A Venture Into A Journal of Virtual Worlds

I should have mentioned this a while ago, but somehow I’ve been distracted. Last year I was contacted by my friend, Dr. Yesha Sivan, senior lecturer at the Department of Software Engineering, Shenkar College of Engineering and Design, Israel. I’d first met Yesha previously at SLCC 2008 and caught up with him again at SLCC 2009 in San Francisco. He inquired whether I’d be interested in writing a paper for his Journal of Virtual Worlds, a scholarly publication that contains a myriad of articles related to virtual worlds.

This particular issue was to hold articles on Technology, Economy and Standards. In other words, which technical standard protocols could make virtual economies more vibrant? Yesha was especially interested in having me, an actual virtual business owner, provide an on-the-ground point of view not normally elucidated by academics. I agreed, and wrote up an article for the Journal, which was published in late 2009.

I chose the topic: Barriers to Efficient Virtual Business Transactions, which really was a platform for me to rant about things that should be rectified. Like most virtual business owners, I encounter logistical problems so often that I and most others don’t even think twice about the insane work-arounds we constantly undertake. I tried to explain some of the basic ones, such has challenges to shared ownership of items and businesses, difficulties in advertising, permissions peculiarities and fulfillment follies.

The paper’s abstract:

With the availability of business transaction capability within virtual worlds like Second Life, enterprising individuals and teams have established businesses that operate entirely within the realm of virtual reality. These wholly-virtual business operations act much like real-life businesses; they must develop and manufacture products or services, advertise, sell and fulfill deliveries. A complete lifecycle of business events takes place within the virtual world.

The virtual business owner is presented with a seemingly complete set of tools to perform all actions required by each stage of the business lifecycle. However, over the past several years virtual business owners have begun to discover limitations and missing elements in these business transaction protocols. This paper will identify the more notable limitations facing today’s virtual business owners.

Hopefully my thoughts are shared by other virtual business owners and I hope even more strongly that those charged with creating virtual worlds will resolve these issues so that much stronger virtual economies can emerge. I'd love to hear your feedback on the paper in the comments below.

You can find the entire journal here, and my paper in particular right here (PDF). Enjoy!

Who Are You?

I’ve been wondering about my customers. Who are they? Where do they come from? How did they find the store?

The first step is to get some statistics. To do so, I conjured up a simple monitor script that quietly tracks visitors when they appear. That’s all – it just records very basic information about those nearby periodically. You can even purchase monitoring tools similar to this yourself if you’d like, there’s plenty for sale on XStreetSL. Maybe I’ll package up mine and put in on sale someday if there is interest.

The results? Well, there is plenty to analyze in the two months of data I’ve collected, but the first analysis I considered was language. My theory was that most of my visitors would be English speaking, since that is the language of the majority of my promotional activities. The results show that yes, English is by far the most popular language of my customers.

But it’s interesting to note that significant numbers of visitors are non-English, with large numbers of German, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. The third biggest group is in fact “unknown”. That means the avatar has not specified their language or does not permit it to be seen. Many other languages are represented in much smaller percentages.

So what does this mean? Some ideas:

• I market too much in English and not enough in other languages
• My products appeal to English speakers and less so to other groups
• Perhaps English speakers shop more than other groups (do they have more money?)
• My insignificant multi-lingual efforts have produced a less significant visitor draw in those languages

But the number one theory is that those non-English speakers probably speak English as a second language anyway! Stay tuned for more analysis in the future.

Just a Pile of Products?

I’ve added some new items to my store in the past few weeks, taking up more space on the product shelves. In fact, a count today revealed that I now have 196 unique products for sale. I’ve talked before about how I arrange the product shelves for shopping ease, but today I want to talk about extra features that every store should consider having.

The issue is that when you have a great many products, things can be confusing for visiting shoppers. Where do they start? What’s different from the last time they visited?  What’s it all about, anyway? Over the past year I’ve developed a few solutions for my shop; they may work for you too.

Problem: How do customers find new items? At first I would simply place a “NEW” sticker onto the appropriate product boxes. That was fine when the number of products is low, but as the number rises it becomes increasingly difficult for customers to make their way through the entire store to find those shiny new items.



Solution: New products are displayed in an area specifically set aside for that purpose. Of course, it should be visible immediately upon arrival to the store. I’ve made such a display at Electric Pixels in Kiosk form. I automatically know when to clean it out, too – whenever it runs out of space for new items, I clean out the older ones.

Problem: How to deliver custom-made items to customers? One can, of course, have them pay you directly and then you hand over the item. But that method can screw up in various ways, not the least of which is incorrect payment amount.



