Second Life Marketplace vs Inworld – Where’s best to sell?
This started as a post I made on SLU at the end of last year. Along with everyone else, I’m noticing a move away from buying inworld to people shopping on the marketplace. So I looked at the figures and it’s pretty obvious to see why stores in Second Life are closing, it just isn’t cost effective to be paying so much for land when people aren’t buying inworld.
I had decided to close the stores at the end of this month but have decided to give them one last chance and I’ll continue to subsidise them from my marketplace sales but it can’t carry on indefinitely and once I have to start putting my hand in my pocket to pay for the land then the shops will go. They’re just a vanity now.
Most store owners complain that tier is too high, they’re right, for what is effectively a 3d web page it is extortionate how much we’re charged but for me, the decline started back in March 2010 when they introduced the new search inworld and then moved to the web based search. That stopped years of month on month sales growth inworld and I’m not the only one who saw that change.
If you don’t fancy reading the table, the take away from it is that to get the same return of $100 from sales inworld to the marketplace you need to be turning over $100 usd per month for every piece of 512sqm you use as a store. Not unheard of but certainly rare I’d suggest. It still beggars belief that LL choose to push people to sell on the marketplace rather than inworld since tier gains them much more income than the lindens they receive in commission but then Linden Lab has never been a haven of rational decision making.
Marketplace | Inworld |
Requirements | Requirements |
The only requirement is a viewer with a merchant outbox (which is everything but phoenix afaik). | Either a premium account or estate land. Minimum cost is around $5usd per month. |
Costs | Costs |
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Benefits | Benefits |
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For every $100 usd of sales.. LL gets $5, you get $95. |
To make $100usd you’d have to sell around 25,000L worth of goods. Not unheard of but to make around the same profit as the marketplace you’d have to do it from a piece of 512 @ $5 pm Good luck with that. |
LL Marketing Requirements | LL Marketing Requirements |
None, you’re automatically listed in search so you just need to add keywords to your listing. |
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Gaming | Gaming |
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LL Marketing optional extras | LL Marketing optional extras |
Variously priced ads but be warned, there’s a bug where if you do take out an ad it’s quite likely you won’t be able to stop it at the end of the period and they’ll keep taking money from you until hell freezes over or LL goes bust. | You can buy your way up the classified search returns by increasing the price of your classified ad.However, LL has a policy of including non keyword high priced classified ads in returns as well and search is also broken so your ad may not be returned even if you pay the highest price for an ad with the keyword that is specifically searched for. (I can remember one classified where they were paying $100usd a week and it wasn’t returned for the main keyword yet a host of irrelevant high priced ads for other things were, that’s LL for you) |
Set up | Set up |
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