Buyers Will Complain In Second Life!

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In Second Life, you can sell your cheapest non-free items for L$1 — not even half a penny — but don’t let that stop you from believing that every sale and every customer’s comment(s) should be listened to, if not acted on, as soon as possible.

If you’re lucky, people will give you feedback. Only one out of several buyers takes the time to complain. There are different ways you can respond:

Don’t act. Some things in a product design are trivial: textures, color, sounds, or scripting, depending on what you actually sell. A badly spelled script thanking the customer, that goes with a box of beautiful textures, may not be as big a problem as a destructible house that crashes a sim every time someone blows it up. If your item sells for a low, low price, don’t lose sleep over the auxiliary details, but do try to at least fix glaring flaws once a month or so. More important is how your product interacts with the buyer. Lag generation, excessive complexity, unnecessary steps, sloppy scripting, underperformance, and cryptic documentation may be big problems your customer is telling you about, so if you ignore these latter problems, you may be setting yourself up for some bad word-of-mouth and your sales may not increase as you would like.

Tinker. If you have time, and your item’s permissions don’t allow the customer to change things around, it may or may not be worth it to make small changes for a buyer or two. But you may want to add copy and/or modify permissions to your objects (no mod for most scripts is still recommended), so as to keep low-level customer customization requests off your plate.

Upgrade, streamline, improve. As for the more serious issues, unless they are impossible to do so they please more people, go for a fix. Many times a customer will be telling you what the market at large wants, so it’s in your best interests to add what in-demand features you can. Even if the request seems unusual, make a copy of the new version, label it accordingly, and set it for sale or set it aside for further research and development.

And if the request seems difficult, give it a try anyway! I had an item that was supposed to send a sound back to a HUD. One of my customers requested that she be able to turn the volume up or down. It took weeks of patient waiting on her part, but by the time I was done I had invented a HUD that could relay any sound, with no script or notecard changes on the user’s part. That extra work is now paying off at the rate of L$100 a copy!

When you first release a product, expect it to have some flaws that may not have been apparent to you. It’s nothing to worry about; your product can’t be all things to all people, at least until you hear from a dozen or more of them! And if you come up with a wowie-zowie upgrade, it’s a good idea to hand out free upgrades to people who have paid recently for previous versions, or at least offer steep discounts! After all, upgrade boxes are still a change to add your landmarks and/or freebies.

So in concluding, just remember that no product will ever be 100% perfect to everyone. However, if you pay attention to what your customers ask for (and possibly don’t want in upgrades), you will be able to enjoy long stretches of hassle-free sales. Good luck!