Question: How is your Shop doing?

FauconIoji

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Faucon Ioji VanAlkel
Hello Everyone,

This post is a question aimed specifically at shop owners - how is your shop doing?

I run a project called the Entropia Revival Project and I'm collecting some data on how everybody is doing with their trading businesses. Right now, I'm just looking to get a general idea of the ups and downs of business.

So, traders and businessmen - can we start a discussion to try and discern how our economy is doing?
 
Sold mine already but remeber placing item was pain in the ass. I would even pay for feature which alows me to set some fixed drop points in shop area and manage it from some kind of list or table.
 
the biggest down atm are the missing messages when something is sold, so you have to go through shop and check all racks to see what has sold and what you might want to refill

i made myself a list with items in the racks by order to be able to do this, not my favorite activity in EU to check this all manually..and to write down each piece when placing it in shop - support is not replying to support case even with 2 reminders nothing happens there ..
 
Missing notifications is really disadvantage.

it works, slowly but it works.

On the other hand, I sell more and faster through auction!
 
Lack of advantages over auction is biggest shop malady. They are simply not like RL shops when u can check things.
Maybe if MA would add some "trial" function unaviable for auction traders that could make some difference, still thats just wild idea though.
 
For me it was like:

shop sells one item every two days but a bit above auction prices
+ you can see items
+ you can wait, because no auction fees again and again if not sold
- more work with restock than auction
- a lot of PED bound

auction:
+ easily sells you 10-20 items a day
+ only few PED bound
- high fees

at the end I sold my shop because I wanted to cash out most of my PED
 
Shop owner: Shops are doing great, I have great turnover and profit.

Future or past shop owner: Missing notifications, placing item was pain in the ass, too much work for few pecs a month, way overpriced.

I wait for the thread "How is your LA doing?" :laugh:

For my shop in New Oxford I can say when I stoped adding items most got sold even stupid items. Now if I can only find time to restock it again I am sure I will make profit. And yes it is pain in the A-team to run a shop. Better question is "Do you enjoy running your shop?"
 
I would be happy with my Shops, if messages still work.
I have great turnover (measured in thousands of PED/month) and a wide range of items.
Much items (but not all!) In my Shops is cheaper than on the AH, and those who regularly makes a purchase, know about it ;)

PS No support for me in broken Shop issue (since july), in messqages issue (since july), and about easy issue with invisible item (since septemper). MA (EU) Support is VERY-VERY bad now, and do nothing, only copy and past standard 'delivered to...'.
 
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My shops are doing well. I make Arkadian weapons and armour and related gear and sell from my shops. I much prefer that instead of use of the auction house.

Total sales of over 750K ped since I opened my first shop in late 2012. I have monthly turnover of 20-30k ped. In August I had over 55k in sales. I also have occasional slow months. For example, in June I only sold around 14k (but still ran at 7% profit). Last time I lost money was April 2013.
Generally I am selling 1/4 to 1/3 of my stock every month.

Relatively recently I opened an apartment based shop on Caly (my other shops are all on Arkadia). Sales are small but promising. Assuming things go the way I expect, I'll be looking to expand to two more shops on Caly in six months to year.

Yes the notification bug is annoying but you can work around it without too much effort if you are prepared to keep records of stocked items, so its not a show stopper. Yes there could be easier more efficient ways to manage shops than are currently offered by MA. But you can make a go of it if you are sufficiently motivated.

Regards,
Kikkijikki
 
of my 4 shops they are busy as follow

#1 arkadia celest north 7 Kittens clothes ppl love to be fashion :D

#2 Next Island CND booth #1 I guess I have a captive market O.O some months very busy

#3 Arkadia sanctuary cove 2 Furniture + odds and ends does ok some months dead others

#4 Deer mall lvl 2 shop 4 Hubby has the shop deed at the moment. we get maybe a sale every few months o_O mindark destroyed that shop and oxford then tried to charge me STUPID high rent till the shop owners revolted made huge anger forum threads and all rents were removed from game. mindark . calypso still did not do anything to fix oxford and I am so pissed with them over it I rarely visit calypso anymore because they obviously dont care about kittens -.- a few times we send messages asking for status update and keep getting told for years now "big things in the works for oxford"
 
