Kitely are currently developing a marketplace for their virtual world, one they hope will also be able to serve other virtual worlds. They have recently blogged some information about how their market will work and they are offering an early bird promotion for merchants to apply for, the details can be found here.
The Kitely market will be different from the Second Life marketplace, for a start there will be listing fees, although I’m unsure how often you have to pay a listing fee, or whether it’s a one off fee. The listing fees are:
- Add product: 100 KC
- Add variation: 25 KC
KC being Kitely Credits. Now the reason for the variation fee is because variations will be listed under one product, so instead of seeing umpteen different listings for a shirt in different colours, you’ll have a listing with variations.
Kitely are also offering some early bird offers to try and encourage merchants to start setting up shop:
Early-Bird Discounts for All Merchants
There will be a 50% discount on listing fees until the market opens for buyers.
In addition, we will provide a special free world that registered merchants (see below) can use for creating their objects. Since we don’t charge upload fees, this means that even users using the Free Plan will be able to create items without any cost except for the listing fees. This world will only be available until the marketplace opens.
However if you’re an established merchant, you can apply to be a featured merchant and get even better discounts.
Additional Benefits for Featured Merchants
The discounts described above are available to anyone that creates content for the Kitely Market. But in addition, we have another tier of benefits for a limited number of big merchants. These benefits are as follows:
Free listing of products and variations until the marketplace opens. (I.e., we waive the 100 KC / 25 KC listing fees completely.)
The merchant’s store logo will be displayed on the Kitely Market homepage for one year from the date the marketplace opens.
We will create an official always-on free-access shopping world, tentatively called the “Kitely Plaza”. Each Featured Merchant will receive a free 2000m parcel with 3000 prims to build their shop in this world. This parcel will be rent-free for at least one year.
Finally, Featured Merchants will be eligible to participate in monthly fashion shows in the Kitely Plaza.
Criteria for Featured Merchant Consideration
You must upload at least 200 unique high-quality products (not variations) to the Kitely Market before April 1.
You must have been selling for a minimum of three years in Second Life and/or a well known OpenSim grid.
Since space in our homepage and shopping world is limited, only about 20 merchants will be eligible for these benefits.
The Kitely market will also have features such as export permissions, which is basically whereby a merchant flags whether an item can be exported from Kitely or not, this isn’t an issue for virtual worlds such as Second Life but is for open sim grids.
Items will be able to be sold for Kitely credits or US dollars, in which case money will go to your paypal account, but either way fees will apply, so read the information carefully.
The Kitely market is still a few weeks off yet, so I can’t link to it in operation, but I’ll link the blog post about it again down here, you really should read that post carefully if you’re interested as I’ve left a fair bit out, but it’s an interesting development.
Kitely Market Blog Post: http://www.kitely.com/virtual-world-news/2013/01/20/kitely-market-early-bird-promotion/
Hi Ciaran,
Listing fees are one-time and charged whenever a new product or variation is created. There are no ongoing listing fees and you aren’t charged again when editing an existing listing.
The listing fees are designed to prevent low quality content from being added to the marketplace and were supported by our mentors group so that high quality content can be more easily found.
This can increase sales for high quality items that are currently hard to find in marketplaces, such as the SL Marketplace, that include many low quality items that aren’t likely to be bought. Those low quality items make it harder to find desirable items which in turn means that good content providers see less money coming in. One way merchants can view listing fees is as a type of low cost advertizing that helps increase the visibility of their wares by eliminating a lot of the noise that prevents finding it.
Thanks for the clarification Ilan.