How come I made a sale, but did not make a profit?
Last Update: May 15, 2007

If you have a question about why you may not be receiving profits from a product you have sold in the IMVU catalog, you should know that there have been some recent changes in the developer economy that may account for what you are currently experiencing. Information about this was made available to all IMVU developers in the Help pages, Forums, and through a link provided at the top of your webpage. (if you are logged into your developer account, you should see an orange bar at the top of your page with a link to this information. The link is: Changes in the Developer Economy )

Discussion about this topic may also be found in the IMVU forums. To access this, click on the following link: http://www.imvu.com/catalog/modules.php?op=modload&name=phpbb2&file=viewtopic.php&t=35946

If your question is not answered after reading this information, please let me know very specifically what questions remain.

The quick overview is that developers will no longer earn ‘free’ credits from sales (only ‘purchased’ credits). Instead you will earn 'tokens' in place of the free credits. You will be able to track these earnings from your developer account page. Version 1 of Developer Tokens (DTs) is now live. You will receive DT’s whenever one of your products is purchased with promotional credits. This gives value to the promotional credit sale while still protects the IMVU economy from inflation.

This initial version of DT’s is limited to paying for submission fees and shoutouts. This means that, instead of paying for shoutouts or submission fees with credits, you may now use DTs. Other details include:
· Every time a sale occurs, any developer in the chain who would have earned any number of predits instead earns 1 Developer Token (DT).
· A DT is worth 10 credits for the purposes of submissions and shoutouts. 50 DTs is enough for a new product submission.
· The price of product submission is base derivation + submission fee. The submission fee will be payable in DT, the base derivation is still a credit charge.
· We have written a script to retroactively reward DTs for all sales that have occurred since the predits were turned off on September 8th, 2006.

Our apologies for any confusion this may have caused. These changes were a necessary step to making the developer experience more lucrative and financially rewarding in the long run.

IF THE ABOVE DOES NOT APPLY TO YOU, PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING:

BACKGROUND:
We have found that some developers may be building on derived products that cost more than they think and therefore they do not see the profit they anticipated, or they simply derived from another product without increasing it’s price from the derivation cost, which means they would make no profit from its sale.

WHAT TO DO:
To see if this may have happened to you, go to either the "product information" page in the Catalog or the "About Me" panel on your homepage, click on the DEVELOPER REPORTS link, and then click on the "Developer Income Events" button in the menu at the top of that page.

Take a few seconds to review the "Developer Income Events" page, paying particular attention to the two columns listed under "Your Income". If the 'credits' and 'promo credits' columns for any particular item are both listed as zero, you may need to go back and review the price you are charging for that product. Most likely the price you are charging is the same as the derivation cost to you (which is why you are not seeing any profit from the item).

[NOTE: You can make the necessary price changes to the item by going to the product information page for that item in the Catalog and clicking on the edit button.