Please fix marketplace

[Exavor Diesel]

The marketplace really needs to be overhauled. Given that it accounts for the majority of non-land sales, I think it's imperative that you get the marketplace right. 

Here's just a few issues:

- It is terribly slow

- The search functon is very poor and usually returns unrelated results

- Sorting product lines is very difficult (I.e. I often have to skip through loads of female products before I come across men's products. You should allow merchants to categorise their products more specifically so that consumers can find what they're looking for

- It looks like you've borrowed some of Ebay's interface design concepts. I suggest taking a look at a few e-commerce CMS systems out there. There's many features which you could borrow, many of which would greatly enhance the marketplace

- Make it easier to get to the marketplace. Typing in "http://marketplace.secondlife.com" or by clicking through the links on secondlife.com is just too tedious

 

[Rival Destiny]

An example of search....I was looking yesterday, for hair by a specific designer.  I search for the store, found it fine.  Searched for the hair by  name and got tons of items that weren't even related to hair.

After about 30 minutes of searching for this hair, I gave up.

 

 

[Drake1 Nightfire]

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Exavor Diesel wrote:

The marketplace really needs to be overhauled. Given that it accounts for the majority of non-land sales, I think it's imperative that you get the marketplace right. 

Here's just a few issues:

- It is terribly slow

That all depends on your web browser. its very fast for me.

- The search functon is very poor and usually returns unrelated results

Thats due to keyword spam, although it does return merchant names as well which does need fixing.

- Sorting product lines is very difficult (I.e. I often have to skip through loads of female products before I come across men's products. You should allow merchants to categorise their products more specifically so that consumers can find what they're looking for

If you are looking for mens clothing, limit it to apparel>mens....

- It looks like you've borrowed some of Ebay's interface design concepts. I suggest taking a look at a few e-commerce CMS systems out there. There's many features which you could borrow, many of which would greatly enhance the marketplace

- Make it easier to get to the marketplace. Typing in "

http://marketplace.secondlife.com

" or by clicking through the links on secondlife.com is just too tedious

 

one link... Shopping.. or you could bookmark it. like most people do.

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[WolfBaginski Bearsfoot]

There's certainly some bizarre things happening with search, and I would not be surprised if it were linked to the way products are getting jumbled up. I've seen claims of items by Merchant A being displayed as if by Merchant B.

If they can't get that right, there's something seriously wrong with the the system.

[Kampu Oyen]

>If they can't get that right, there's something seriously wrong with the the system.

Which system?

[Spica Inventor]

Right, I guess 'fine tuning' just costs more than L.L. is willing to invest. And if the Marketplace worked too well, then there wouldn't be any good reason at all to go shop in world outside of peeps main stores (just to get a closer look at the products) pumping up land costs. hehe ;-)

[LarryLow Kappler]

Broken since marketplace introduction - Today, almost 2 years later - still broken - Will not get fixed the next few years because they don't know how. That's the sad truth!

[Kampu Oyen]

>Will not get fixed the next few years because they don't know how.

But I DO know how.

Put everything back the way it was in January and leave it alone.

There will still be errors, but if LL will focus on compensating for those instead of looking for more ways that won't work to make them totally go away, the service level would either be sufficiently acceptable to allow user confidence and market growth, or it would at least be no worse than it has been since 14 February.

How long should they keep clinging to solutions that are worse than the problems they are said to be intended to solve?

Really, a better use of resources than development and implementation of DD would just have been to fully investigate the targeted borking of regions advertised as box rentals, and take action against whoever was responsible for that.

@Spica:

>Right, I guess 'fine tuning' just costs more than L.L. is willing to invest.

I think they might want to also consider the possibly higher cost of not fixing it.

[angelo Netizen]

Would anyone consider a competitor to marketplace.

I am merchant and am also fed up with the current system, but I am someone willing to do something about it.

A replacement system would require a system similar to magic boxes as any competitor to marketplace would not have the ability to provide direct delivery.

Just been thinking about this the last few months.

It would seem that the Lindens may not be open to listening to their customers, that is merchants complaints and that opens up a space for a company that does.

[Poison Aura]

Marketplace is not even opening and LL announces 

[RESOLVED] Marketplace Page Delays

 

Where is resolved guys?

[Kampu Oyen]

If it doesn't open at all, how can you really say there's a delay?

[Phantom Republic]

"Would anyone consider a competitor to marketplace."

 

There used to be two ... xstreetSL and onrez ... LL bought them both, shut the latter down, and absorbed xstreetSL into their website.

Competition would be nice ... but, it probably won't make as much as LL will offer the new owner.

[Flea Yatsenko]

I've considered an alternative myself since I'm proficient in PHP and mySQL, and it doesn't make sense at this point. People tend to forget that in order to buy anything from XStreet, you'd have to find a terminal, pay the terminal, then buy your goods. I don't think that even if you had a functioning and very reliable service that you could compete with SLMP being tied directly to your in world balance. The convenience is far too great, even if SLMP has a lot of problems.If you want to compete with SLMP, you're going to have to do it with something that lets a user find something with less effort than SLMP. You won't ever beat SLMP no matter how slow and broken it is unless you come up with a killer feature. The history of technology is full of examples where someone has had a superior product and it failed because of marketing or trying to defeat an established market.

I could be wrong, but setting up something like that is a big deal and a lot of work. It'd be extremely risking to start something like that. The only way I could imagine something coming close to convenience of SLMP would be to have an in world object have debit permissions and to have a website make a request to that object which pays the merchant. Debit permissions are scary to give out and can be abused. I don't see people lining up to have debit permissions given away. If there were to be a security issue (there's security issues in *everything*, even major websites), people could steal other people's L$.

Whatever is wrong with SLMP is very massive and it happened when LL bought SLMP and started tinkering with the original code. Whenever the marketplace starts to run slow, the JIRA about items having the wrong pictures becomes active and my sales nosedive for a while.

I use the WEB-4587 Sales Performance Index. The more active  WEB-4587 in the JIRA is, the worse sales are. If it's noon and my phone is full of messages from the JIRA, I know sales are going to suck. 

If LL does want to fix SLMP and they want it to prosper, it's going to take them a while to get everything fixed. If they really wanted it to fail, they could just walk away from it right now, if they left it alone it would explode.