Pardon my english, but I had to write a big text in a second language. :/Changes are coming and we have to adapt!
*Nyu ??*
Ok, so finally the coin dropped.
After watching my sales performance inworld and at Xstreetsl I can be sure that the sales inworld are growing steady as I release more models and get more known but no significant sale or growing at XStreetsl, only the dollarbies ones that, in my case, do not always represent the whole quality of my best work.
Most of it are old stuff, try-outs that I did not wanted to improve but it is good enough for the price and products that are good, but are supposed to be low priced or free (like t-shirt, tanks, made with freebies textures, etc).
Yes I do offer the best ones for free sometimes, but always prefer to use the Midnight Mania board, offer at the live music gigs we have in the shop parking and other more efficient promotions.
So, because I used to think it was a good deal to have my products exposed at Xstreesl and I used to like the features that the merchants had with the old forum like: be free to advertise our events, sales, new products with cool pictures and links; be able to have a unique and classy signature if wanted and all that jazz, I was still releasing and keeping my top line products available there.
Back to the past
Years ago, when I become aware of SLExchange service for the first time, I got confused how the controllers of a 3D tool could permit a 2D web based third part explore something that were supposed to be made inworld. I mean, it is not that hard to understand... if you have a place to expose your products and deliver it inworld for the resident, that person would
not be shopping and bringing traffic to the sims and also the merchant would not even have to rent or buy land and pay tier to the 3D tool guys.
So yeah.. it was about time when they bought SLExchange. Of course, that was the best way, without shutting the thing down for nothing and still get one more asset to advertise (Oh.. look here, we have a site with LOTS of products created by the mice for you)
The merge to kill move.
Now things have changed again.
With the excuse that the old forums were bad for the business (their own fault - because active moderation or enforcement is a role that apparently do not exist in that company in general) the XstreetSL team, or who ever made that decision, dropped their services taking all the facilities for the small/medium merchant.
Oh ok, cool.. of course they would to something like that some day.
The point is...they never talked about decrease the amount of L$% commission they discount from the merchant for each product sold there. Lets not get into that spread macarroni cheese thing.
I believe this is just one important step until the end of this service but speculate about it is not the purpose of this post.
Making my inworld shop stronger for now
So now, I will change my business model to adapt too.
- My dollarbies will still be available in the Xstreetsl, my low price products also;
- The new releases will be upload to Xstreetsl, but will only be available there for a certain period of time;
- IF one day they answer positively my question about keeping the feature to post events for the commerce comunity in the new Commerce Blog, maybe I will make sales there too;
- I will not put XStreetSL links inworld or in any of my web feeds and advertisements;
- I will not indicate XstreetSL to anyone
- I will try, with time, follow some of the top 10 sellers practices (without have to pretend to be nice to the Almighty ones) like just keeping with time only 5% of my products in XstreeSL;
- And, of course, I will not buy any kind of their advertisements plans too (unless for a REALLY good price).
Why am I doing that?
It is just business, a matter of cost/benefit.
It will not make any difference for the XstreetSL revenue (the sales are going down right ?) or for my customers (they prefer to buy inworld).
I really dont have any personal feelings about it.
This will give me more free time to think about how to improve my creations, my promotion inworld and in other social medias, give more attention to my loyal customers, find better alternatives to advertise, make contacts with other residents and, more important, support their business too.
I am always very positive with changes, in both lives. I actually like it.
This virtual world is changing for sure, but its company´s bad practices are not, even with some nice work from a few enthusiastic employees from time to time.
Resistance is futile, the cake is a lie and I try to make of my both lives a hobby.
Now, excuse me but I have to try create something that will make me and some people fell better :D
Oh yeah...almost forgot... Visit my shop inworld :)
