I thought I'd share a few more of my development notes. I'm trying to get back into drawing, and putting pencil to paper once more. It's been several years since I really took the time to do any drawing, and I don't want to get too rusty. Besides, this whole "Remake ER" project is a pretty complex one.. and I need to write some things out and such.
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Preliminary store layout (didn't quite survive implementation)[/caption]This was the planned vendor layout for the new store at Kloimar. For the most part things went according to plan, but on actually applying the plan in SL, I realized that the bondage furniture being relegated to the far-north wall wouldn't really work so much. So I moved it to the center area. The central pillars turned out to be considerably more imposing than I had planned for, but they will look much better over time, as I'm able to add vendors to them. It seems once there's vendors on them, they stop feeling so much "in the way". I still haven't decided what to do with them in the meantime though.
Freebies are another area where there's going to be some changes. The reasons why I'm making changes to this are a bit complicated. The short version is that Linden Lab is adding a limit to the number of items a person can give out per hour, per sim. And while I'm in the midst of contracting my land holdings due to RL financial reasons, I don't really have a long-term solution for where to put the "notecard giver" that sends out thousands of notecards, one to each of the newsletter subscribers.
The "easiest" solution to this problem, is to use a group, and replace the whole system with group notices and links to the ER webpage where I can display inline photos, hotlinks to the marketplace, and all that fun stuff that notecards really can't handle on their own.
But groups come with their own set of problems. They use up a "group slot" (we're limited to 40 groups per avatar), and it's often hard to justify staying in a group that only sends you product announcements, unless you're just a super loyal fan of the store. (and I do know there's quite a few out there.. I love you too.)
So in order to have a group, I need to incentivize it, with special promotions. There were really only two options.. group discounts on for-sale products, or tying store freebies (bears for example) to group membership. Financially, the first option really doesn't work for me right now. But the second opened up a world of possibilities for me. I began trying to devise a sort of interconnected system whereby freebies would be available to group members for a limited time (2 weeks I'm thinking) and then that freebie would enter the pool of freebies that a lucky chair, or other such devise could pull from, which would be open to the public.
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Thoughts on future plans for freebie handling, and overall project's next steps[/caption]This idea had the upshot of letting me revive and derive value from the older holiday bears, and in a way, give people a chance at getting them again, albeit in a kind of subversive manner.
The overall goal of the plan being that in the future, freebies would drive loyal customers "groupies" (sorry, lol) into the store to grab new freebies, and give them a chance to again see what's new in the shop. A lucky chair would encourage people to "push" the alphabet when a desirable item showed up, which in turn would bring more people to the shop bringing new eyes to ER products, and some traffic from people standing about occasionally, and the third option.. well.. could either monetize demand for a specific item (through a "second chance" vendor or a "gatcha" vendor).. or provide raw traffic by having a camping/fishing type system pull from the same freebie pool.
The "Third Phase" part hasn't been solidified yet, but I suspect that the "go fish" idea will be a part of it, since there is already a fishing pond set up at Kloimar.
I've considered using a more mainstream approach to something like Midnight Mania.. putting a premium product into the machine rather than a freebie.. but there are reasonable concerns about "giving too much away for free".. let's be honest, ER exists to make sales. If I DID set up a MM board for premium items, I would probably only load/activate it on release days, and probably set a very low threshold. "first 30 people" that sort of thing. I've never been too fond of the "only online rarely" MM approach, but it seems to work for Bad Kitty.
We'll see how it goes..
On top of all of this, is the driving need to reduce my land holdings, which means not only losing one of my shops, and moving another.. but losing my "home" for the mid-term future. Very stressful stuff, and all the land swapping needs to be done by August 14th, to realize the tier savings in time for my next IRS payment.
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