One of the things anyone whom wants to be a succesful merchant needs to do is follow the market and what sells and what doesn't sell and what the trends seem to be very closely.

There's been a number of non-vicky otems in the marketplace that have done extremely well. You have to be able to figure out what's special about them, and see how you can make your items special in some way. You have to be able to see past the stereotypes, and analyze things a bit more in depth.  Something like that can affect your earnings a lot. It could make or break you.

The bottom line is, there are a LOT of variables in whether one can make a living as a merchant or not. It's just like running your own business.

If you're making props for your own purpose, and just making them available for the marketplace as a side thing it's almost guaranteed that you will not be as successful (and make a living wage) as if you followed the market, spent a lot of time learning about your customers, and focused your product on what you learn they are interested in.

Also, if you're making stuff for your movie in C4D for example, and plan on putting the product in the marketplace as poser props, about half of your time will be spent making them "poser friendly". Compared to high end programs, Poser has a lot of quirks and limitations that need to be accomodated to make things work in Poser. For one, all your materials will end up needing to be re-done specially for Poser (for a commercial quality item).  Scaling and making props work in proportion with Popular Poser figures is also an issue you'll have to deal with. Lot of other little technical things. Those are all the things that will affect how succesful you will be as a merchant.

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Renderosity Store  Personal nick: Conniekat8
Hi, my name is "No, Bad Kitteh, NOO", what's yours?