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SLST Outlet views
How to see if you’ve been paying too much for store rental locations
Saturday, June 09, 2007
By: Zimbit Vidor
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Over the past number of years, Second Life has gone through many transitions. One such transition that has come and matured over the years has been the idea of store rental locations. Entire businesses have sprung up with their primary focus directed at renting spaces to other persons so they can setup stores. Soon after the mall idea was born within Second Life a need for managing this new business of renting land to others was born as well. Now there are many malls and many automated store rental packages. Right now anyone could find a mall with an open stall, rent that stall and start a store in less then an hour, all learning curves aside.
So is it that easy to start a store? You take your existing product line throw it into a new rental and start making more money right? Well usually not. Second Life is a HUGE place. Many persons go hours and hours in world with out even seeing another single person. So where do you put your stores then? Obviously, you need a place that has many persons so people will see your products and buy them.
If you have a booming business, it is not uncommon to have quite a few rental places. You have built a name for yourself and you know many of your places are doing good business. You also know you are paying tons and tons for your rental places. Every week comes due a huge bill you must pay to keep you places open. Occasionally you must wonder if that is all necessary or if you are just putting out money with out any real benefit to your business.
A business running SLST as their sales tracking package will not have these problems. When it comes time to pay the bills for rental locations they will just look at their business using SLST and find out if each location is pulling its weight. It is actually easy and it might save you thousands if not tens of thousands of lindens over the course of a few years of rental locations.
That all sounds fantastic right? Let us look at actually doing just that; looking at how well a specific region, or store location, is doing. Open up SLST and log into the service. First, look at the matrix report that shows your regions and how well they are doing. It is simple and too the point.
Hover over the Reporting menu item at the top and select Reports. When the list of reports comes up select the report named “Count of sales by Region” and click on it. In a second, the site will show your report. This extremely simple report shows you a list of regions you sell product in down the left side along with the number of products sold at that location in the last two months. Using the same method, you used to run this report you can also run the “Sum of sales by Region” report, which shows a very similar view except that it shows the total of sales by region. These two reports can give you a view of your data that will help to make decisions such as keeping a specific location or not.
Next, we will look at a graphical way to view how well a region is doing. Using the View menu and clicking the View My Summary link you can setup a reporting mash up which will let you see just how well a location is doing via interactive charts and graphs. After your summary page comes up, there may not be any items on it, click the “add content” button near the top right. After the page reloads, the site will display a consent catalog containing all the items you can add to your view. Place a check mark next to the “Revenue Percentage by Region” and “Revenue Total by Region” items and click add. After the page reloads, click the close button to close the content catalog. Your data may differ but when the page reloads you’ll see two graphs that can visually show you how well various locations are doing.
Using those two simple methods, both the matrix reporting and the My Summary Page you can get a comprehensive view of your sales data as it pertains to specific locations. You are now armed with the data you need to make tough business decisions, like cutting locations or looking to pick up more.
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