Shopping

Artsy Pixels in the Marketplace

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I have been watching the web side e-commerce application developments for Second Life members ever since I became a member.  Last week I finally decided to give the Marketplace a trial run and opened up a shop with my Jewle Rae Coiffure avatar hairstyles on Monday evening.  After spending over 100 hours getting goods ready to sell, I still didn’t have all the inventory ready to go live in the shop. Preparing products for sale was a lot more work than I thought it would be!

I am striving to load the product descriptions with keywords and have added more than one photo, a PDF file and video slideshow to most of the entries.  I decided not to make any big announcements or buy any advertising until I had my virtual shelves stocked with more goods. I really wasn’t expecting much traffic after reading posts from other merchants who were frustrated by the inadequacy of the Marketplace search feature.  I  was really surprised to find I had made my first sale early in the morning on Thanksgiving Day! What was most interesting is that the product sold was not listed among the “Top searched products” at all and the highest number for the “Times appeared in search” was only 183.  I’m just intrigued enough to continue stocking the shop for now.

Flower Garden Particle Emitter

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Spring is finally in the air! Early this morning I went shopping in world at Outy’s Particle Paradise ~ http://ow.ly/1Czwy.

Outy's Particle Paradise in Second Life
Jewle visits Outy's Particle Paradise

But I couldn’t find the copy edition of the flower garden emitter I had seen yesterday so I returned to purchase the Flower Garden Emitter on XStreetSL for $1350L. (Current Listing in SL Marketplace)

Upon rezzing the emitter for the first time, I quickly discovered that it was going to take some effort to get the flowers planted in a position that looked natural. Within seconds I was up to my neck in flowers!

Flower Garden Particles Meditation Cave
First Flower Garden Particles Installation ~ Gritaville Meditation Cave

First Shopping Experience

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Just like in the real-world Second Life merchants were offering lots of special year-end savings so I decided to take three vendors up on their offers. I figured that whatever I purchased would be placed automatically in the corresponding product  folder within my Inventory.  That was far too blonde. Then I discovered there is an Objects folder within the Inventory.  That’s where all the objects automatically land but then I couldn’t figure out how to get the objects opened so I gave up and logged out.

Today I found the new Second Life Answers community where the first post was from a user asking what to do with the objects.  I learned that vendors often package multiple items in the form of objects and that all I needed to do was to drag the object out of my Inventory on to the floor or ground in front of  JewleRae. Then using my Mouse, right click on the object which brings up a menu from which I can select “Open”. This helpful YouTube tutorial was included:

YouTube Video URL

I still haven’t found the products I’ve purchased from two of the vendors.  Ugh!