After the realisation last night that it’s going to be more cost effective for me to not sell the PayPal™ vendors, I thought I’d go over my accounts and find out exactly how my SL store is doing. I hope to also demonstrate why it would cost me more in admin costs to sell the vendors, than I am likely to make from selling them. Lets give some details about my business in SL to start with. I sell scripts (some with objects as example, but mostly just pure scripts) in SL, for L$. I’ve been doing this for about a year, but am focusing on this year to date (2009) because I’ve invested more time and effort. I have in-world and XStreetSL presences, although XStreetSL accounts for the majority of my sales.
I’m going to focus here on in-world only, and only on transactions that are business related (by which I mean I’ve spent half the afternoon clearing out my own purchases from the transaction logs). Records are essentially year to date, and all figures are in L$. Figures are precise enough for my curiosity, but are not exact.
Chart of income and expenditure year to date 2009.
In short, that means I made about L$6,000 more on in-world sales than I paid in rent, but made L$117,000 in XStreetSL sales. Expenses primarily consists of image upload costs. This gives me a typical monthly profit of about L$19,500, or about $75 USD if it were converted to real money. I pay $27.50 USD in web hosting, leaving me with a theoretical (because I’m not pulling profit out of SL) $47.50/month. Assuming about a 80 hour/month investment, that’s a little over $0.50/hour. Before I start talking about cost of hardware.
Can I have a pay rise please?