Inworld

All things considered, that was a nice thing to say about the merchants, Grant. Glad to hear you'll be migrating the Favorites list...strangely, that was one of the major pieces of functionality I was missing most, as a shopper.

In amongst a number of concerns about whether the new Marketplace is ready for prime time as yet, the thing I would most wish for is a resumption of the communication that we used to have between merchants and the Commerce Team, once upon a time. I know the seat is a hot one, especially right now...but I expect you'd find that over time it would cool down quite a lot, and might even become comfortable.

That being said, good work on the cleanliness of the site, as well as a number of the new features, and I will keep my fingers crossed that the go-live is a successful one for all of us.

I've been preparing for the release for a while now, and I quite like what I see. All the tools are very cool, browsing is a lot easier. Good Job!

Would it have been too much trouble to at least bother migrating everything first?

Listings that haven't migrated now simply redirect to the SLM homepage, a double whammy for those merchants.

Once again you have shown that you simply don't care.

I bet the commerce team need to lay down in a dark corner after that excercise

Anyway, congrats on making it this far despite the hiccups along the way

p.s.

I'm still not convinced by the Relevance search

OMG... i  was upset when you released the beta without favorites.... I ignored using the beta version for this reason. NOW it is released AND NO FAVORITES and all my favs are gone. This was a very big complaint when you did the beta again you prove you do not listen to us. Favorites is one of the biggest selling points for us being that we do not buy everything we want at one time so we were able to go back and purchse the things we like when we wanted. You hurt your merchants and us on this big time. Yes its pretty... but pretty does squat for me in my opinion. Great job SL NOT 2 thumbs down

The completely useless e-mail subjects for sales are now only slightly useless, but more cluttered.

"Customer <Firstname Lastname> purchased 1 item from you as part of order #123456 on the Second Life Marketplace"

I'd much rather see the following, as I don't need a full, weirdly-worded sentence to understand what's going on:

For a single item:

SL Marketplace Order #123456: <Firstname Lastname> purchased <Product Name>.

For multiple items:

SL Marketplace Order #123456: <Firstname Lastname> purchased <number> items.

In all cases, so far, I've sold single items, and would rather know what the product was than how many were bought.

Grant,

Many thanks for getting SLM up and running relatively quickly. My experience so far has been very good. I will, though, remind everyone that:

Private Islands -> Parcel Sales should be changed to:

Private Islands -> Parcel Leases.

One cannot buy or sell a private island parcel; one can only lease a parcel from the island owner. While private islands can be subdivided into leasehold parcels, those leasehold parcels cannot be bought or sold. Only an entire island can be bought or sold - whole, not in part. It is very confusing to new residents who (falsely) believe they are buying an island parcel. Fixing the terminology in SLM would be a partial solution to a major, longstanding problem.

The completely useless e-mail subjects for sales are now only slightly useless, but more cluttered.

"Customer <Firstname Lastname> purchased 1 item from you as part of order #123456 on the Second Life Marketplace"

I'd much rather see the following, as I don't need a full, weirdly-worded sentence to understand what's going on:

For a single item:

SL Marketplace Order #123456: <Firstname Lastname> purchased <Product Name>.

For multiple items:

SL Marketplace Order #123456: <Firstname Lastname> purchased <number> items.

In all cases, so far, I've sold single items, and would rather know what the product was than how many were bought.

agreed, also needs a total sum of L$ at the bottom

I wish they'd change the "buy" terminology to "lease" everywhere in the SL experience so the UI would match the material I write for my estate. I run into too many people who get confused because my documentation describes taking a lease while the Viewer says "Buy Land". I can't bring myself to use LL's misleading terminology, though.

All LL ads served by Double Click are pointing to http://secondlife.com/ including the "Find us on Facebook", "Linden Homes etc" and "Advertise on Xstreet" banners.

PS: I find those ads slightly in conflict with the marketplace service you provide... yet I'd tolerate having them there until you offer third party ads. Past that, might be unethical just as google's bids on its own ad system is see a valid conflict of interest: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/18/google_adwords_house_ads_conflict_of_interest/

Please be mindful of that as you plan third party advertising on the marketplace.

But for now please at least point each banner to the right place. It goes back to the dashboard right now...

Thanks

sort by best selling seems to be broken, at least for my stuff it doesnt show the right order.

overall the search seemed a bit clunky over the past few days.

besides that it looks pretty decent.

good luck

I wish  they'd change the "buy" terminology to "lease" everywhere in the SL  experience so the UI would match the material I write for my estate. I  run into too many people who get confused because my documentation  describes taking a lease while the Viewer says "Buy Land". I can't bring  myself to use LL's misleading terminology, though.

Agree. LL needs to bite the bullet on this one as part of the Fast Easy Fun program.

In theory, all that is required is a simple test in the software to know which window to present for About Land. If estate, present window A; if mainland, present window B.

A far more sophisticated approach - and truly impressive - would be to build lease/rental functionality into the About Land window.

You might be interested in this:

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-15679?

Perhaps now you could address the bug where a customer gets charged, doesn't get the item and the merchant is not paid?

Or maybe bother answering your support tickets?

I hate having to post this here, but it seems there's no other way to get Support for issues with the marketplace. I tried filing a support ticket, but the Lindens there seem unwilling to address marketplace issues, and instead tell me to post issues relating to my personal merchant account, on the jira.

