How does malling work? As far as i know, they just have big size shops, link to each other, and overprice items. I dont see how this generates profit [...]
Many of them know little about autobuying, i guess. That's why they are so involved in malling (or so-called time-consuming disguised scamming ? )
The only benefit I can think of is that when people are on quests and can't use the shop wiz, they go to malls to try and find what they want. The malls can then charge anything they want because the people looking for the item don't have any other prices to compare it to like on the shop wiz. Lucky for us, though, we have the shop wiz searcher on this site, so there's no need to get ripped off by the malls.
Your right, its all about the shop wiz wen ur on a quest, i dont fink they're scamming anybody, most mallers are millionaires. this is just another way of making np for them while they can restock and watch the shop till flows
This isn't the only way they make NP. Have you not noticed that a very small amount of popular items in their shops are priced at the lowest price on the Shop Wiz? This acts like a loss leader (if anyone did basic business or economics at school ) which brings people into their shop and gets them to start looking around. Not everyone will wiz each item before they buy it. Many will just see a few things they like and buy them there and then so a lot of their revenue is made from impulse buys. Then, obviously, the fact that they all link to each other just adds to the traffic and therefore adds to the chance of these impulse purchases being made. I wouldn't say it was scamming either, but I can definitely see where you're coming from, especially seeing as if someone goes into a store because the toys are so cheap, maybe they assume that all of the other items are well priced too, and then end up paying way too much. However, I suppose it's everyone's own responsibility to check what they're buying, at the end of the day.
I think the biggest profit isnt from people who come into their shop from the shop wiz though. When you have a huge shop, your shop comes up in the first few shops of the marketplaces (http://www.neopets.com/market.phtml?type=list&limit=10 top 10 shops of neopia). Not only that, a lot of noobs dont know about the shop wizard and use the Notice Board to look for shops to buy stuff. People with malls pay 4 million np to have their ad placed on top of the notice board (http://www.neopets.com/noticeboard.phtml), this brings a lot of those noobs who dont know about the shop wiz to their store.
i still dont understand why they need such big shop sizes though... does the money they generate really pay for all those shop ugprades?
Everything you guys have said is wrong. Okay there are some little right bits, but not really. My background: When the main market was redesigned, it was changed from like 500 shops to 770 shops or something. The size needed for main market went down to 320 from 420. Lots of new malls sprouted up. I joined one of them, summer of 05 I believe it was. I was the petpet shop (the best spot in any mall), with just the promise of upgrading to main market. So I kinda screwed them over. I made 300k a day that summer. As in, I was clearing 900k a day in sales, with wiz prices marked up 50%. I got enough to upgrade to main, and the mall owner quit, so I took over. I tried to make the mall good, but nobody really gave a damn. This was September 05. At that point, I disbanded that mall, and started looking for something else. Being a small shop (I was just the minimum size needed to be in main market), nobody wanted me. So I did something genius. I decided to start my own mall. Instead of doing what everyone else was doing, and just getting junk people to join from the BD chat, I went through the marketplace and mailed everyone with a size 550 shop or larger (more than 50% of the marketplace was under 500 at this point). I told them that I was going to upgrade my own shop to around size 600 or so, and I had several other large shops who were interested in joining the mall with me. And it worked. The Meridell Mega Mall was formed within about a week, with a great array of shops, not just tiny ones. We did well, establishing ourselves as a great new mall, one that a lot of people wanted to join. This took us to just before summer of 06. We found that there was another mall which was giving us a lot of competition (I'll discuss competition below). Me and the other mall leader (Brian) were practically giving each other death threats over msn. And then I said to him, "Man. This isn't working. Let's merge". So merge we did. We took 4 of my members, 4 of his members, and 2 new people, and formed a completely new mall. Over the course of the next 6 months or so, we absolutely dominated the malling world, bringing in profits up to 500k a day or so. We pretty much redefined malling strategy. Of course people were watching. Other malls gave us competition. We decided that our own profits weren't enough. So we replaced some of our members with side accounts of our own that we upgraded. At the end, Brian and I had 7 accounts between us with shops over size 600. Average size was 700. So 50 mil x 7 accounts = 350m in shop upgrades. But we were pulling in loads. We shared a BD set worth loads. Then Brian got iced, pulling down 6 of our main market accounts. I only had 70m in items and my own account left. At that point, I quit neopets and sold it all for USD. I'll come back and post what malling actually is LATER. I'm going out now. But yea, that's my story. Outsiders think malling is stupid. Trust me, coming from someone that knows, it really isn't.
Big shops are better for marketplace huts. http://www.neopets.com/market_map.phtml People click on a hut, go to first shop, buy the stuff, then move on to others in the mall. People buy the stuff because they don't know about the shop wizard to search for items. They're just new to the game and buy whatever, at any price.
Things do get a lot more complicated here than i thought of Sorry for being in great ignorance of malling [...] Please, I do want to know more :yup: So... you still do malling now ? or you never come back since that ?
are you gonna plan on doing malling? cause u'd need like millions of millions of np to do it lols.. i read a guide about it on someones petpage =O
I'm really looking forward to reading your post that proves everything said here is wrong :lol:. Good luck with that. I don't doubt that there are additional things that haven't been mentioned, but that doesn't mean that the things discussed already are wrong. But anyway, you are looking at needing a size 600 shop at the moment to get into any of the decent malls, or to be able to create a decent one. Based on the current prices for shop upgrades, that would cost almost 36,000,000NP. Then you have to pay for the items to start you out. Now filling 3000 shop spaces is going to cost you quite a bit too, probably a couple of million. Oh, and then you have your advertising costs. Even if, as Hallendale was, you were making 300k a day in profit, it would take you 4 solid months just to recoup what you have spent on your shop, not to mention the fact that it's pretty labout intensive to keep a shop of that size stocked. So, I've no doubt that it can make you a tidy profit legitimately, but you need to realise that you need a huge amount of capital to start it out and quite a bit of time and patience :/