My first Kitely cottage Atlantis Beach has been up for sale on the Kitely Marketplace for some time now and so I thought it would be a good time to give an update on my experiences so far. I chose Atlantis Beach as it is my best selling SL Cottage, here’s the link to the SL Marketplace version.

The cottage pictured in this blog post is a new version I was working on for Kitely called Atlantis Lava Beach. This is essentially the same as the original cottage but with a darker, broodier colour way coupled with steel framed windows and doors. It has been inspired by the black volcanic beaches of the popular island of Tenerife in Spain. I may create the same version for SL if there is enough interest so let me know!

Sales in Kitely however have been very low/disappointing so my Kitely journey is on hold for now.  One because I am seriously busy with RL creative pursuits and two, there is no point in throwing energy and good money after something that’s sadly not really going anywhere and three, I need to get back to creating in SL where I do have a market and many loyal customers. As well as the sales being slow, views of the cottage on the Kitely Marketplace have been really low too.

So for any other merchants thinking of venturing into the Kitely metaverse here are some things to bear in mind:

• Kitely has not promoted itself as a community based metaverse so concurrency is pretty low
• The main focus of the Kitely team is on building up the Marketplace as a cross world shopping centre – so if you don’t want to export (and I don’t at the moment) sales are likely to be very slow
• You should do well sales wise if you sell the basics such as trees, landscaping, plants, scripts etc
• As there is still little choice if you can make high quality skins, hair and make-up you should make a killing
• You should also do well if you make high quality mesh shoes and clothes
• A lot of ‘basic’ scripts, the ones that SL Merchant rely on are still missing or just don’t work that well
  • Rezzers don’t work
  • There are no FP huds I can see
  • No decent texture/colour change scripts
  • Good workable re-sizer scripts are like gold dust
• You will make more money if you allow your products to be exportable
• DON”T bother paying for any land services other than signing up as a a premium user. I made this mistake early on and really all you need to do is take out a premium account and you will get more than enough sims. You then pay a very low amount for anyone that visits or for basic transactions
• If your Kitely store takes off or you are getting lots of visitors then look into one of the different land ownership models

Maybe my style of house is just not popular enough for Kitely but I am glad I gave it a go and will now move onto creating some new houses for SL.

The last thing I did want to mention was that I did sell one cottage for US dollars rather than KC dollars and this amount should have been transferred after 45 days to my Paypal Account, it hasn’t been. I tried to look on the Kitely forums etc but found it difficult to find any information that could help. I wrote to Ilan one of the founders who used to respond straightaway – when I was paying more for the services : ) but has yet to come back to me with an explanation.

So in the absence of any response and now feeling slightly worried (it’s only a small amount but hey) I have just one question.

Where’s my money?!?!

UPDATE UPDATE. They have now come back to me and explained that dollar transfers to your paypal account  requires a minimum of $10 and it is normally a 90 day wait. However you can use any dollars you have in your Kitely account to buy Kitely coins straightway without any wait which is just another way of paying them money 🙂

This is my latest Kitely Avatar. The skin, makeup and lip gloss have had to be created by yours truly although the hair is from Kitely and I even had to modify that to improve the appearance.