Anyways, the issue is https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-2980 , namely that the items in my magic box used version numbers BEFORE THE MIGRATION, and now my item listings are LOCKED to delivery objects with version numbers: numbers that can't be changed or removed without sacrificing years of product reviews and ratings.

I'd appreciate it if some Marketplace Linden would look into this issue and give me some feedback on how to proceed.

It is a very pretty website : )

Two small things I would change (perhaps LL is already working on)

• Some Xstreet data (reviews & past sales) is still not migrated (my crocodile & mist for example).
  
• All web links to old Xstreet listings are broken -- stops at SLM homepage -- no way to find equivalent new SLM listing.

However, congrats on the successful launch & I look forward to see SLM become better & better over time!

Please add some pretty charts/graphs somewhere for us visually-thinking merchants ; )

I would greatly appreciate it if you would refrain from opening the marketplace until everything was migrated over.

Seeing as it is already opened, however, I would also appreciate it if you would FINALLY migrate the rest of my stuff over.  I have products with outdated prices, outdated pictures, outdated information, and I do not have the time to edit all of them.

Other than that, the new marketplace seems fine to me.

Thanks commerce team for listening to us merchants. I want to compliment you with the proces of communicating. It must not be easy for a team of a few people to communicate with a community of ten thousands. And still a lot of people think you communicate way too less. But what I experience is you are team that is actually listening.

You announced the plans in an early stage. There was a lot of protest amongst merchants about several points, like: the fixed image size did not meet the used standards by merchants, the item descriptions was limited too much, the BBcode was taken away, gif files were not supported... and so on. Those concerns were heared and where possible implemented in your plans.

In the beta phase you also listened to complaints and ideas, you worked on bugs and proposed improvements. And you asked us for ideas for future features.

For years we were not heared at all. And now the frustration of not being heared is coming out to everybody who actually wants to listen. Despite of that you did not give up and worked with this recalcitrant community. I rate it 5 stars!

To all merchants and shoppers: good luck with selling and buying!

We are looking into  better solution for versioning that takes in account the version in the name of the object. More on this when the team has had a night of sleep and can come up with a solution that meets everyone's needs.

"NOW it is released AND NO FAVORITES and all my favs are gone."

Yes, I miss favorites too, but they are not gone! We will introduce favorites and migrate your favorites very soon.

Grant,

When can we expect the items that are not migrated over to be migrated?

And why did you not wait until your team had finished the migration before killing xstreet?

We were promised - PROMISED - that the Marketplace would not be opened until the work was done. THE WORK IS NOT DONE. The listings are not up to what merchants need to sell product, the emails are still not in a format we really need, our stars and reviews are not completely migrated over, relevant search is not working right, the favorites list is wiped out - but off we go anyway.

The mysterious "boxless" system has me irritated the most. Until it's rolled out so we can at least SEE it - because you've given us nothing as far as details on how it will work and how our product changes can or will be handled - our listings with version number in the product names are held captive. Completely unfair to people who have marketed good products for the long term.

NO MAJORITY OF YOUR CUSTOMERS, NOT EVEN A SIZABLE MINORITY OF THEM, ASKED FOR THIS MARKETPLACE. In and of itself it's a fine idea, a shiny new marketplace sounds nice - but as usual, you took it upon yourselves to dismantle a working system and replace it with an as-yet unfinished one. And I'm tired of making the point over and over that half-baked product from Linden Lab replacing what actually works is one of the key issues driving the numbers down. When will you people figure it out?

Grant, thanks for the rapid reply. It's very reassuring to know that I've been heard.

A night's sleep? That's a totally reasonable request. You've got it.

Please do understand, I bear no ill will towards the marketplace here. The value of marketplace sales outweighs any likes or dislikes I might have, and I'm willing to work with whatever system you want to put in place,  whether I personally like it or not. If that means removing  version numbers in the product names, then I'm totally willing to do  that, assuming someone can help me do that. It's just that since 2006, I've worked hard improving products and helping customers. The positive reviews and ratings I've earned over the years are a major business asset to me, and keeping those reviews connected to the products I'm selling is the most important thing here.

Thankfully it's not a crucial "gotta fix it today" problem.. because I haven't done any product upgrades since the migration..and while I do have some updates planned in the future, they're not ready today. So if it's something that a fix is coming for in a week or a month or so.. I'm willing to wait that out. I've just been trying for weeks to get someone to recognize that the issue exists.

Anyways, I wish all involved a peaceful night's rest.

P.S. Get those Web-Lindens to fix the link on the website menu.. at this point, "Shopping > Marketplace" should probably be linking straight to the new marketplace I'd think.

Would be very greatful if reviews could be fully migrated over asap, as a consumer the reviews are essential in deciding if i intend to purchase somethin or if i should stay a million miles away from it. Until then unless there are reviews on the products (which in 90% of the case there is not) ill refrain from purchasing.

I would like to be able to search the text in the ads, with at least a few operators familiar from search engines like Google, such as being able to exclude results by putting a dash in front of a term, or to search for a specific phrase in the text by enclosing multiple words in quotes.

Without the ability to at least search for specific terms and phrases in the text of the pages,  the results are not very useful.  That's why all the major web search engines  have them.

I need to know if LL is totally done with product listing migration. I cannot waste any more time on editing listings that will be overwritten.

Please state in precise English that there is no more chance of any SLM listings being overwritten. Or that there is a chance so editing SLM listings is a waste of time.

Thanks in advance.