Kitely merchants continue switch to exports

Given the choice between selling to Kitely‘s 1,003 local active users or to the 14,075 on the hypergrid, it makes sense that more and more Kitely Market merchants have gone the hypergrid route.

In fact, exportables have long been growing at a faster rate than non-exportables for the past eight months — and actually surpassed non-exportables for the first time last month.

But the latest data from the Kitely Market shows that not only are merchants adding exportable items at a faster rate than non-exportables, but may actually be switching on the export setting for formerly non-exportable items, since the number of non-exportable items actually declined this past month, while exportables continued on their break-neck pace.

Kitely Market Exportable items Feb 2015

In the chart above, you can see the green “exportable” bars leveling off last summer, as merchants waited to see the consequences of selling their products to the wider metaverse, then taking off in the fall after reports from successful merchants started to flow in.

Today, according to Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner, there are 3,714 products for sale on the Kitely Market, in 7,682 variations, of which 4,005 are exportable.

The exportable variations increased by 289 items over the past four weeks, while non-exportables decreased by 26.

Kitely Market
Kitely Market

Unlike the Second Life Marketplace, which would list, say, the red and black versions of the same pair of shoes as two separate products, the Kitely Market allows merchants to upload them as a single product, with two color variations, as is the standard on most other e-commerce websites.

A merchant can also charge different prices for different variations — a full-perm item or an exportable one, for example, might cost more than one with more restrictive permissions.

The Kitely Market can already deliver items to the 208 active grids that are hypergrid enabled, with no special action required on the part of the grid owners. Customers simply log into the marketplace, buy a product, and then specify the avatar and the grid to deliver it to.

The Kitely Market can also deliver to some closed grids, though in this case the grid owners have to configure their grids’ security settings to allow inbound market deliveries. The configuration instructions are here. According to Tochner, the Kitely Market currently delivers to “numerous” private grids. Two grids that have publicly announced that they have enabled Kitely Market deliveries are The Adult Grid and ZanGrid, formerly Zandramas.

Kitely has also posted a promotional video on YouTube, which you can watch below, and begun advertising the Kitely Market on virtual-world related websites, including here at Hypergrid Business, where the money will go towards freelance researchers. If you would like to research events and destinations for Hyperica, please email maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

The only other online store that delivers to multiple grids is Sunny Whitfield’s Total Avatar Shop, where Whitfield handles the deliveries personally and is able to deliver content to the major closed grids, such as Second Life, InWorldz, and Island Oasis. Whitfield also lists her products on the Kitely Market, in the Sun Made Fashions store.

My avatar with my new hair. I recently had my real hair trimmed and highlighted, so my in-world haircut is actually very similar to my real one.
My avatar with my new hair. I recently had my real hair trimmed and highlighted, so my in-world haircut is actually very similar to my real one.

For example, I bought the Summer Mesh Hair for my OpenSim avatar on the Kitely Market, and a copy for Second Life at the Total Avatar Shop, so that I could have the same appearance in both places. My skin is an original creation based on my photograph.

Maria Korolov