Solution: I’ve created a “Special Deliveries” area, in which I place one-time product boxes containing special orders. I set the floating text to the name of the customer and also set the box for sale at the agreed upon price. A quick IM to the customer leads them to come by and “pick it up” (which really is “buying” it.) This ensures that your transaction log shows more detail than “Give Inventory”. A side benefit of this approach is that while they’re in your store, they just might buy something else, or perhaps bring someone else along with them.

Problem: Depending on the season, there’s different combinations of products that go together. For example, during Halloween you might want scary Vampire items alongside with falling leaves. Or at another time you might want Christmas and winter items placed together. Either that or you force your customers to thread their way through your shop looking for them. Except that they won’t, and you lose the sale.



Solution: Recently I built a “Seasonal” area in which I can display different combinations of products throughout the year. (That is, if I get off my can and actually move stuff around – note expired Halloween items in photo. Sheesh.)

Problem: Visitors are not sure what to do with your products.



Solution: My solution is to build a demonstration area, where I can display interesting combinations of products. It’s not selling anything directly, but instead the purpose is to stimulate the imagination of the customer, which may lead to purchases they wouldn’t have made otherwise. (Pictured: Eureka Dejavu and myself, testing the demonstration area.)

Problem: Visitors don’t know much about your store.



Solution. You could use one of those accursed Landmark givers, but I don’t like their intrusiveness when I shop, and I suspect my customers don’t like them either. Instead, I’ve built an all-in-one gadget that upon a click offers a landmark, group join, explanatory notecards in multiple languages and a link to the website, too. It also tracks visitors and emails reports periodically.

You can see that a store is not simply just a pile of products pasted on a wall or laid out on the floor. I’ve tried to make the shopping experience as simple as possible. You can too!

Elderly Visitors

Last October I wrote about a strange phenomenon occurring at my store, Electric Pixels. I had examined my traffic counter and found that the age of my visitors was gradually increasing over time. At that time I speculated that it was perhaps due to:

• The same set of customers continues to visit, and they simply get older over time? (This can't be true because inspection of the transaction log shows few repeat long-term customers. Yes, there are repeats, but the majority of customers are new to the store.)
• Perhaps as my avatar gets older and more experienced, he makes more sophisticated products that attract a more sophisticated clientele? I'd like to think so!
• As knowledge of these products increases via word-of-mouth, older avatars become aware of Electric Pixels and come by to shop? If so, where did the young ones go? This graph might be indirect evidence of word-of-mouth viral promotion, which is typically not easily measurable.
• Perhaps the more recent arrivals to Second Life simply don't buy as much as those who joined earlier? We know that Linden's policy changes have affected the makeup of the Second Life residents somewhat - maybe this is one of the side effects?

I thought it was time to revisit the data, especially after reading this paradoxical article in New World Notes. Here's the result in 2D graphical form: the customers are continuing to get older. Virtually no newbies come by, as the majority of the customers are now 1+ years old. In SL, I mean!

The NWN article suggests another cause may be at work: there simply aren't as many newbies any more! Also, I suspect another factor may be at play. The new signups may have a disproportionate number of alts created by existing avatars, and they do their shopping with the main avatar that has the fattest wallet.

We all do this, don't we?

Vendor Bending

Let's get this straight right away: I don't like vendors. No, not the fine people that sell things - I am talking about those Vending Machines one often encounters in Second Life. Often used by fine people. Why pick on vendors? Nightbird's comment on this post got me thinking about vendors and I couldn't resist.

Why don't I like them? Let's start with the good things:

Vending Machines are very prim-light. In fact, a good vendor may soak up only a single prim, whereas your for-sale object may yank hundreds of prims from your measly parcel limit. That's right, you can't easily place that 4,444 prim Naval Aircraft Carrier for sale without slightly blowing out your prim limit. You could put it inside a vendor and avoid the pain. Or, just put it in a box instead and avoid the vendor entirely.

Sophisticated vending machines might offer networking capability, where they can simultaneously update and contain consistent sets of objects regardless of the locations where your 720 vendors were dumped on the Grid. In addition, some sophisticated vendors might offer reporting capability so you can track your sales. However, I've found satellite stores and mall locations to be extremely ineffective, so I have no reason to employ vendors in distributed locations.

Payments may be split by a vendor into separate payments by multiple owners, where two or more people are to receive income from sales. However, this is often problematic, since a typical situation involves Maker A placing a vendor on Resident B's property. Who makes sure that the vendor's payment-splitting script actually does a fair split? A? or B? Who made the script? Who owns the script? Who can change the script? My enquiries about this scenario suggest that Resident B should simply rent space to Maker A by the week and avoid the problem entirely. So much for payment splitting.

And I think that's about it for the good things. But what about the bad?

