Socially Mundane

One of the frustrating things shoppers face is having to decipher product specifications and details when they shop. To help make it easy as possible for a buyer to give you their money, ensure your “product art” is not only ‘net-optimized (file size,) but also visually optimized to help sell the product for you.

As already mentioned in previous tips, your product must be the focus of the image - a clean, neutral background works best. But also, when taking these snapshots of your product, learn to use the zoom feature (CTRL-0 and CTRL-8) to set a good view. Be consistent in the style and presentation across the genre of products and then secondarily, across your entire line of products.

Right: were you shopping for a prim sword? Here are two to choose from.

Always try to include the permissions of your product on the artwork, but not the price (note to creators: if the prims are no-modify, do not claim your product is modify just because you use resize scripts: you are false-advertising).

The two most important informational items shoppers want to know are the permissions and the price of anything they are considering. Having the permissions prominently displayed takes away the first curiosity (which could very likely be a deciding factor - so it’s a good idea to offer two versions: one with copy and the other with transfer permissions. However, if you offer only one, it is my experience that copy sells better than transfer versions.)

The reason you don’t want to put the price on your artwork is that you must redo the texture if you ever change your mind - especially if you ever choose to raise the price. It looks stupid if your art says L$500 and you’re selling for L$250 and you’ll never make any sales if those numbers are reversed.

Pricing is easy enough to figure-out simply by clicking the ‘buy’ button, anyway. However, that’s lazy on the part of the merchant. Post a sign somewhere and always include the price in the informational notecard. As a last resort (and I do mean last) use hover-text. This will make it easy to change the price of your product at a later time with minimal work and uploading cost

Also include a few bullet points to highlight the most important features. Not all the features, you have notecards for that - just enough to tease the shopper into looking at the notecard. That is where you make your sales pitch - not on the product art itself.

To summarize: your product art should be fast-rezzing (256x256) - include the permissions details, focus on the product and not a complicated, confusing background or product details. Include a few bullets on the best features. The product art should simply be designed to get the shopper’s attention, give enough information to know what it is and does and hopefully tease the shopper to grab the informational notecard where you will make your actual sales pitch.

Left: the image at the bottom appears to be selling an entire outfit, or otherwise offers too many distractions away from the actual product. Who cares if the merchant is really good at poseball animation choice and adept at Photoshop? The product is lost in the message. You can barely see it.

The image at the top is “done right”: it features the product and only the product, nice and large with a few non-distracting tid-bits about it and the creator. (blurring of parts of these images were done by this author before posting here).