If you are considered a merchant by Linden Lab, you may have had the terrible surprise of filling a Second Life Merchant Survey sent to you by Pink Linden this week.While Pink says "none of these concepts are currently on our development roadmap, they’re just hypothetical scenarios that we’d appreciate your thoughts on", there is room to worry.
Let me give you a quick run-down on the ideas thrown around.
1- Second Life-Certified Vending Machines
This would create a unified store management, provide premium merchant support and a guarantee for deliveries. Features would include automatic listing on XStreet SL's Web platform and metrics to see how business is performing. The catch? A surcharge of 10 or 15% on all sales.
2- Listing and Promotional Program
For a 5 to 10 US dollars fee for each item listed, Linden Lab will cross-promote your virtual goods on XStreetSL and Premium Classified Listings.
3- Merchant Marketing Program
To spur growth, Linden Lab thinks out loud about bringing new tools such as branding systems, customized store systems such as a Web storefront, and automatic consideration for large scale promotions. Other tools such as tracking purchases in real-time would also be offered.
The price? 10 to 100 US dollars per month, depending on sales volume.
4- I kept the most outrageous for the last point: The Mall of Second Life.
Land would be offered for "free" to merchants. LL would offer promotions along with it… while taking a 30% surcharge on their sales.
What should we make of all this? Linden Lab is CRAVING for your sales money. It wants, with programs such as the Mall of Second Life, to create a real-life income tax on each of your sales.
With fixed land costs, any increase in sales means more revenue and profits for your business. If you use any or all of these potential initiatives, you basically hand Linden Lab a larger chunk of your revenues rather than fixed costs. With the costly listings, you also take much bigger risks by increasing your startup costs, even before you make a sale.
These ideas are also dangerous for small stores. Imagine that there are enough big merchants that make this transition because the costs mean almost nothing to them. It would make those merchandising programs central to shopping in Second Life.
Being a merchant in SL has meant working a whole lot for little money for a large majority of business owners. Many are gaining managing experience but are not getting large amounts for it. Now, if LL manages to implement the measures and make them inevitable, merchants will stand to lose… again.
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