Shopping in SL - Answer of a Merchant

Yesterday I got a note card with an answer of a merchant on my last blog post. It was too long for the commentary function. Therefore I post it here:

Answers from my side as a creator and shop owner in SL, you wrote:

"Dear shop owners, if you want to make more sales and traffic inworld, here are my recommendations:

1. You show me in your stores often the same photos as in the Market Place. I want to see the stuff inworld. That's why I'm coming! And if it is not possible, have at least some examples in the store."

Answer:
Well, we would love to show the customer the quality of the products by placing inworld-examples at the store. I agree, that this will be the best way to decide if a customer will buy or not .... I am selling clothing, attachments, furniture, deco stuff, some houses ...  and i try to show the products inworld. As real as possible .... chairs you can sit on, houses to walk in, decoration you can see in an natural environment. But this only works for primed/sculpted objects, which can be rezzed. And of course, each rezzed object uses prims. Unfortunately Second Life is limiting us to 15000 prims per SIM (if you are lucky enough to offer your clients a whole sim store)..... sounds a lot, but in fact you need a lot of prims for the store, the environment, the presentation of products (e.g. easel, shelfs, tables, lights, plants, buildings etc.) As a client, please do a simple test. Just count the prims you are actually wearing while you read this. How much is it including hair, shoes, belt, jewelry and various other attachments. Are you below 100? between 100 and 200? over 200? Well its up to you to decide, how many products can be placed with a limit of 15000 prims.

Just to clarify. We offer a range of nearly 1000 different products. Store and environment (whole SIM) takes about 25% of the available prims and is well built, using sculpties, megaprims and low prim plants and furniture. (hey, thats for you, the client, to give you a nice shopping experience in a store that reflects the products. Or do you prefer shopping in white boxes?)

Sure, products can be shown with temp-rezz-vendors ..... but i doubt this will be the shopping experience you expected. Sitting in front of a box, touching, rezzing, touching, rezzing, touching ......

For  clothing, like shirts and pants there is another problem. These can only be shown when worn on the body. So you need some modelling bots or real person models to show. Be honest. Do you like the stores where 20 models are standing around? For some of the clothing sets, we try at least to show the sculpted parts and boots in real.

"2. For EVERY piece of clothing please offer a demo to try. Many of you are better photographers than builders, but some also are worse. Even if the quality is good, sometimes the Items cannot be properly adjusted to fit to the avatar."

Answer:
Its hard to show e.g. a shirt as a demo. Sure you can paint a huge DEMO across the breast, but wont this destroy the overall look? Same for pants and other clothing textures.
For anything else, I agree that a demo will be a nice idea. And I can't deny that some merchants use photoshop to "pimp up" their vendor pictures. That is an absolutely NO GO!

"3. Deliver clothes in folders. I want to put them on immediately."

Answer:
We do.

"4. If the items must come in a box, then please allow to rez. Is it customer-friendly to send me back home? If I liked it, I might have bought a different color or something else. But you sent me away!"

Answer:
For products which are in a box, it's a simple one prim box to open:

"5. I wish changing rooms to fit the clothes."

Answer:
In fact I built one...... it is never used by clients

"6. For other objects, I wish the number of prims in the description. They are an essential part of my decision to buy or not."

Answer:
For all items which have to be rezzed, we announce the number of prims on the vendor. For attached items, like belts or shoes, we do when the prim count is incredible high.

"6. Please use your creativity for the products and not the packaging. Boxes with more than 15 prims often have sent me to a sandbox. That did not made me happier with the new items. You might stand all day on your building platform of a full sim and do not understand that. But I have a strong decoration gene and a beautiful home on a low prim sim. Therefore free prims are luxury for me as for most residents"

Answer:
I completely agree:

"7. And last, but not least: Why don't you care about the number and quality of scripts and ARC? How should I know about it as average resident? You are the builder and you risk that I will be expelled from other sims because of your clothes, hair, shoes or whatever."

Answer:
There are various reasons to use scripts in the products.
Most of the merchants are afraid to sell copy/modify products because of some easy to handle copy tools in SL. To give the client at least the chance to resize, they add a resizer script in the product. Although all of our products are copy/mod, i also add some resizer scripts sometimes.For example for some belts, made of sculpties and prims, to make them fit the clients shape. I cant expect any client to be experienced enough to adjust by hand, but we still keep the products modifyable. So you can adjust to your needs, depending on your skills in SL. But under all circumstances, it must be possible for the client to delete the scripts. Thats a must! Either by an delete option in the script menu, or by deleting the script out of the content of the object.

The client normally needs to adjust the item once .... then there is no further need of resizers etc. Selling NO MOD products with build in resizer scripts without an delete option is stupid. I am providing both solutions for the client.  Delete by menu and deleting the script in the modifyable object. If you don't do one of both offered solutions to get rid of the scripts ... don't blame the merchant.

DragansVarg, http://www.huskycity.de/