot more items for sale then a year ago. So in general the profit per item decreases. My conclusion is: more and more people prefer to shop on the marketplace above shopping in world. ugh absolutely and I hate it. I've been busting my tail off for the last year trying to get my in world sales percentage higher than my marketplace and I just can't make it happen. overall sales are definitely higher on both MP and in world, but I can't get the percentage to shift. Right now I'm about 50/50, sometimes MP pulls in front of inworld by about 10-15% but if I work at it I can keep them close. these days I'm basically treating my MP and my in world as 2 different businesses. I have to or it will drive me nuts. I can't keep comparing the sales to each other, which is actually why I asked the question of this thread, since I don't want to compare anything to my own MP sales anymore, I'd rather compare with others who are actively marketing their in world stores. But ya...I totally agree with you...MP is rocking the sales charts right now. I guess all we can do is keep trying to do what we are doing and hope the in world sales pay for our in world stores. Honestly, if I wasn't able to pay tier solely with in world sales, I would probably close up and just take the MP sales as pure profit.

mtwtfss71 wrote: I did have that same increase as you, Deja. Interesting, hm?! And I mostly sell clothing so I guess that's where the club sponsorship works for me. It does nothing to increase my mannequin or pet sales though! At first I was hesitant to give away product through gift card prizes but it's amazing how many return customers I'm seeing from the practice. And to your point, marketing inworld makes all the difference (usually) in my sales volume. If I slow down on my blogging, or releasing new product, or sending out newletters, etc., there is always a decline. I'm about ready to hire someone to take that part of my business on to allow me to concentrate my time on new designs and customer service. It's difficult when you try to do it all. Actually I have to highly recommend that course of that action to you! I am not someone who can spend all my time in SL, so when I do, I want to spend it building more than anything. I hired someone about 2 months ago and I have to say it was the best thing I ever did. She greets customers in the store, is on call for my "paging" system if someone needs help, manages all of my blogging, reposts those to facebook, she's even recently started to help me do some minor building projects and honestly is just an absolute gem to me. It has taken such a load of stress off of me and now when I log in, I just sit in my skybox and build build build. It's awesome. Best thing I could have ever done for myself. My only advice would be to try and find someone who loves your products because if you don't have a ton of money to spend on that sort of thing, you can hand out your products left and right along with some linden and it makes them happy. I even have some special stuff I plan on doing for her around Christmas just to show her how much I appreciate her and everything she's done. I would never want to lose her!

Medhue...I wish I was doing better tracking back in 2010, I didn't start really taking my business all that seriously until about August 2010. It would be interesting to see if I experienced the same thing. But those are some interesting numbers, it's a shame we can't get those same stats today. I'd love to see a chart this year with PMLF.

I think it can also depend on what your business is and how you are marketing yourself. In other words, is your business the type of business people would use the search to find you? To be honest. I'm still not convinced search helps me much at all. Is it hindering me by not making the most of it? Maybe...I don't know. Perhaps if search was better, my in world sales would be spectacular! I can tell you the majority of my customers as of right now do not find me via search. I am a heavy marketer in world, it's what I mainly focus on. I don't even really compare MP to in world sales any more because to me they are two different beasts, basically two different businesses, so I am on board with you in saying I don't think the MP is to blame for lower in world sales. As for the search...I've been on the first page of results and the 3rd page and even the 5th page, I guess because of my traffic it moves, but my revenue has never changed due to it or at least not suffered due to it. I've found what changes my income is when I don't do marketing. When I leave myself off the shopper lists, when I go on vacation and don't send out my weekly newsletter or when I don't release a new product for weeks on end. Honestly, lower in world sales I typically can point right back at myself. But for the month of October, since it didn't just go as high as I was hoping, it actually went down and I did everything I normally do it left me baffled. And it's funny because I posted this thread yesterday and that statement was true, then had a whopper of a day all day and night and now I'm back up to normal this morning. But who knows if it will continue the rest of the month. Shopping habits are a strange beast and hard to tame the inner workings of...who knows who will need a bed tomorrow? Just out of curiosity, what is the date you are talking about when the search engine changed? I've seen a stready increase in sales every month for the last year, but this month is my first downward sales slump, is this something recent you're talking about? Of course.. If you were to take out August and September from my own numbers then it would still continue to be a slight increase every month. But I can tell you, if you remember a post awhile back from me, there is a reason August and September are strangely high. I did my little experiment with the time I spend in SL. http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Merchants/Another-boring-experiment-In-world-promotions/td-p/1657815 The experiment was great and my sales were awesome due to it...but of course, I can't commit that kind of time every month. I have to decide family/Real life over SL...obviously RL wins. And don't get me wrong, I'm still happy with my normal sales when I can only spend 3-4 hours per week at most so I'm not complaining at all. but, if you take out those 2 months, were sitting right back at normal I guess. So you are absolutely correct in your statement "As soon as you stop tho, things will go back to normal." By the way I love love love your idea of sharing a piece of land with friends. It helps pay your tier but like you said, you share traffic and how nice would that be!

Don't forget, not just merchant name, but store name as well.

Wow, club sponsorship! i honestly have had no luck with those, that is really interesting to hear that! I wonder if that could be attributed to the different types of businesses we are in. Looks like you are having the same downsize in october versus September as I am. Did you also have the increase in August and September over previous months as well?

