Marketplace needs Treasuries or User created Lists

[Kala Bijoux]

Marketplace needs a better system for its promos. I think having promos for certain categories is a great idea, but the current system of just allowing merchants to add the keyword to their listing. 

Why is it flawed? - Well, let's take the current Mad Style promo - on the first page of the most popular listings I see a lot of sex poses and hooker boots, but only 1 set of makeup that is vaguely 60s. I have to go to the 3rd page before I see a listing for a hair style and one for a dress that fit the Mad Style look. Now if I search via "new items" - then I see a meero nest. Don was TOTALLY into meeros, right?

What I suggest - A better way to do promos would be to take a page from Etsy's playbook and do something like user generated treasuries. Users create a page of items for a certain theme or style and LL can pick from the best of those and feature that list. 

Any other ideas?

[Lasher Oh]

I do agree. When the Marketplace was first introduced a couple of years ago by the now long gone Pink Linden. She quoted Etsy as their inspiration and as an example of best practice for all. The Commerce team then proceeded to ignore all the best points that a professional outfit like Etsy promote. And instead, at the time cobbled together a faint imitation that represented a triumph of style over content and gave us worse marketing tools than we had before. The Etsy model of treasures / favourites is far more sensible than the botched, inefficient, gamed review system that we now have to put up with.

^L^

[Dartagan Shepherd]

Agree. This is a quickie hack, not really suitable for promotions. You add a tag, they put up an image and link that to a custom search string that searches for that tag.

No controls over the promotion, no cleanup, no tracking. It needs a proper mechanism.

On seeing too many unrelated items ... have noticed that it appears glitchy, although nothing I've been able or willing to take the time to reproduce.

Make sure the amount of products returned is (currently) about 1,800 with all maturity ratings checked, or about 1,700 items if you've got only General maturity checked.

If you're seeing more than that, search is bugging on the results. Doesn't happen often, but have seen that it appears to happen occassionally (on a fresh login?), and it will return over 1 million results.

Another good reason not to rely on keywords and search for promotions, both must work properly first.

[Kala Bijoux]

 

RE search glitch: 

It's not a search glitch, unfortunately. It's people gaming the system. I went and checked all the entries I cited and they all have the keyword "madstyle" in their source code. Including the meero nests. I see about 1800 too (with all maturity ratings). I think people are just gaming the system, because it is very very easy to game the promotions. 

[Kala Bijoux]

I think it is in LL's best interest to make Marketplace the best it can be. After Hamlet's article on just how many people are (probably) using marketplace, LL needs to make the best impression it can with the marketplace. And I agree, I'd love to see someone like Pink Linden who has a real vision of what consumers want back at the helm.

[Madeliefste Oh]

When there would be a punishment for keyword abuse, the gaming would be over soon enough.

Something like: get two warnings when abuse is found and approved by LL, third time people game the keywords their marketplace store is closed for a week. X times leads to a permaban from the marketplace for the seller and all alts.

I would be curious to see how soon the search on the marketplace is 'repared' by such kind of measure.

 

[Dartagan Shepherd]

Sorry, didn't mean to imply that gaming the system wasn't happening either. Just watching those search result numbers bounce up and down the last couple of days, sometimes it's stable, sometimes it's a moving target. Just one of many issues.

Also agree about Pink. She's been moving and shaking since she left LL. Bring her back with a 5 year contract this time, and give her the ability to fire. It couldn't turn out any worse than to have her as Marketplace product manager. I think they let some of the wrong ones go in that mass firing. She would be one of them, especially in hindsight.

[Zanara Zenovka]

Oh c'mon - there's a huge untapped market segment there for stylish accessories for the urban, chain-smoking meeroo...

[Calamari]

Until LL cares about keyword spamming any promotion that relies on keywords, is going to get keyword spammed.  Here's one of my favorite examples of keyword spamming, that LL seams to think it's fine. 

"Apocalyptic, Post Apocalypse, Sci-Fi, Fallout, Retro, Cyberpunk, MadMax, Role Play, Pirate,Dark Fantasy, Rusty Vehicles, Junks, Unisex, Joke Items, Wasteland, Steampunk, Urban, Military,"

If you guessed that this was for a flower pattern bikini your right! 

I don't think it matters what idea some one has, as long as LL thinks the above keyword list describes a bikini there will all ways be problems with any promotion or search system.

[Medhue Simoni]

Literally, 3 items for men out of the first 200 items. Boy, you can really tell which market has the most desperate merchants.

[Sophia Trefusis]

Saw this too Modern day streetwear and other things that had nothing do with with the theme. Not my idea of a Mad Men style!