Hi Everyone,

Following on from my last post about how Xstreet managed to loose my business - I am pleased to be able to announce that we have found a new online marketplace – slapt.me.

So far I have only registered and verified my account, but I have had an extremely warm welcome from Constanza Amsterdam who is one of the owners, and one of her mod’s Deckheard Cleanslate (and I recognise the name of one of the forum’s other mod’s too - as an old neighbour of mine Sid Nagy).

I will be gradually adding my lines to Slapt.me, so bear with me (still got my RL injury which is slowing everything down a little) but I am confident that this will be a new lease of life for Paws 4 Thought’s online presence.

I can thoroughly recommend Slapt.me to any merchant out there who is looking for an alternative for Xstreetsl after the recent issues on that site and want to send thanks to Constanza and her team for the really warm welcome and prompt response to any questions I had. I look forward to working with you all to help all prosper, starting with the “NEW YEARS GRAND PRIZE DRAW 2009” that I will be donating a prize to

Great job guys!

Zennie =^.^=

As some of you know, I have been offline a bit recently due to a RL injury to my wrist that has made it nigh on impossible for me to use a computer comfortably…

I finally made it back to my digital life today only to discover this announcement from Linden Labs regarding items set for sale on Xstreet SL!

I have been a loyal merchant on Xstreet SL even from back in the days when it was humble little Secondlfe Exchange, so was shocked to see that they are now going to cream what little profit I make from my  items as my ethos has always been high level quaility for minimum expenditure to help those that don’t have a lot of L$ sloshing around. I have many items, most under 50L$ on Xstreet SL which they are now planning on charging me 10L$ a month (per item) for me to list them – I have over 300 items, and do not make anything like the 3000L$ a month needed to list them.

I refuse to put up my prices to “absorb” this cost – mainly coz this wouldn’t help anyhow – I just don’t sell the volume of items needed to cover the new costs.  I am simply going to be pulling  most of my items from Xstreet SL.  It wouldn’t seem so unfair for little fish like me if the charge was a one off “listing activation” fee, and they continued charging a commission on items sold (which I have no issue with) but for now, I will be looking at moving all my items over to other SL online marketplaces. I will add links for you all once I have found and set up a suitable replacement to Xstreet SL.

I urge all you other merchants that use this “service” to do the same, maybe if enough of us bail out they will see the error in their thinking and come up with a fairer solution for those of us that don’t like to charge the earth for our goods!!!!

I intend, at least for now, to leave a few of my best sellers up as an advert, but I am not looking at keeping many on there, and I will re-assess this in a few months. I do understand that they need to make money, they are a business, but also, we, the content creators, are an important source of income for them too, if they drive out the little guys like me, who will become the next big players?