The ability to pre-purchase items (before release)
Griffin Avid
Posts: 3,763
Seems like a controversial one with several hiccups...even if it works as planned....BUT! I have ideas. lol, not lol.
1) Pros Buyer: Deeper than deep discounts for buying product early.
2) Pros Vendor: Early capital for product development (Gauge for popularity and creates pecking order should multiple products be in development cue at once [more money=make that one first])
3) Pro Daz: Refunds are done as Store Credit (with 5% savings) so buyer's money is always a benefit entering the system.
4) Pro Buyer: Store Credit can be applied to PC+ Membership so you 'don't have to sit and wait for other promised items to be announced'
5) Pro Daz: PC+ Club only so there becomes yet another reason to join.
6) Pro Vendor: Filter = Vendor's number of items in store before they can presale = threshold + track record for releases - becomes a goal for vendors to reach.
7) Pro Daz: Allow pre purchases for items without a theme so they can be offered longer. It's a NEW CATEGORY in the store and a permanenet banner like Fast Grab. Can be made to combine with regular sales so if a buyer is stuck for a second or third attractive item to help qualify for a purchase, a pre-order item might be the perfect sales- ticket rounder. It can be done by category too - figures discount all figures, props all props etc...
8) Pro Buyer: Pre-sale items can be short, like a week before official release or while a product is in QC or QA testing. Or even beta-testing by vendor. So that you arent supporting vapor-objects. Items can be listed as 'coming in 3 months' or '3 weeks' and that can be listed for patience required. lol Can be listed as DAYS so the moment to JUMP is...now!
9) Pro Vendor: They can scale early discounts by date so the earlier you help, the more of a discount you receive.
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The reason I like it all locked in as store credit is - it eliminates wacky refunds going back and borth if some products are cancelled (we saw that recently)
Or if products seem stuck in developmental hell - hello our long-awaited creature. That *could have been pre-purchases and gotten us some dino-discounts + all the other monsters coming out while we wait.
It's works alongside the coming soon thread to showcase what's around the corner...
For the Daz-a-holics, it's more to drool over and anticipate and build hype and SPEND EVEN MORE...lol...not......lol.
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Comments
.......No
The problem I see is that it would create a privileged class of buyers /sellers replete with all manner of "moral hazards"
The "insiders" on the buying side would have little incentive to report
negatively on any quality issues for fear of losing thier elite "first access" status.
Also some disgruntled "insider" could run to the forums and report
negatively on some vender product and effectively kill it before it has a fair chance to compete in the marketplace.
Add to this when a genuinely poorly recieved product makes it to the general marketplace
the great unwashed masses without "insider" status will complain that they were not warned by the elite insiders who knew of the problems.
Also the insiders Could warn regular vendors that a competing vendor is about to release a product very similar to thiers
and possibly even be compensated for it ,a sort of
"insider trading"
This would all be rather bad for Daz's Current business model IMHO.
I don't think you understand how a brokerage works. Our items are accepted when they are DONE, not in development stage. PAs also have no control over whether a product is accepted or even when it is released. Then when you realize the margins for making products are so thin, I doubt anyone is going to sign off on "deep than deep discounts" when some PAs have to put out lots of product already to make a living. None of that is workable givem the business model here, especially when you're suggesting for even more massive discounts than already provided.
the margins for making products are so thin.... I did not know that. I thought with the sheer amount of products released every day, their cut was small and they survived off quantity or overall library size.
a privileged class of buyers /sellers
I got lost with this part. There is no extra club, you just gotta be willing to plunk down cash early.
Vendors already make threads saying "coming soon" and then update it to "Released". That's a window. Instead they say 'available for pre-order'.
As far as early peer reviews killing a product, that whole line of reasoning is curbed by Daz's return policy.
A) Daz don't release no crappy products. Bad descriptions are on the vendor. failing to 'wow' is on the vendor. Buying something you didn't need/want is on the buyer (And you STILL get a break)
B) There is no review system besides a thread, usually started by the vendor, themselves.
C) No different than anyone buying a product at Daz midnight and being early with their review. No one does that now. So why would someone suddenly choose to do so in the future....?
D) Counter opinions. There's no official Daz reviewer so every voice holds equal weight unless it's Wonderwoman or Llnara or Will or any other very active forum memeber whose opinion is trusted.
No one person can just get on the forum and crush the momentum of a product. Even the Vendor would be just as likely to counter any negative points or at least address them. And if you were being unfair towards a vendor for spite or with unsubstantiated claims, I'm sure the mods would swoop in and restore civility and order.
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I think revenue is the real issue. I can't thinl of how to solve that.