Kikki,
Gz for 75k, my turnover never been so high.
But my specialisation is tools/enhancers, so I have lower demand due to longer period of use my sold items.
Maximal recorded turnover I have is about 20K/month, but that is enough for me atm.
I must say that on other planets (like Calypso and Monria, FOMA) I have low demand (about 10-20% of Arkadia Shop), this is due to the lack of people (on Monria or FOMA) and lack of desire to go shopping (Calypso)
Usually I have about 7-12k/month turnover (mostly in Ark shop).
Perhaps if my shop at Next Island could function normally, I would have had a strong demand there, because the planet has almost empty at auction, and for items in a Shop (in the place that I can use, and which is not broken), was good demand. Now I put NI Shop for sale (on Caly AH), because I do not want to wait when MA will fix my 300 item points, they promised to do it, but at the moment I have only 18 available, and it is too small for me.
 
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My Shop is in Port Atlantis Mall Level 1 #3

It specialised for a year in clothes and textures. The sells where a constant up and down, around all half an year i wanted to sell it because the sells where so low. But everytime i decided this, the sells got high again.

Nowadays I try to sell some gear too.

I tried to advertise the shop with people calling it out and ad's on the Ad Terminals.
Seems to make not much difference if I place them or not, only some people starting to pm me and asking questions.

The missing shop sell notifications are realy bad.

But what I would wish for, is a terminal at a mall, or even better for the whole game like the event list, where the people can search for items and have a list what is where available.

It is realy bothering to have to run through all shops and see where what is.

I know my problem, and sure that of some others too, is how to advertise and stock a shop properly. As malls in RL dont have our problems (or at least the goos ones not). I think maybe we have to look how RL shopowners do things.
 
The missing shop sell notifications are realy bad.

Actually received an reply from support about that issue:

Support Reply said:
Hi GoNi,

We are aware that the fix did not go into the game as intended and it did not help the error symptoms.

We are looking into it and hoping to restore this feature as soon as possible.

Thank you for your report.

We hope that, too!
 
I like running my shop and it's doing fine.

I run a noob shop on Monria and because there basically is not working auction a lot of items sell quite fast. I have a habit of aggressive pricing (almost always better than weekly auction markup), that could help too.
 
The Habitat Bargin Bin in Omegaton West Habitat is running fine, slow at times but we are on the outskirts of civilization and supply mostly lower level gear so is to be expected. We do try to offer better prices then the AH though on the items we do have.

FOMA Shop 52 is still owned by me but I don't have the means to keep it full of anything so it has no business atm. Wish there was a way to rent it out or sell it for what it really is worth, got some low offers but I am not going to take the loss on sale. Rather keep it to maybe use in the future.
 
Wow, A lot of feedback - I logged onto the forums just a few moments ago for the first time today and had to read through all of this. That gosh darn day job always keeps me away for longer than I think it will :p

Anyway, thank you to everyone for your thoughts. As you all may or may not know by now, I run a Project on Calypso called The Entropia Revival Project. The Revival is focused around re-developing Calypso's community and economy. It's been a big undertaking but we're really making some headway and a lot of fronts, and pretty soon we'll be positioned to start working on some really big things.

That being said, the malls (in my opinion) are an extremely important and currently very unstable business. For all of the thoughts that I've gotten here, I think its safe to say that the broad points are:
  • Some things are simply broken, like the notifications and product placement. Those things, though frustrating, seem to be more annoying to some than others. Still, this hinders business by making customer retention difficult
  • The auction, it's success, and it's placement have a major impact on the mall shop economy. Mall placement in-world is also very important, and as a result some malls have exploded while others have died.
  • The main problem on Calypso is a lack of consumer interaction with the market. I'm sure this comes from a number of factors, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the big reason is lack of funds in the newer player demographic and poor active-user counts on world at any given time.

Now, I know that some of those things are impossible to change. However, there are some things on that list that we, as players, have the power to make a difference on.

Juliane, you said your problem is marketing and advertising. If you're on the first floor of the mall, you probably (recently) got an email from me talking about just that (I'm working on emailing that entire mall right now). I think that a lot of people share that view - but how do you market a mall, and what do you do?

Well, I've had six years to think about it (with a visual merchandising background) and I think I have a few ideas.

For starters, the malls have a major advantage over the auction of not having auction fees - meaning that they can undercut the auction in prices.

