Kitty pricing!

[SavageR0SE Resident]

(04-15-2015 09:05 AM)TerrorMisu Resident Wrote:  It used to be 50-100L per trait for basic kitties .. 200-2000L or more per for the most sought after traits.. now people are selling cats for 100L for 7T or more.. how do we compete w that? I am seeing this happening now with a vengeance. Do we all start selling our cats for 100L to give some competition? Someone said or I read that it costs 700L to produce one kitty? How is the feasible to sell for 100L? I know how one person does it. He sells all the newly traited kitties for 30-100k per cat.. then when the market slumps he sell off his kitties for nothing. Does it mean we all must compromise our integrity and that of our kitty business to stay competitive. Perhaps I will do that? Selling cats to a target market niche "beginners" for 100L does not justify this absurd pricing. It only teaches that there is someone willing to compromise their integrity and value of these lovely kitties. I see this practice detrimental to the market, clearly a desperate person doing desperate things to hang on...just saying!

It really makes me sad and disappointed. What are your thoughts?

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PS Happy Tax Day, Americans! I better go finish mine! LOL

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Oh mercy! I read all 11 pages of the postings on this Pricing topic. And I can't get one thing OUT of my mind... It is something I didn't really notice anyone else addressing strongly enough yet? Maybe I missed it.

free enterprise definition: "The freedom of private businesses to operate competitively for profit with minimal governmental regulation."

Well thankfully when selling KittyCats in Second Life goverment regulation is not applicable. Taking it further, I do not believe there should be ANY regulation of the prices we as individuals decide to set for our KittyCatS.

When newbies ask me for pricing help, I tell them as I learned. $100L per trait basically and extra for new traits, rare traits and sizes to equal a value AND then I add... 1/2 that for the auction market. It's a pretty basic method. Keeping it simple!
However, my own personal pricing method is a tad more involved than that! lol Sometimes I have a kitten that I bred and backbred through 3 generations; and, it's as close to what I was breeding for that I consider it Very Special. And I charge accordingly. And I get my price! Sometimes the offspring from my "projects" have some traits that make them valuable I think to someone (too much so to just menagerie), yet they lack so much. So I might market them for a lot less. It all evens out. There is a natural balance. It takes a little experience to get there.

Now if you don't like the prices I set, by all means shop elsewhere! Believe me, I won't be offended at all!
But do NOT have the audacity to tell me what I should charge or how I should value my cats. How arrogant of you to try! My cats are worth what I think they are worth and priced according to that, to how much work and lindens I put into making them, how lucky or unlucky I was while breeding them, how I FEEL about a particular trait, also to how badly I need the lindens at the time, and EVEN sometimes as to who is buying the cat! I say what they are priced at and No one has the right to say for me and MINE. Sorry if that sounds harsh. You do not have a clue as to all the factors I use for my pricing!

On top of that, start telling me what to charge for my KittyCats and where does it end? Tell me when and where to sell them? What traits I am allowed to breed? Maybe we should be like the farmers and You pay me NOT to breed to keep the prices higher! lol You get the drift! How far does this "regulation" go???

In the United States we have a saying, "It's a Free Country!" Now I know a lot of people in the World think we are just egotistic jerks, but we believe in our Freedom and in our Rights! Don't try to take these away from us. We will fight you every time!
*Normally I am no flag waver! This just goes to show how very seriously I take my KittyCats! lol

So yes, it's mean if someone overnight busts the market on that new trait you paid thousands of lindens to breed! Ouch!!! But hey! that's part of the gamble and part of the FUN of this game... at least to my way of thinking. If you don't like the gamble, stay out of the game! Otherwise, Suck it Up! Don't criticize (or try to pressure) other people for not playing the game the exact same way that you do. We are all different, have the right to express ourselves in new, creative and DIFFERENT ways and I like that about us! I truly believe that is mostly what Second Life is all about.

New sign: FREE ENTERPRISE!


~SavageR0SE][

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[TerrorMisu Resident]

Was it only 11 pages? Its worth reviewing now and then!

[Ivy Norsk]

Maybe that's how much they are worth now. Supply and demand. Traits that were once coveted have become routine. Also the location of the shop affects the pricing. 9T cats are up on menagerie tables all the time.

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Edited to note that the post I was replying to has been deleted.

[TerrorMisu Resident]

Do you think location matters since the profilers? Methinks it probably does still affect sales. Auctions seem to be the place to buy the best of the best these days!! Second best would be the love tables and near those said tables! Cheers!

[Illuminatra Resident]

Kitty Pricing...

Do our current prices reflect a market that once was OR do they represent a market that is now?

