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."]
