Great idea.... but do you have any idea how much effort and time it requires to manage your own store? I've tried in the past and it's not that easy. OK, if you have 1 or 2 products it's easy, but if you have a lot, building a store website has a lot of catches.

If you do it yourself, you need to learn some kind of content management system. You can buy one, but they are quite expensive, so you need to go with a free one. I've done that and it took me over 3 months to even learn how to use such a store system, only to find out in the end that didn't do everything required. In the end, I gave up. Building a simple website is easy, getting a store up is far more complicated.

The next option is to go to some place were they have ready made stores or hire someone. Most of the ready made stores aren't geared towards poser content at all and hiring someone to build a website is going cost.

Next thing is bandwith....... huge problem when you are selling content. Before you know, you start paying for extra bandwith and loose the little profit made.

Then there's time..... having a store is taking up a lot of time to maintain, time that will be taking away from creating new content.

I do agree with you and it would be wonderful, but for most of us it's not an option, we either lack the knowledge, time and money. Our revenue isn't good enough to pay for a store also.

Setting up a shop isn't as easy as you state, simply because we're dealing with downloadable content. Most ready made shop system are made for physical products and services and can not handle downloadable products. Other can handle it, but charge extra for it. Yes, a shop is easy, as long as you don't sell products that can only be downloaded.

If it was so easy and cost little money only, we wouldn't see so many (personal) poser stores closing or struggling.

Having said that, the main issue is exclusivity..... Because some stores insist on being exclusive, we need to make choices. RDNA & DAZ only give the option of being exclusive. If a vendor doesn't want to be exclusive, then there aren't many choices left anymore. Even if you don't go exclusive, you still are, since there are very few places that you can sell at, that really work well.

But even if non of the stores wouldn't be exclusive, it still not that easy to sell everywere. Each store uses a different system and has different rules to abide to. It actually take a bit of effort to get products released. It's not like uploading some images and zip files and you're done. Far from that. The only store that really has that option is Content Paradise. CP is very easy to use for vendors, but it seems like a lot of customers refuse to go there. If I release a product at 3 stores (which I do), I need to do the work 3 times. Each requires different things in the zip file, different promotional material and different testing. Because each store uses it's own system, you need to do the same work each time again. Just go figure the time it takes to render and edit a set of promos for each time.

In the end, all of the work to please customers just doesn't pay of at all. Sales aren't reflecting all the work done at all when one sells at all kinds of different stores.

It's all easily said, getting everything in different stores, but in reality it's not like that all. The more stores a vendor releases at, the less he/she can focus on creating content. That is why we make choices...... or more or less are forced to make choices. I don't like it either, but we all seem to be stuck in the same place......

Artwork and 3DToons items, create the perfect place for you toon and other figures!

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/index.php?vendor=23722

Due to the childish TOS changes, I'm not allowed to link to my other products outside of Rendo anymore :(

Food for thought.....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYZw0dfLmLk