Mall Time!

Tuesday, May 15, 2007 Tuesday, May 15, 2007

A customer came by my store the other day and convinced me to set up a secondary shop location in his mall. He says he gets lots of traffic (verified by Linden Lab stats) so it should be a good deal for me. Even better, he's giving me a few weeks at no charge so that I can see how it goes. How can I say no to a fellow Canadian?

So I've set up this new shop in Monowai, and it's basically a miniature replica of my main shop. I've put in a small selection of the most popular products, and built a single custom demonstrator unit to show them off. Also, the demonstrator automatically triggers a brief random demonstration every five minutes to attract passers-by.

But now a question comes to mind: should I purchase special advertising for the secondary shop? In the end, I decided that is NOT a good idea. Here's my reasoning:

  • Advertising is used by consumers in a very simple way: search -> results -> select one of them -> TP to shop location. There is no need to have more than one shop location if you can instantly TP to any location from a search hit. Why spread your advertising L$ budget over several ads when you can concentrate that money on one ad that would get higher search ranking?
  • On the other hand, the mall may have existing traffic, and if someone is already at the mall they may notice your shop and drop in for purchases. But again, this doesn't require me to advertise
My bottom line on mall advertising: if you already have an advertised main location outside of the mall don't bother advertising the mall location. Spend it on your main advertisement instead.

So, I now have a second shop in a second location and I am depending on existing mall traffic to drive results. Apparently there is a busy club nearby so I am hoping to grab some customers from that traffic. We'll see what happens.

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