AND if you grab something early and use ot for a discount, what do you do on that day that it is actually released.
I doubt they'd let you double dip.
Regarding the margins for the vendor being thin; this only makes a difference if the "deeper than deep discount" comes from the Vendors side. If DAZ3d were to benefit from this scheme (from greater sales of clearly wanted items) then perhaps they would cut their percentage, no?
Perhaps money could be removed from this equation all together. If vendors describe the items they are (or intending to be) working on the Buyers could vote for these items. This would give the Vendors an indication of where to concentrate their efforts if they have more projects on the go than they can easily handle. This has a downside for Vendors in that they would have to show what they are working on and this may give others a chance to beat them to it. However, DAZ could play the role of "responsible grown up" in this situation and give the original vendor "fair opportunity" to complete a project before accepting a similar project from another PA, or suggest that the PAs can work together, or whatever other suggestions a responsible and unbiased adult would make given the particular circumstances. Vendors could also be somewhat circumspect about their "in the pipeline" offerings. So for example a PA about to release a Physics Package Addon for DS would not necessarily give away all the details before they have even begun working.
As far as voting: As it's been noted many times, forum members represent a small part of the buying population and generally asking a small population what should be made almost always ends in a flop product. A better venue for this idea would be at the Paetron website. The brokerage here deals with FINISHED products only; that's the model used here and I don't see that changing.
What I think is missed is this; you don't usually read about a product coming from a PA until they have already submitted it to DAZ for sale.
Yeah not sure much more of a discount you could get other that PC without basically ripping off the artists who make this stuff LOL
Paetron website?
This is what would happen.....
Nathy Design just posted this.....
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/169741/commercial-coming-soon-cyber-angel-for-g3f#latest
New product coming out in SIX days that I am sure I will buy.
I wish there was something to be done. Now if we had voting, MAYBE, maybe Daz sees the amount of support and makes HIS product the featured item for the day so that's where I get the biggest discount and his product gets the better Bundle Deal. So instead of his item being included in the 'also out today' line, it gets the most attention and you create satellite sales items around his stuff. If cyber chick is lead, maybe poses go on sale or futuristic sets or such....space vehicles....THAT DAMN MCOOR HALLWAY for the 2,000th time. lol
Just a thought.....
https://www.patreon.com/
Another thought: Why would a PA want to sell an item for the biggest discount? Are they in business to make the least money? Also when there isn't a true representation of customers in the forum, voting won't represent the most popular thing. I don't think you're going to convince PAs to make less money so that you can get a huge discount; that's not free market works. If a vendor doesn't make money on an item, they stop making them, not make more of them, so I wouldn't suggest things to drive vendors out of the market. DAZ3D has to service customers with reasonable prices and sales, but they still have to grow and keep their PAs so that they keep getting quality items. You're not going to keep vendors if their profits are gouged with deep discounts.
Whilst this is not an economics forum; clearly from the point of view of both DAZ3d and the PA it is the total amount of turnover (sale price x number sold) that matters. Lowering the item price might significantly increase sales numbers and hence increase overall turnover. However it is a risk, and since both DAZ3d and the PA are beneficiaries, it would be normal to (and I'd reckon, already do) set the price together with a view to maximising turnover.
On the subject of exposure in the forums, it may indeed not be large enough to be a reliable indicator of potential sales. However, if there was a page on the website which indicated possible/probable new products then that might be beneficial to all.
There is an entire forum dedicated to upcoming products...
The DAZ PA commercial products forum.
"Possible" or speculative products have no real value IMHO
and dont earn content producers any income until they become
live store products.
Personally, I'd love a system like this to encourage PAs to create stuff they might be unsure of; demonstrating actual interest ahead of time would go some way toward supporting a proposition that might be risky.
But I think an additional discount is a bad idea; support a product because you want to see that product and not supporting it likely means it's not going to get made.
That forum is also for actual products coming to the store, not possible ones.. If a PA had put a possible product there before it gets accepted and the product is ultimately rejected, then that thread would be deleted as it would violate the TOS.
Again, getting forum input on products almost always ends in a flop. Again and again. Those vendors that try this learn a hard lesson, so I wouldn't encourage this.
Of course, the nice thing about Patreon in particular is that it's not so fiddly; you trust a PA to make cool stuff, and just give them money to keep doing that. They can then take a few chances, knowing that at the very least they have (whatever) Patreon subs to keep them afloat if those gambles don't pan out.
