anshe chung

In June we reported on a pricing snafu in IMVU. Anshe Chung had reduced the price of a wide variety of items causing all sorts of upheaval for reasons specific to the IMVU economy.

Now in Second Life she's slashed prices once more, lowering prices down to the neighborhood of L$10. The products range from clothes to furniture to buildings, all of which are also for sale directly by independent artists who need to charge quite a bit more than L$10 to make any kind of profit. Her competitors are not happy at all, and it's coming through in the auctions of the SL Exchange.

One listing selling full-permissions "Invisible One-Way Glass" for L$750 has a description containing: "Its a bargain at this price, especially if you have several walls to do. This item is not associated with ACS or 10lindens in any way nor does it sell for $10L. It was not produced by Anshe Chung studios or and of her workers. Buy from the real people of Second Life."

The Boycott Anshe Chung !quit T-Shirt got positive feedback as well with the comment: "Everyone should get one and join the protest to let ACS know that noone wants her cheap copies of talented artist's creations."

A full forum thread has begun at the SL Exhange with many others chiming in. The debate continues about what's healthy competition versus what's anti-competition. The old story of Wal-Mart's tactic of undercutting local businesses until they fold has left more than one person nervous about the implications of this kind of sale on goods, virtual or not.

The virtual world entrepreneur husband and wife team who work under the name Anshe Chung have found themselves at the center of a major controversy, reports 3pointD. According to a written statement, they mistook a bug in IMVU's system for a feature and began to lower prices on 1500 of their items.

Things got quite a bit more complicated from there. The IMVU system allows people to create derivative products, and many were creating products based on these items whose prices were lowering. The derived products, however, weren't automatically lowering in price accordingly. As a result, competitors would create copy-cat derivative products at a fraction of the cost while the original derivative products were still locked at the higher prices.

Restoring the original prices has proven more complicated than one might think:

We don't have a list with the original prices and have to browse the developer reports to find prices of previous sales. Lowering prices of 1500 products already took us 20 hours, with the slow page loads that we currently suffer from China. Finding out the original prices one by one and raising prices again will take a multiple of that. We have 2 people doing that full time now, who will need several more days to get this done.

This is a good example of how nuanced commerce in virtual worlds can be. If pros like Anshe Chung can be caught out this badly on the details, it might pay for the rest of us to re-read everything before making a move.

[CORRECTION: Shortly after this article appeared Anshe Chung contacted Metaversed - "Just to clear up confusion: Anshe Chung is just only my avatar / pseudonym, not shared with my husband. However, Guni co-founded the company Anshe Chung Studios, Ltd., China with me. Guni's own avatar is Guni Greenstein."]