Socially|Mundane

There are two kinds of customers: the hunter and the gatherer. The gatherer gathers. They are the window-shoppers who browse around, store-to-store looking for anything that catches their fancy - impulse-buyers. In Second Life, unlike first life, gatherers are likely one in a thousand - or only once in every 100-shopping jaunts for each of us. Hunting is far too easy. There are two things to sell also: services (your talent such a photographer, disc-jockey, land-leasing, etc.) and products (anything I can put into my inventory.)


These tips will focus on the hunter and product-selling primarily. It means you absolutely must follow the one single most important rule of business, especially in SL. All other rules and effort follow after and are based on this one singular law:

Make it easy as possible for anyone to give you their money.

But wait, "anyone can simply click something and throw money at me," you say? Yes this is true. However, you have to make it easy to find you; get to you; see what you sell; determine quality; digest the price and so on. We will cover these aspects of business and show you how to get an edge.

Point of Sale (POS), where the buyer actually gives you money be it on XStreet SL (XSL) or a vendor in-world must do all your work for you: entice, inform, sell. Our first tip involves the evil "T" word.

Traffic. It is important when you choose a POS location in world you simply must pay attention to the traffic of the the entire sim. Ideally, you want zero traffic. Yes you read it correctly: zero traffic is optimal for the shopping experience as what we commonly call "lag" comes fast and hard from other agents (avatars) in the sim. The more agents on a sim, the more lag the sim will have. This slows down not only movement, but also scripts and texture downloads.

Most shoppers on the hunt will not wait too long for your product art to appear - especially in "page" vendors. Hunters are impatient - they're on a hunt! You want your POS to be as low-traffic as possible so your vendor and other textures will rez quickly as possible.

Ensure no campers or traffic bots are anywhere in the sim before you rent a merchant booth. And, try to rent in a corner or off to the side where as few other booths as possible can be seen from that location. This helps your textures rez first. And finally, try to get a booth on the East side, facing west. Whenever you land somewhere after a teleport, you are often facing East.

This way, if someone does teleport directly to your POS, they will be facing your booth directly without having to turn around, thus your vendors and textures will often be first in the download queue to rez just a bit faster than everyone else.

So, Point-of-Sale rule: Find a place with as little traffic as possible in order to get your vendors and textures to rez quickly as possible, thereby giving your potential customer a better customer experience.

Regardless of traffic, once your potential customer gets there, they have to be able to see what it is you are selling. So be sure to optimize your product art files.

(A new tip is posted each Tuesday and Thursday morning at 6 a.m. Pacific time (think SL Time) until all 15 are presented.)