Also with Patreon is that you're paying the artist for product that you will receive as that's the business model there and you're locked into it. Also you're hoping the product is quality as you're giving money sight unseen. If the product isn't what you want then you could cancel your subscription to the artist, but i doubt you would get any money back. Also just like subs on Twitch, it may not pay the bills if you don't have enough subs to an artist. This doesn't sound workable in a brokerage that sells finished products, if there was a suggestion those people would have to be locked in to the development of the product (with no refunds) and the project has to cover the costs of development, so if there isn't enough monetary interest, the money gets refunded and the item isn't made. That sounds like an unnecessary second track that would be out of place and hard to manage.. thus Patreon is your best bet.
I don't see how this makes sense.
I don't think we are advocating sketching some scribbles on a piece of paper or lazily asking "What should I make next?" and then 8 months later you bring it to market and then wonder if the original frenzy was real.
What product that is looked forward to - would get released and then NOT get a high level of sales?
If you just said "Hey, all I'm going to make a fresh halter top" and everybody chimes in and goes "Yeah, we want that!" and then you drop some funky print pattern from the 70...then yeah, pre-hype serves you no purpose.
Vendors are listing their tentative release schedule and getting support.
Vendors are already doing "Coming Soon" that part of the equation is already in effect and working so let's move beyond that step.
Maybe Daz needs to eat the cost. They broke? They barely breaking even? No, PAs have no room on their end to keep their margin and Daz absorb the cost another way?
There's PLENTY of time between APPROVAL and RELEASED to offer a buy early.
Who would benefit MOST? Venerable crafters who are already proven.
Stonemason had that damn new Greeble on his website for months (maybe 1 month at least) and everyone that came across is was like WHAT IS THAT?
You don't think he could have done a presale? OR Antfam? or that power-couple FWSKA -something (they do elves very well lol)
Or the monster-king Josh Crocket?
You can make it just like a regular Banner and NOT have EVERY item in there, only select ones that you can base ad-campaigns around.
AND it's be nice if some sales got EXTENDED with exact dates so you know when it comes OFF-sale. Pre-sale items can be rewarded with being on sale for more than a few days. Maybe two-weeks there's a pre-sale page that has a regular store landing page look. On top is the three or four presale items and on the bottom is the list of items that were pre-sale on extended sale. And they could count towards every bundle for those two weeks. There are so many ways to do this.....
And it's not some weird idea I made up. Almost every other industry has advanced sales and pre-sales and special screening and advanced looks etc...
If pricing or discounts ON DAZ's end is too much to imagine - it can just about certain products getting an extended shelf-life before disappearing.
A new category to check should be welcome.
You check the day's sale and see nothing (the theme is something you have no interest in)
You check Fast grab and there's only two items....
- With this, you'd at least have 1 more place to go to fill out your sales cart. It'd almost be like ADDING MORE ITEMS TO CHOOSE FROM without impacting the current sales.
We already complain that there aren't relevant enough items in any sale to flesh out your "buy two, get...X%" quota. THIS would solve that- easily. Or at least help. lol
And that does NOT require additional sales and/or price gouging.
Tell me what PA wouldn't want his items on the front page display area for an extra week.
What PA wouldn't want his wares to trigger discounts for more items in greater combination(s).
Indeed!!
I have talked to fellow content developers over the 10 years that I was a renderosity merchant
and the majority agreed that those highly vocal forum pledges of "we would buy such & such regular V4 clothing if someone made it."..........,more often than not failed commercially.
No offense to anyone here, but what people say to the seller in a forum post is not a reliable indicator of what they will actually buy.
A little known secret about advertsing is as follows:
the Majority of Commercial Advertisements on TV are NOT targeted
at consumers who have not yet bought the product.
They are targeted at those who already have bought the product.
Why ??
because advertisers know the power of peer influence
and that people love nothing more than to have their personal choices validated with depictions of very attractive, articulate consumers enjoying the product and the lifestyle it promises magically produce.
This external validation raises their self esteem and they cant resist
talking to others about their "achievement".
Look at what happens here in these forums when a major new character bundle is released.( Ivan ,rune etc)
There is literally a competition to be the first to annouce that they have it and start posting renders.
the First posters are literally Thanked for posting ( more external validation)
People quickly begin joining in and the mutual validation frenzy of ,ooohh me too!! posts begin and the Daz store carts start filling up as more "I did a quick render with mine" posts begin to populate the thread.
My point here is that nothing helps a product sell more than a relatively closed group under the influence of a typcial "me too" mutual validation cycle where the massive price discounts and desire to not be left out is virtualy irresistable.
If a merchant wishes to test the claims of those potential buyers who are asserting they would support them in exchange "even deeper discounts"and "early access" ,then such merchanst, should indeed Start a Paetreon page.
The number of Supporters who commit to a regular monthly donation
in exchange for early access and the ability to influence what content is created, would be the most realistic indicator of where people intentions truly reside.