I don't find that big of a deal either. Honestly, the number of them hardly "messes" with results. So what you have to skip over a picture or two. I've been dealing with this same issue...for the longest time when you did a search for gothic furniture, the very first item that came up was a dance hud. I didn't see the word gothic or furniture ANYWHERE in the title, description or keyword. No idea how it got there but it did. Stressed over it, reported it, etc. And for what? Nadda enchilada. I don't worry about what others are doing anymore and just worry about myself. I guess if it was a major inconvenience, I might have a bigger issue, but if 99% of my search is coming up correctly and it's just a random few, I wouldn't let it get to you. One other thing that could be going on...and I can't say for sure because I'm not on their developer team, they could be using smart searching techniques on their database. I won't get into the technical side of it, but SQL has a way to do word comparison in a smart manner with their full text searching. What does this mean? Well...think if of it like this: I search for the word: "lease" (im just picking something at random here) My results if using a fulltext search could possibly return results with items that match the word exactly, items that begin with that term, items that end with that term, inflectional forms of that word, a word that is close to that word, or a synonymous form of a specific word (think of a thesaurus here). So for the word lease I could get back listings with: lease, leased, leasing, leaser, rent, renting, charter, contract, deed, voucher, papers, legal document, etc. The list is endless, but can also be weighted so it's not an insane result set. Now, obviously if a merchant is blatantly adding keywords that are there that shouldn't be, then that isn't the case, but I've seen it in many cases where the word was nowhere to be found...or in cases where it could be a partial part of a word like the example given above with mad style.

This really make me curious as to the inner workings of the commerce team. I'd love to know if they do in fact have a separate development and separate planning team. I know for us we CAN'T make those kinds of changes without approval. There are spec documents to approve, execs to ask, permission to be asked. Even on things we see and think "you know what would be better". We are sometimes told no. I'd love to know exactly who deserves all of our wrath? The developers, the planners or are they one in the same? And again...Hey Rod...yo...call me...I could whip you up an awesome reporting solution and I know exactly what merchants would find important...and if I don't, we could poll them. Ya...I'll be their btich. lol

Sassy Romano wrote: I know, there are occassions when it happens or when the "send to email" gets unchecked (it used to happen when swapping to the LL viewer from others I found) but I just wanted to dispell the misinformation that everything caps at 25 and thus nothing else goes to email. That's not the case and never has been. RL post gets lost, RL phone calls don't always get through, there's no difference in the few failures in SL failing to deliver but i'm all for making it easy for the customer and easy for me as far as possible and by far, the most sensible has to be IM's to email for anyone. I'm going to get on my grumpy step now and ask if anyone that asks for notecards also asks RL phone callers or email senders to send a postcard in the mail instead? *hops off the grumpy step* Not yet but I am seriously considering it now.

Perrie Juran wrote: . I tell all my GF's that if they don't want to be oggled to put on underwear. Just how many would that be there martian man? What you think cause you're not of this earth you can just strut around being a man whore?

I would be surprised if it's only 30% that don't use mesh enabled viewers. I have run into so many people who can't see mesh. Many of my own customers have asked me what's wrong with my store, cause some of my stuff looks like weird giant blocks or other strange shapes. Czari actually sent me a screenshot awhile back of what she saw at my place once, I think it was a mailbox...it was pretty jacked looking. lol

Marcus Hancroft wrote: I hear ya, Toy Dude! Personally, I think one of the most important things to look at (besides WHAT'S selling) is the total "Item Clicks." In other words, how many times was my item looked at, and from the sales, I can extrapolate the total success of the items description, keywords, etc. Now, with the Top Selling report being fubar'ed, it's not an easy thing to do. "Anyway..... regardless if LL were to fix the reporting or outsource it..... this is still one of the oldest broken xstreet feature that LCT still has not addressed and ironically one of the easiest things they could fix.. Yet..... THEY DONT!" Exactly. They don't. And why not?? " It tell all of us exactly the level of Developer Competence we are dealing with regarding the MP staff." ^^ This I don't know if I would even call it a developer issue...because most developers are just doing what they are told to do by execs, at least in larger companies. I find it more of an issue with the team who comes up with the ideas behind it. Then again, mabe I'm wrong and they are the same people. I can tell you in my company, the developers do not decide the "what" of what happens in reporting, we just implement. Our sales reps and managers know what they need to provide the level of customer service to our clients are and they know what they need to so. Some of it I would never think of to include, but they feel they need it. If the planning team is different then the developer team maybe this could be the issue. If so...we need a new planning team cause they obviously have no idea about what numbers business people need to look at.

I know a lot of people focus on MP sales, in fact a few months ago, alot of us were sharing our sales data that included MP data as a major point. But for those who really focus on in world, how are your inworld sales comparing over the last few months? You don't have to give numbers, I'm just curious as to the overall general performance, have you been doing anything different or are you just letting it ride, is your traffic higher/lower, etc. I noticed a huge increase in inworld sales for August and September, but back down to normal numbers in October so far. I did run a huge promotion in August that I'm sure attributed to that month, and most likely also September as a trickle down effect because I gained a huge number of new customers. But things are slowly tapering off to being normal again for October...though we still have several days left in the month so I can't officially report that I guess. I also cut back on my hunts for the month of October and November due to the giant velociprator growing in my stomach that is ready to burst out any day, which I feel very strongly is affecting my sales since hunts usually net me quite a bit...so it's hurting. As far as traffic counts go...I've never been one to watch my numbers on the traffic side of things until just a month or two ago when someone explained it to me better on the forums. I wish I could find the thread to post it, I think it may have been Darius or Toy, but I could be wrong. So I'm still learning and still trying to understand how it affects my sales but I can say my traffic is pretty much the same as it was 2 months ago, for the most part. Sure I have days where the numbers just goes crazy high, and then the next day I have crazy low. But for the most part it generally stays somewhere in the 2,000-3,000 range...whatever that means. I'm still not totally convinced about traffic mattering all that much, since at the conclusion of my survey I ran in my store showed the highest numbers of "how people found me" was through hunts..and second was through organized shopper groups, but I'm still working with the thought process of trying to increase traffic...at least for awhile to see if it can help...surely it can't hurt!