That could (at least on Calypso) be our angle. The shops in the PA mall should market towards new players. With the proper signage in-shop and good marketing and community interaction to drive newbie traffic to the mall, the "visual representation" of the items can be a great asset. If shop owners pulled together on this one with me, we could create an environment in the mall that sells people items and educates them on the items they're buying. I've already seen this tactic used in the Twin Peaks Mall - and from what I can tell, it works.

If anyone is interested in learning more about what The Revival is doing, you can find my blog linked in my signature. I have a lot of things I want to do with Calypso to drive business through increased trade and community interaction - but here's my question for all of you:

Would you be willing to work with someone to help market your shop based on your area, to try and drive traffic, if the cost was manageable? I think that a collective effort on the behalf of the malls and shop owners is what we need right now. Specifically, I would like to start in Port Atlantis, as this mall, in my opinion, has the most untapped potential. If someone were to manage the mall to try and drive profitability for everyone, through proper store placement in the mall to avoid unnecessary competition, product themes and placement in-store, signage design and brand marketing, everyone would reap the benefits.

So, thoughts?
And Thank you all again for your responses.
 
But what I would wish for, is a terminal at a mall, or even better for the whole game like the event list, where the people can search for items and have a list what is where available.

It is realy bothering to have to run through all shops and see where what is.

yep I hate that too to run around all the different shop locations and search .. then I usually end up using auction instead .. a shop register or something would be really neat
 
They could integrate such a feature into auction.

But instead of the bid button you have a show location button.
 
They could integrate such a feature into auction.

But instead of the bid button you have a show location button.

*Bad mood on*: Why would they? They dont get money from the shops and they will loos auction fees.

*Bad mood off*: Thats a great idea
 
Yep, I hate to say it but I don't forsee that happening.

I think it's up to use to drive traffic to those mall stores. MIndArk has said plenty of times that the shops are the owner's responsibility, and marketing and merchandising them are up to the mall owners.

But, that brings another thought to my mind:

If I started a registry of shops on my blog site with a brief overview of what you can find at your shop, would anybody be interested? I could require a small monthly cost for it, and give a set amount of words for a description for each shop, and include a general overview of wares that wouldn't cut into that amount.

It's worth noting that, in only 3 weeks of operation now, my blog is getting well over 600 views per week with an average hit rate of 200 per post. I anticipate that number to go up substantially, as well.
 
Well, there is a shopping directory built into Entropedia, if only that was maintained.

Of course an in-game solution would be better, or at least an API that would allow app developers to tap into the original database. The total lack of any automation tools to help with discovery keeps me away from actually running a shop, because as a buyer I hate it just as much having to waste my time searching for anything specific. They're at a severe disadvantage to the auction house and I believe, only the few who are doing well would report here while we won't hear from the rest. But thanks to the thread starter for drawing these responses, it is interesting nonetheless.
 
If I started a registry of shops on my blog site with a brief overview of what you can find at your shop, would anybody be interested?

I think it will NOT work, because we already have list of Shops here on PCF.
If you make a full database with all items, with all prices, and will update it every day, with powerful and easy search engine - maybe I'll think about how to be included to it (also with a fee maybe), if the other owners also will be included to it.
In this (quoted) case you are looking for earnings on a empty place, I can spend 30-100 PED in a month to attract buyers, using a planetary ad system, and this way is more effective
 
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Twin peaks mall is doing well. Shops are better now than ever from what I recall. Even in 2007 when shops were generally good, weren't as good as now.

I sold Arkadia shop due to the logistics of keeping up with daily sales, (even with a warp ship I bought to keep up, which I sold cause I had no time between running twin peaks sales and playing.)

sold FOMA due to the logistics....ok not really it just sucked. :)

Foma is lacking in business, but its a bad design anyhow.

I had been selling alot of armor weapons gear ect, but lately am using it to sell off some extra bps.
Still get sales every day.


Regarding your site idea, I find people do not spend much out of game time to find things, apart from information, and even then its sporadic.

I even created a fast automatic upload (WIP, grabs off the website) of (editable) all inventory and one part of it separates shop goods and puts them in a table http://www.lundsys.com/Entropia/shoptable.php and in all honesty, just a few die hard customers ever check despite ads run in-game and invites to look. And I am not the only guy who decided to try and make similar tools by far.