Technology (AKA: the Profilers) have made it so much easier for a consumer to compare prices. In years past, a consumer had to TP to each of the markets, spend countless amounts of hours walking around - trying to find a cat that catches their eye, at a price that they can afford OR want to afford. Now-a-days, this way of consumerism has changed drastically. We can look up the traits that we are in search of in a matter of minutes using the web-markets & once we find what we are in search of, we can TP directly to these cats. This eliminates the need to walk around comparing prices, traits, etc. If a cat that we TP to costs more than we're willing to spend, we can quickly TP to the next one that might fit our budgets better. Before the profilers - we didn't have this "luxury." We would just have to settle for what we stumbled across during our searches - and sometimes that meant spending more.

Auctions... Now-a-days at auctions you rarely see those bid-wars, those big slap downs, etc. A lot of the time there's hardly anyone bidding on the cats. Why is this? It's because many Auctioneers have stressed to breeders - "this is where you can sell your cats." This ideology that has been hammered into people's heads has caused a nasty domino effect. Everyone's going to auctions to sell their cats, not to BUY & sell their cats. Nobody knows that they should be buying cats too. And think about it for a second. People in our community talk. If they see the same people trying to sell their cats at auctions, without ever supporting anyone else's cats - people will be like, "no, don't buy his/her cat, because they don't ever buy anyone else's." You may think that this is silly or ridiculous - but that's how communities work. That's how this one works anyway. Auctions used to be highly coveted events where people would go to BUY and sell cats. When did this change? Why did this change?

Breeding... There are a LOT of good breeders out there now. Before, you would go to a handful of people that were known for breeding the best cats. Now-a-days, that's not really the case. A lot of people know how to breed for pure traits now. Pure traits always go for more money, but when you have more breeders out there that know how to "play the game," pricing becomes even more competitive. I am going to put a conspiracy theory out there - but maybe, JUST MAYBE - the reason why Confetti cats are so hard to breed, is because KittyCatS themselves - wants breeding to be a bit more tricky. It's been over 2 years since they came out & no one has been able to make and keep a 9T Confetti cat. People have gotten close - 7Ts, 8Ts even... but nope, not 9Ts. These cats don't breed traits as well as normal furs do. Why is that? Why haven't we been able to solve the puzzle over 2 years later? Like I said, there isn't just a handful of people that know how to breed and do it well anymore. Many of us know how to breed down to lock traits in, etc.

I don't know... that's my 2 cents.

[TerrorMisu Resident]

Your post covers a lot of ground! LOL Buying cats at auction...Coverboy also addressed this topic in his auctioneer post on another thread. We do need to BUY each others cats to sustain the market, that said, people do, just not necessarily at auctions. Many of the newest or 'hottest' traits are sold as private sales since many folks know who have them tend to sell (trade)them privately,mainly to friends or people they choose to have them, even though auctions usually bring higher price for obvious reasons.

As a buyer, the premium priced kitties, new and/or rare traits/kitties, for me, I have to consider if i will get a return on my investment. In the past, it was a lot easier to do. Today's market its very hard to recover your costs, since the prices can drop drastically, within a few day to a few hours. A lot of folks trading and selling behind the scenes begin breeding and developing lines optimizing the new trait find, if you are lucky enough to sell a new fur for 40k quite possibly in a few days the markets could be flooded with the same cat at 1/4 the price.

Other than that, unique combination kitties and lower starting bids encourage buyers. I understand lower start bids on nicely traited kitties to encourage bidding at auctions. The standard to charge 50-100L per trait is still a good practice to encourage. At the end of they day, it is still supply and demand. When the market is saturated it is a lot harder to price and sell.

As always, if you sell cats for 200L at shops, how can you expect to sell them at auctions?

Good luck, Illumintra! Thanks for your input!♥♥

[Ivy Norsk]

Ah this has blossomed out into a more wide-ranging conversation. A meandering response:

Yes, I think absolutely auctions are the best place to get those top cats with hot new traits. Also a number of very distinctive cats do show up on love tables (with very familiar breeder names) along with generically useful recessive utility cats. And the best shop I ever had was right across from some love tables, but that is several years ago now. Also, to Terror's point of selling behind the scenes, I recently bought Surprise Sparkle eyed cat - with very nice traits - behind the scenes for an auction price, but not a really high auction price. That just came about through chat. When I was doing auctions on a regular basis I always sold a cat and bought a cat. It's a community reciprocity thing and the auctions don't work without it and it does increase the quality of one's Cattery.