Those other industries are not based on frankly speculative",paid on the back end" broker model that is in use with Daz/renderosity etc.
The people are getting paid upfront salaries to perform the work and produce the products..it is an entirely Different business model.
Daz is already operating under a Loss Leader model with the FREE Program& free base figures they are paying pro software coders to maintain& update.
They already heavily discount thier content products and offer Great quality 3D content for the price.
Why should DAZ "Eat the costs" so you can pay even less than you already are??.. They are a business.
Most wouldn't. Why? Because the majority of sales a product fall within the intro period and the consumer pool to buy items is finite. When you realize those two things, then giving a huge discount pre-sale doesn't make sense.
For instance, you would agree that 100 items sold at 30% off isn't the same money taken in at 100 items at 50%. To get the same money, you would have to sell more. To offer a bigger discount, even more product would need to be sold. However, in this market there aren't the same number of customers as one that buys videogames or software so you can't offer the same deals or presale, hoping you can recoup the loss of a major discount by increasing sales. There is a point where a discount ultimately loses money because there will not be enough people to buy product to make up the difference.
This point is where your idea falls flat. You're assuming there are the same amount of people buying a dress for Victoria as there would be somoene preordering copies of the latest hyped videogame for $70, with bundles and DLC which will take the price over $100 (so it makes sense if you wanted all that to buy early and get it included), and still have room months later to discount it down to $30 if it's still profitable or if it's a flop $15. The pool isn't that large to suggest this, and especially when most sales happen at the beginning and the prices would have to change where you can figure a huge discount in the intro price in the first place. To implement your idea, the prices would need to go HIGHER to buffer in huge discounts to cover it. Then the idea becames even more disastrous when an item sells far less than predicted, not more.
Also note that a new item should trigger interest and discounts on a back catalog, not severely discounting the advertise item. That's how exposure should work in a brokerage.
Technically sometimes untrue, but the places that allow pre-orders like this tend to not do any kind of QA on the product in question, and that seriously affects the reputation of the market.
(I think pre-orders for completed, scheduled products would be a convenience personally but since if it was implemented I bet it would be like Amazon KDPs with no money exchanged until release, it wouldn't be beneficial for the vendors financially. I do like the idea of supporting a Daz-style creator via Patreon though.)
I said :
"- With this, you'd at least have 1 more place to go to fill out your sales cart. It'd almost be like ADDING MORE ITEMS TO CHOOSE FROM without impacting the current sales.
We already complain that there aren't relevant enough items in any sale to flesh out your "buy two, get...X%" quota. THIS would solve that- easily. Or at least help. lol
And that does NOT require additional sales and/or price gouging."
Then you said:
When you realize those two things, then giving a huge discount pre-sale doesn't make sense.
For instance, you would agree that 100 items sold at 30% off isn't the same money taken in at 100 items at 50%. To get the same money, you would have to sell more. To offer a bigger discount
I think I type too much and the point gets lost. I gotta work on that. Please stop mentioning adding further discounts or messing with ANY SALES PRICES.
I just named a bunch of other benefits aside from bigger discounts. Again, PLEASE stop mentioning price-reducing products. I already that is NO LONGER A POINT.
As far as all your ideas about how long Daz should put an item on sale - it's debateable. Unless you have a chart that breaks common sense, allowing time to pass and knowing when a coupon or sale ends is a common request. Not too many places DON'T tell you when an offer expires. Centaur felt like a week and a half, the dinosaur sale felt like 3 days. I could be wrong. Some deals disappear in the same day.
March Madness drove us mad with banners and special deals and tons of stuff that we spent a lot of time trying to figure out.
If anything, plenty of stuff that goes on here breaks the norm..
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Your idea of padding the sales with older items is great, until you're a person who has lots of the older items already.
How many times can you blow out the same stuff? BUT! Why not combine the sales items from two days together and rotate 3 times a week as opposed to EVERY DAY?
That *should be easier on everyone- and would give me more time to pick and choose and get a wider aselection of items to build a better cart.
Why not Pre-sale Friday' items on Monday?
Does that make sense, how simple this could be implemented.
It's the same week.
Same price.
No problem for the vendor and if it rolls over days as opposed to week to week, I don't have to wait till Fridays to buy stuff.
Lets see; the item in second position on the Store banner today isn't the same one that was in that position yesterday... Nor was it the same one as the day before that.
Can you guarantee that PAs will get more sales of their upcoming products if DAZ were to allow preordering, or is it more likely that the same number of people will buy it no matter how many days they can get it at a discount?