Anyone can use this btw, it would be accessible in my android ap also if so wanted.
its dynamic and the info changes to yours when logged in(secret registration code is Atrox) , eventually it could list everyone's inventory...but I like to play, and its just a learn to program hobby site in all honesty.

Getting people to go to the site and keep going is the trick I think. Another thing is that there is a major part of the playerbase that simply never see these forums....there are alot of foreign fansites with all kinds of similar cool tools and such for almost all major languages to compete with, or organize with as well.


For now the ad terminal is my major source of peddling my existence, and it works well overall.
 
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I dunno.

I've been advertising my society, The Entropia Revival Project, on a lot of different mediums this month.We've been working Facebook, the blog, here on the forums, etc. and what I've noticed is something else from what everyone here seems to be describing.

I've had well over 2,000 hits on the blog this month. Some posts have over 20k +1's from Google. Each post gets over 200 Unique hits. I have over 100 people interacting with the society on Facebook and I see a daily increase. Then again, I have a professional marketing background myself and I'm currently devoting around 40 hours per week to just Advertising.

I think the problem, more or less, is that the marketing off-world hasn't been done correctly. You can have a great tool, but if it isn't marketed, it won't get anywhere. I think we've seen that happen in the real world enough for us to know it to be true :p I heavily market my website on-world through word of mouth and events, and this has turned out great for me. I regularly tell people to homepage or favorite my site, and I have people coming to me all the time telling me they've read the latest blog.

I'd be happy to attach screenshots of these stats as well :p

The Ad panel in game, as a result, provides me with, by far, the least return after i've put the time in for the other mediums. Thee is a registry on entropiaplanets and one here - but are they marketed 40 hours per week?

The value of me working on a registry isn't necessarily the functionality, but the level of exposure. I understand how easy it would be for MindArk to do one on-world and how much more effective that would be. I also, however, understand that likely won't happen for a long time as a semi-veteran myself. We all know how long it takes for MindArk to do anything, and thats the stuff they've actually announced they'll do.

That being said, I'm just trying to make the best of a bad situation and I think I'm going to be in th ebest position to do it by next month. :p
 
Traffic to your site means nothing if it does not give additional buyers to my (or other) shop
You have no target visitors, only www-surfers, nothing more. Maybe also you attract new players to the game, it's good, but they have no motive to come and shop.
 
Well, there is a shopping directory built into Entropedia, if only that was maintained

I use to maintain my inventory there on a daily basis until I could not change things because of some bug, it just loaded forever sometimes, the drop downs never populated, the categories showed wrong selection of items etc...

So I stopped using it.
 
I use to maintain my inventory there on a daily basis until I could not change things because of some bug, it just loaded forever sometimes, the drop downs never populated, the categories showed wrong selection of items etc...

So I stopped using it.

I was trying to use that too and it did not work most of the time so same stopped trying it
 
Traffic to your site means nothing if it does not give additional buyers to my (or other) shop
You have no target visitors, only www-surfers, nothing more. Maybe also you attract new players to the game, it's good, but they have no motive to come and shop.

I don't understand your point here.

Advertising companies never give anyone a "point" to come and shop - it's the stores' responsibility to provide good product at a good price to a target market. The "Point" to come shop at any shop is because, well, its a good shop.

Advertising provides an opportunity to present your "motive to come and shop" to others. It doesn't invent that motive for you - it simply provides you with a medium for which to get that message out in an effective, extensive way. Granted, there may have been a "shop directory" on another website. But, was it getting 2,000 hits per week? Based on the feedback I've received here, I doubt it.

What I have to offer is a website with a high level of exposure. As for what traffic I'm getting, the traffic I have isn't just coming from my blog sitting on the internet. It's a result of strong advertising of the blog on Facebook groups for Entropia, on this forum and others, on the ad panel in game and through word of mouth.

Think of it like a Television commercial. I doubt the TV station helps the company figure out where the value is in their company before they run an advertisement. The TV station has their own company to worry about :) And their profession is putting the word out about YOUR company for others on a medium that attracts customers through other means, like shows and sports games.

On my blog, those other means of attraction are my blog posts, and if I don't say so myself they've received very positive feedback so far. :)
 
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