I'm Here ... Now Keep Me!

You’ve done your marketing and promotions and people are teleporting to your store. But they aren’t staying. Most are leaving within a few seconds of landing and are definitely not buying. What’s the problem, why are they leaving and how do you get them to stay and ultimately buy from your store.

I’ve done a lot of shopping in my time here and have left stores within a couple seconds many times. I’ve reviewed why I do that and tried to correct those problems in my stores. Let’s look at some of the problems encountered and how to correct them.



One of the more annoying things for customers is when it takes a long time for things to rez. Standing around looking at a bunch of grey items is not much fun and I find if the products and displays don’t rez within 30 seconds, most people will tp somewhere else. While you want to make your store and displays as attractive as possible, they won’t be noticed if they don’t rez quick enough. Keep your textures at a lower resolution to aid in rezzing, generally no more than 512x512. The larger the resolution, the longer it takes for these textures to rez completely. This goes for product textures, display textures and the textures used in your store walls as well. Try to keep them to a minimum in addition to the size. Having your items rez quickly will give your potential customers the full view and begin shopping much quicker.

When displaying your items for sale, have them organized to make it easier for shoppers to find them. Keep like items together and have a clearly visible sign or other indication of where they are. Most shoppers don’t want to hunt around throughout your store in a vain attempt to find what they are looking for. While a lot of shop keepers think having other items visible will make customers inquire about them, quite the opposite is true in Second Life®. Customers here want to get directly to what they came for and if they then have time, they will browse some more. Keeping happy customers is a key to having them return and giving them an easy way to find what they came for is one way of keeping them happy. In my clothing store, I have four sections, one each for new releases, mini skirts, dresses and gowns. This way, my customers can easily get to what they want.

. If you advertise a particular time either in events or by way of a notice to your group, make sure that items is easy to find. I’ve done searches for a particular kind of shoe and found them listed then unable to locate them when I tp to the store. I will search for a short time, but if I can’t find them quickly, I’m back to search to try somewhere else. This ties in to the previous point, but if you feature items, make them highly visible or noticeable when someone does tp to your store.

Lag is another big issue. Trying to shop at a store and being unable to move or moving very slowly will lead anyone to leaving. As with textures, keep scripts to a minimum. In most stores, you shouldn’t need to be running a whole lot of scripts.

.

I've noticed a lot of stores have their autoreturn set to return items and while I understand that you don't want to have customers leave items around or have griefers drop objects, customers need to be able to rez their purchase and try it out. Setting autoreturn to five minutes seems to work good for me. Five minutes is plenty of time to rez a purchase and copy it to inventory and yet it allows unwanted items left behind to be returned in five minutes.

.

I’ve covered greeters and notecards in previous posts, so I’ll keep this one brief. Having numerous notes and messages upon landing in a store is annoying. Most of us don’t mind being greeted, but keep it to a minimum.

The tendency in Second Life® is to recreate what you would have in a real life store. For the most part that is okay, although Second Life® has limitations that real life doesn’t. Try to concentrate on what makes shopping easier for your customers. Well organized, categorized items, visually appealing but limited on textures will go a long way to keeping people around. Try tping into your store and see how long it takes for things to rez, if too long, change some textures.

Keeping your customers happy upon arrival is one of the first things you need to do to be successful. Make sure their experience is a good one. If they like what they see and experience, they will look around and hopefully start buying. Then you can concentrate on getting customers to return.

.

Ciao For Now

.

Jenny