Second Life gives you the ability to create and sell your creations. This is achieved through putting your items out either in whole form or in boxes called “Sales Prims.” Typically, your sales prims are flat signs that hang on the walls of your shop and have a price set on them. Visitors pay the sign the required amount and receive a copy of the contents. The trick to being a successful merchant in second life is finding the right location to put your stores to achieve maximum profit potential.

I’ve spent quite a lot of time running my own store in Second Life, and picked up a few tips along the way. The first being the choice of products. Second Life operates around genres. There are areas in the game devoted to Neko (half cat half human) communities where items that appeal to the cyberpunk community would do very well. Things like tattered scarves, floppy ears, and low-life high-tech products are best suited for these areas. Many malls offer a theme that goes well with certain types of clothing, skins, hair, accessories.

For example, if you have a shoe store that mostly contains combat boots and other military/punk accessories, your best bet is to find malls or store space in areas with that theme. Putting an evening gown store in the middle of a biker village is not likely going to get you a lot of purchases, meanwhile a leather shop would flourish.

The next thing you want to look at is the cost per week. Stores in Second Life are often rented on a weekly basis, and charge by the prim. A prim is a single shape that is used to make up parts of an overall product. A cube, for example, is a prim. That’s a lesson for another post, so I’ll continue assuming you know what primitives are in relation to this game. A good rate for a store sets your rent with traffic flow in mind. A mall that receives 2,000 customers a day shouldn’t charge as much as a mall that has 10,000+ visitors. Likewise, a lot of malls contain camping spots that pay people to sit idle in their spaces to up their traffic counts. Malls that do this are best avoided, since they are in the business of falsely representing their popularity, or are just starting out and need the traffic boost to increase their visibility.

A good rent for 25 sales prims would be 250/week. It’s a good idea to try to aim for between 6 and 10 linden dollars per prim. This is a fair market value taking into account the amount the landlords have to pay Linden to use the prims. If the traffic is high and the mall is quality, expect to pay more for your space. This works much the same way as it does in real life.

Make sure your product signs stand out. They need to be classy and realistic. Many newcomers create stores with bright yellow signs that look like they were designed in Windows Paint. You want a sales prim to have a texture that you would be proud to have in a real life store. Many retail stores hire models to wear their products and model them in the sales prim. Time has proven that things like clothing and jewelry look and sell a lot better when photographed on flesh than on a blank background. Don’t under any circumstances use a newbie or bad looking avatar as your model. There are some amazing avatars out there and a lot of money goes into making a realistic and aesthetically pleasing avatar… let them model for you.

Keep detailed records of your spendings and earnings at each individual store. Name the sales prims numerically in order to give you an easier reporting tool to determine which shops are earning their rent, and which are falling behind.

In the next article, I will discuss owning a home in Second Life on the cheap.

Matt Ryan of MattRyan.TV

Tags: second life, life, rent, shop, frugal geek, frugal, matt ryan, business, prims, sales