Jump to content

Can basic accounts open up stores?


tomalo10
 Share

You are about to reply to a thread that has been inactive for 2710 days.

Please take a moment to consider if this thread is worth bumping.

Recommended Posts

I would like to start selling creations, or at least find some way of making money.

 

One way that looks fairly promsing to me is to open up a store or something. The problem is, I have no idea how I would get people to visit, and I will be basic for a long time. I'm very new to this, so sorry if I'm being a noob.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yes, Basic accounts can open a store, either in-world or on SL Marketplace. If you hope to cash out profits as real money, you do need to have payment info on file (Credit card or a Verified PayPal account). You do NOT need to be a Premium member.

To have an in-world store, you'll need to rent land. As a Basic account, you can't purchase mainland parcels and pay your rent directly to Linden Lab. But you can rent land from other Residents, or rent space in a mall run by other residents.

Small first-time merchants can get much more exposure by locating in a busy mall than they can by trying to open a free-standing store. You benefit from walk-by trafic from the neighboring mall shops. Find a place where people go already to buy the sort of things that you hope to sell, and get a small mall space there. 

SL Marketplace makes it possible to set up a web-based store without actually having any land in-world. There are no costs per month to have an SL Marketplace store. Instead, Linden Lab takes a certain percentage of any sales that you make, in return for providing the service and advertising SL Marketplace as a general place to shop.

No matter where you sell stuff, you need to have the right skills to make things that people want to buy. Learn to create textures in a graphics program like Photoshop or Gimp. Learn to build in-world with Prims. Learn how to maks system clothes, applying textures that you make to the in-world system clothing templates. Learn to use programs like Blender to make things with 3D Mesh. Learn the LSL scripting language, so you can make scripted stuff.

Like any other sort of work, making things to sell in SL requires skill, effort, and time spent managing the business. It isn't like fishing or farming in some games, where you can just do a repetitive task and earn game money or goodies.

Whatever you do, make sure you're doing it because you actually enjoy it. Most businesss in SL are lucky to break even on costs. Very few make any sort of real profits. For the most part, unless you already have great skills that can be applied to making stuff in SL, you'll have a steep learning curve before you can be as good as the competition. And even then, you can probably make more money in the real world flipping burgers, and spend your real money to buy L$ for playing around in SL.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks, everyone. It is much easier. I have one more question though; how do I find a good destination? 

 

For example, if I wanted to open a store in a mall, how would I find a mall with rentable space and lots of traffic?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

That's NOT easy.  It takes patience and good luck.  Finding rentable space is a snap. Walk onto almost any sim with shops and you'll find some vacant ones.  The trick is finding one where you're likely to have customers.  I have had shops on beautiful sims with no people, and sims with lots of people who weren't interested in buying my clothing.  I have my shop on a sim now that I must have visited dozens of times for almost two years before it occurred to me that there was a reason I kept coming back.  It appealed to people like me, and they might also be people who like what I sell.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

You have to look for one or both of the following places;

-a sim you really like

-a sim with lots of visitors who will like your product.

 

The first is easy but will often not give you profit.

I have a few shops in sims that don't make much or any profit but I really like the sims, I want to support them and I also like that the kind of people who go there will visit my shop, pick up landmarks to my main shop and sim and will one day visit.

 

The second is harder.

It all depends on what you will be selling.

Find a sim that fits your items, example; if you make cowboy stuff, vind a Western roleplay sim.

Once you know your theme/subject/product, start looking for sims where people go who may like what you want to sell.

Hang out in these sims, see if they are busy, do they have many events, chat to other shopkeepers there, how much is the rent, etc.

 

There is no real golden formula, no matter what you do, you always take a little risk.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I would not rent land from another user for running any kind of business as you are at the mercy of the land owner. Land owner may go belly up or decide to change the sim to something else, kicking everyone out and returning all objects without notice (which happened to me a few times, lol)

best bet is to do marketplace only without premium account or payment info but may want to go premium anyway since you will need to spend some lindens to start off anyhow (unless you create everything from scratch like scripts, sculpts, mesh, textures, templates, skins, shapes) depending on what you want to create.

I build myself and it's usually a mix of creating stuff from scratch and using full perm stuff from marketplace or in world for me.

If you do go the completly free rout, you can make builds on "Sandbox" sims that let anyone rez objets, then make your marketplace shop and post them up there.

If you do go premium you can get 512 plot of mainland land for free and use that as a temp store (with some one prim sales boards and grow from there as you make some lindens. Unless you are piling in the lindens, there really is no need to worry about cashing them out as you are probably going to put that right back into SL for building stuff or just stuff for your avatar.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 4 years later...
You are about to reply to a thread that has been inactive for 2710 days.

Please take a moment to consider if this thread is worth bumping.

Please sign in to comment

You will be able to leave a comment after signing in



Sign In Now
 Share

×
×
  • Create New...