Indeed in some cases those pre-ordering customers are paying for the privileage of beta testing the product,
as has happened with many poser releases over the years,
But that is often one of the inherent risks of being an "early Adopter".
Can you guarantee that PAs will ....
lol. There's no guarantee of ANYTHING. You can try stuff, tweak it- see if it works and if not, STOP DOING IT.
There's a lot of things that are brilliant and some things I wish would change. That's probably all of us, unless you're part of the Daz is perfect militia and think the mere suggestion of a change is blastphemy.
Obviously, as a customer, I'm all about those sales and transparency and knowing what I'm buying. And in many instances I probably DON'T have the vendor as the ultimate benefactor, but even when I do, I see great resistance and excuses.
This conversation has morphed from Advanced Sales to a more inclusive sales system.
So, are the people on the forum a small representation of a larger group or are we isolated and what we do here has NOTHING or little to do with what the 'average' and [more numerous] Daz customer(s) experience(s)?
Pick one, cause if Daz is NOT finding a way to get THEIR opinions - that is bad business. No business wants to use its Tech Support Department for customer satisfaction feedback.
Any I aint never see anyone ask my opinion about Daz. lol
Is it possible that a great number on the forum seem to complain about the same things over and over, but yet I'm supposed to surmise that a small number or no one outside of the forum has the same issue(s)?
So we want a manual, but no one else does.
We'd like more choices for putting items in our cart, but no one else would appreciate that?
Here's one of those wacky ideas....let's see if this has any bite.
Daz is blowing out old items....mostly items that are INCOMPATIBLE with it's CURRENT line of models.
I already said numerous times, that should be addressed so new people STILL are not buying stuff that doesn't fit - buying it because it's on SALE.
And advertised at great price reductions....and they, in some cases need tweaks to work (properly) certainly not something someone brand new would just know how to do.
There is no information to tell you (in great detail) that- that old dress will not fit XYZ figure.
Forget my fix 1. Right now Wear-Them-All is a great thing.
I grabbed it and a ton of us are now going nuts messing with older stuff(s).
In my humble opinion, that should have been licensed by Daz and should have been FREE.
And included, at the very least *Maybe PC+* free and always offered for super cheap.
Daz should (in my opinion) pay MORE for utilities that expand their product overall. That vendor, I think has done a wonderful service.
Everyone could use
Ghost Lights
That memory reduction script
The iray one with the presets...
Wear them all...
clone this...instance that......
Convert this to that.....
I don't think those should be classified as regualr products.
If you are missing what I'm saying, some products open the door for buying more or other products. Those releases are special...
Facebook, Google+, Twitter and YouTube.
You mean up to date manual. There is one on the DAZ documentation site for an older version amd much of it is still valid.
They also give away all three generations of thw Genesis figure which much of the reduced cost content will work with.
And yet some of them are scripting shortcuts to built-in functions and others are ways to use content in ways DAZ never expected us to want to do it. Still others are functionality that is useless if you're not using Iray for one reason or another.
Facebook, Google+, Twitter and YouTube.
This is the part where I think you just want to counter my points. You have not seen how Face Book is nothing but people insulting Daz and mentioning OTHER products in every other comment.
The criticisms are "Free" software and Expensive content and it's seen as bait and switch. If you mean the Daz user groups, you'd be reduced to the same odds of who is active on facebook (so many people do NOT use facebook)
verse who's active on a forum. I checked for Daz Google + sites (found the top 3) and they all have little activity and nothing about feedback. Their youtubes are tutorials and the comments are the expected low quality/insulting/useless youtube comments.
They also give away all three generations of thw Genesis figure which much of the reduced cost content will work with.
That's a great point except you mentions SALES...so it's a better sales move to sell OLD stuff at blowout prices (that's been alreay bought by the current active community.....to new users - that are supposed to STILL use the current gen 3 stuff that's driving sales now? So old stuff for cheap for FREE figures I got with the basic program is the way forward?
Good luck building a business around .79 cent skirts from 6 years ago.
I haven't waded through all the posts here, but the initial idea does have some merit. You can pre-order items on Amazon long before they come out. It's a vote of confidence and a way to support the PA. Doesn't have to be at a deep discount, but it's a great way to reserve a copy of something you want while you're thinking about it. Definitely some opportunities for sales with that concept, and the ability to catch potentially missed sales too (because some of us DO forget that something is coming out because we're distracted by other shiny objects...)
The simple concept of being able to pre-order things is not a bad idea at all. In fact, it's good marketing.
But that's why we don't severely discount or presale new items that actually drive the business. Large discounts on older items to help move sales makes more sense. The only time you severely discount new product is when no one wants it, like videogames that have horrible reviews.