Vendors suffer from rez-disease, that terrible affliction that occurs when you try to painfully page through each offering. The rezzing doesn't start until the new texture is exposed, which means you are constantly standing there waiting for the next pic to appear. "It's a bit blurry yet. I think it's a shirt. Yes! No. What does it say? Oh, it's a Moose. But I wanted a shirt! Argh, press the NEXT button... again!" So you give up and move on to avoid the tedium. After all, there are so many other great places to shop! This often happens because people are generally impatient, particularly when the Lag Demons are loose.

You are frequently required to flip through many pages before you (might) find the item you seek. I've seen vendors with 20+ items in them. Does anyone actually expect you to page through all of them? Again, people are impatient and simply go somewhere else where it's easier to shop. Am I being picky? Perhaps, but I've found that if there is a barrier to sales, even a small one, it will deter some portion of customers from proceeding. To be successful you must remove as many barriers as possible.

The manner in which you flip through buttons is usually inconsistent, since there are many species of vendors to choose from. Indeed, some sellers even create their own vendors with totally unique control mechanisms. This leads to the uncomfortable situation where the buttons are marked and placed differently from vendor to vendor. Sure, the vendor "works", but it's just more difficult for customers to figure out how they work. "Do I press the top button or the left one?" If you don't agree with me, consider the case where you are renting an automobile. Do you immediately drive off after getting in? Or do you take a few minutes to familiarize yourself the with alien controls? (especially if it's a Volkswagen.) Why make it difficult for customers at all?

While I mentioned that some vendors are networked and provide sophisticated functions, many vendors are in fact not networked at all and do not provide any such features.

Finally, in-world search scans objects marked as "For Sale" and "Include in Search". This simply doesn't work with vendors since the for-sale objects are hidden inside and don't get indexed by searchbots whizzing by.

Is there a case for using vendors? Certainly - I believe you must use vendors if you happen to be prim-starved. It may be your only option on a 512sm parcel or a 30 prim mall-stall. But don't ever expect a similar level of sales as you might have had if all objects were out on display for all those reasons above.

Splashy Ideas

Shopping is definitely not one of my fortes. In fact, I foolishly try to build any item I need first. Or at least I contemplate building before finally giving in and undergoing a shopping ordeal. Why is it an ordeal? I am not exactly sure, but usually I end up doing what seems to be an endless search for something that may not even exist. It typically takes a very long time and I often get frustrated when lag slows my store visits even more. Am I being too picky? Probably. Am I impatient? Um, Yes.

Fortunately, my friends keep me honest by directing me to the best shops in Second Life. This week a very dear friend took me to Splash Aquatics, which sells a variety of watery goods. According to their directory, they sell:

• Marine, tropical & freshwater fish
• Fishtanks & bowls
• Aquarium & pond decor
• Fountains
• Natural freshwater pods
• Bridges
• Ocean wildlife
• Aquatic animals & birds
• Scuba diving
• Aqua-scaping

I wasn't looking for fish on that day, but if I did I would certainly come back to this very interesting store.

Readers will recall that I often rant about store structure and organization. But this time I wanted to point out the good things I observed at Splash Aquatics. Not only does Splash Aquatics have a great selection of high-quality items that all follow the same theme and are grouped in very sensible ways, it also has a couple of interesting twists that I believe many shops should consider.

First, there is a very strong element of realism throughout the area. Buildings and landscape appear just as they would in real life. But one of the most interesting realism aspects was the manner in which fish were sold. Pictured above is the "Nursery" where small fry fish apparently are spawned. To the right of the tank are buttons for purchasing said small fish. What struck me was how different this was from a typical store display. Instead of merely having an array of product boxes lined up on a wall, the nursery tank seems to bring the concept to life by showing you precisely how the product can be used. And even better, it is exactly what you would see in a real life aquarium store.

Secondly, Splash Aquatics has a "feature attraction" in addition to the store product displays and stocked shelves: a walk-through fish tank. We've all seen these in real life, where you may walk in dry safety within a glass tunnel at the bottom of a large tank, watching sharks skim just above your head. You can do exactly the same thing at Splash Aquatics; their tank looks very much like real life. Having a feature attraction like the water tunnel is a tremendous idea for any store. It provides visitors with another reason to visit, and possibly show it to their friends who otherwise would have had no reason to visit your store. That's exactly how I discovered Splash Aquatics.

Someday I will build a feature attraction at Electric Pixels. I've already been thinking of some ideas, but I haven't quite got the right one yet. A feature for an aquatics store might be obvious, but for particles? Stay tuned!

And by the way, you can visit Splash Aquatics here, in the unfortunately named sim, "Gooruembalchi".