There are a lot of ways to do the KittyCats hobby. I've never been a trait-racer. I've never invested in really hot expensive cats because I didn't want to deal with the stress of recouping costs. At this point I don't really try to sell at all. I'm up at Saga breeding 4T genesis cats for the sake of figuring out the puzzle, and my "home" breeding projects focus mainly on trying to get pure whiskers on cats that go with their furs (to greater and lesser success). I have skybox shop - that is, it's not in a market - and every now and then I clean out my cattery and menagerie cats and put the better ones in the shop. In other words, I'm not actively managing the place. Some are 200L. But they aren't auction cats. If they were auction cats, I'd be selling them at auction. But they might be useful for somebody for a trait or combo. I do not believe they are hurting the market. Part of that is because they are off in a skybox and I'm not underpricing the person next to me in a market. They are not currently attached to profilers - if they were, I'd be more actively managing the pricing of my cats.

Profilers are or perhaps should be the most fraught topic right now. As a technology they are a godsend, but we are (as a community) are not in a happy place with them. There is more than one heated thread about the profilers on this forum. I took my RM profilers down at the time of one of those threads. Detailed conversations about the personal dynamics behind the RM profilers made me not want to support them anymore. Now, that's easy for me to do since I'm not an active seller and the stakes are low for me. I do note that the Too Adorable sims took the RM profilers down for awhile, but has since put them back up. I don't know why but suspect it might be for technical reasons.The competing Torgon profiler seems like it's not quite up to speed in graphic design at least. I know that KittyCats doesn't want to get into the marketplace, but profilers are a really important tech for selling cats, and all that data is being harvested from the KC servers.

[Evolving Yin]

(09-29-2017 06:28 AM)Illuminatra Resident Wrote:  Do our current prices reflect a market that once was OR do they represent a market that is now?

Wow twelves pages! Certainly a hot topic for KittyCatS breeders. I agree, the market is always in flux. What was hot yesterday may not be hot today. I appreciate having the web markets to do my research before I price a cat. That tends to work better for live cats but not always for boxes. My boxed cats don't sell well unless they happen to be a Mega or a Teacup. I can price a boxed cat according to market value at the time I set it out, but by the time I revisit the cat it will be outlandishly priced according to the most recent entries on the web market.

Some of the formulas here for pricing cats seem way to simplistic. They do not take in account the cats age, or whether a particular trait even looks good on the cat being sold. I also consider how common the traits or the combination of traits are in the marketplace. Are the cats traits solid? Is the cat live or boxed? Is the cat at 100% and ready to breed, or will will the buyer have to wait two weeks to breed it? There are so many variables that can affect how I choose to price a cat. It is to tedious to make a list for even that is in flux. I try to take in to account current market prices before I price a cat, but if the cat sits for long periods of time and isn't selling maybe that is a sign the market has changed for those traits? A cat is really only worth what someone is willing pay for it. It makes sense to hang on to the collectible cats and wait for the right buyer, but my experience indicates that cats bred for traits seem to go down in value over time not up.

(01-19-2016 10:21 AM)SavageR0SE Resident Wrote:  But do NOT have the audacity to tell me what I should charge or how I should value my cats. How arrogant of you to try! My cats are worth what I think they are worth and priced according to that, to how much work and lindens I put into making them, how lucky or unlucky I was while breeding them, how I FEEL about a particular trait, also to how badly I need the lindens at the time, and EVEN sometimes as to who is buying the cat! I say what they are priced at and No one has the right to say for me and MINE. Sorry if that sounds harsh. You do not have a clue as to all the factors I use for my pricing!

On top of that, start telling me what to charge for my KittyCats and where does it end? Tell me when and where to sell them? What traits I am allowed to breed? Maybe we should be like the farmers and You pay me NOT to breed to keep the prices higher! lol You get the drift! How far does this "regulation" go???

I enjoy the KittyCatS community aspect of breeding, and for that reason I do factor issues of community when pricing cats, but ultimately I agree with SavageRose on this issue.

[Tad Carlucci]

(10-20-2017 03:38 PM)Evolving Yin Wrote:  Wow twelves pages! Certainly a hot topic for KittyCatS breeders.

Well, the thread is approaching it's 5th birthday.

[Evolving Yin]

(10-20-2017 04:00 PM)Tad Carlucci Wrote:  

(10-20-2017 03:38 PM)Evolving Yin Wrote:  Wow twelves pages! Certainly a hot topic for KittyCatS breeders.

Well, the thread is approaching it's 5th birthday.

Lol, just goes to prove, some things evolve and some things just keep recycling themselves. For the most part, I think this thread has evolved. It is a very useful thread for newcomers. I get newbies and even people who have been breeding for a while asking me for help in pricing their cats. Honestly, I hate pricing my own cats, but it is necessary if I want to continue breeding. From now on when people ask me about priding cats I am just going to refer them to this thread.

Happy 5th birthday KittyCatS pricing thread!