Has market place a problem?

[Boudicca Littlebird]

I have not had a single sale in 3 days, this is very odd as I have not had 3 days without a sale before, I have averaged 5 a day so find this odd, have any of you experienced the same.

[Sassy Romano]

Go and buy something, see if it works. Three days is far too small a window to determine any real trend.

[Dora Gustafson]

It is very optimistic to say it has only one problem:)

My market place return has been low lately, but luckily the in world sale is taking over so I am compensated

[PeterCanessa Oh]

The marketplace has so many problems it would be impossible to list them all.

One of them is giving-away items without sending the merchants any notification or payment: http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Merchants/Undelivered-was-delivered-customer-got-it-and-I-have-no-pay/m-p/1527239/message-uid/1527239#U1527239

So maybe your products are selling brilliantly but LL is stealing all your money.

[JohnMiddlefield]

When Market Place stops having problems, I would like to know. I have been thinking of putting some things up for sale on MP, but I really need not any more frustrations in life, so I am deferring the attempt to become a merchant on MP. It sounds like this will be a very long deferment, eh?

[Spica Inventor]

No, you're not the only one that thinks MP is having intermittent 'bad hair days'. Have you had any unusually good string of sale days or an exceptionally good sales day as well? (Trying to form a theory here) ;-)

[Spica Inventor]

Did you have any communication with customers saying they tried but wherent able to purchase your products on the MP and so went to your in world store to get them there instead?

[Boudicca Littlebird]

Yes, a few days like that, but this none at all is new ground.

[Flea Yatsenko]

My sales records show that sales have been about half of normal since April 30th. Things have held steady the last few days, but sales are still 50% to 75% lower than what I normally expect.

In case anyone forgot, April 30th was the day LL found that unexpected bug when doing routine maintenence. Whatever the bug, it's affected everything and I haven't seen a day of normal sales since then. They've been ok, but they're back to pre-DD levels which tells me deliveries are silently failing again or just not happening.The good news is that I have a script that notifies me when my best sellers are unboxed and rezzed, and it seems like no one is getting my stuff for free. So, either LL is eating people's money or LL is just not taking it. Either that, or I've really reached the end.

I've had a few situations where ANS did not notify my scripts, so I'm guessing there's some backbone problems still with everytthing. I'd stay away from uploading new content to sell and changing anything with your marketplace store. Doing anything when the grid is having issues and sales are irregular is just asking for trouble.

[Czari Zenovka]

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Boudicca Littlebird wrote:

I have not had a single sale in 3 days, this is very odd as I have not had 3 days without a sale before, I have averaged 5 a day so find this odd, have any of you experienced the same.

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For approximately the last 2 months my sales have been off its normal trend - a trend that has been steady for 4 years.  All of a sudden my sales will stop completely, then begin again in about 3-5 days.  I have a small shop so am very aware of all my sales and, until this started, I ALWAYS sold at least one thing every day (usually more) and never had more than one day with no sales. 

I am seeing a definite pattern in my shop with "sell items for 5 days; stop for 3-5 days; sell an item, etc."  The pattern is becoming so regular now that I can basically "predict" the days I will/won't have sales.

[Flea Yatsenko]

Can you elaborate on that pattern?

I've noticed if sales are bad by 5pm SL time on a friday that you pretty much have no hope for a good weekend.

Since April 30th, I've noticed a lot of times my sales will start to ramp up and then have a very painful crash, and then start the ramping up process all over again only to see them get beat down again.

April 30th (monday), sales crashed and improved steadily over the next few (3) days

May 5th (friday) sales crashed and improve steadily over the next two days.

May 7th (monday) sales crashed, held steady for 4 days, and crashed today.

(note, I'm fuzzing these numbers because I don't like to release sale data and setting post April 30th sales as a baseline of 10, but the ratios will remain the same)

Average sales per day before April 30th: 17, 18.4 if you exclude the day there was an issue and sales were bad

Average sales per day after April 30th: 10

So, sales are about half, but people are buying less expensive goods. This is another pattern I've noticed when there's problems with marketplace. People stop buying expensive builder's kits and pre-fabs and opt for smaller items that sell for about L$200.

[WADE1 Jya]

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Flea Yatsenko wrote:

So, either LL is eating people's money or LL is just not taking it.

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Oh they're taking it. This is the one part of the platform Lindens have down to a flawless science.

They have perfected the art of taking. Giving back or sharing with others, they are not so good at this.

[Ann Otoole]

I saw some delicious mesh boots I had to have. So I bought them. That led to buying a new hair wig. And that led to buying a new corset.

 

So some people are getting sales. Just depends on what you are selling I guess.

[Flea Yatsenko]

I have no doubt that things are still selling (I've been selling things), but there's still something wrong. I did some information hunting and LL has a lot of work to do and from the sound of it, SL is running in emergency mode that just gives some functionality.

All my graphs show that after the 30th, in world traffic is down, sales are down, and profits are down. Lots of people are saying sales have been bad this last week as well.

It might be hard to notice if you're just looking at transaction history, but I wrote a php script that uses ans and gives reports and graphs, and it's really clear something bad happened on the 30th and the grid still hasn't recovered.

[Vegro Solari]

The selling bits seem to be working "OK",  it's the search (and hence how many customers are likely to buy from you) that likely got messed with around Apr 30.

[WADE1 Jya]

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Flea Yatsenko wrote: it's really clear something bad happened on the 30th and the grid still hasn't recovered.

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maybe they sold off half their servers to pay rent on the office building.

so now we have "deploys" until they can afford to buy them back from the pawn shop down the street.

 

[Marcus Hancroft]

I have definitely seen a hard downturn in sales last week.  The week of 4/29 to 5/5 was good, but beginning on 5/6, something big changed.

And I think it's more than the marketplace.  I was trying to do some work on my inworld store (still working on getting it set up) and I couldn't rez ANYTHING.  I kept getting the "Can't rez object...owner doesn't allow it" error.  Of course, I'M the parcel owner, I have rezzing turned on for everybody (with a 5 minute return), plenty of prims, and I always have my store group active.  So I don't know why the system wouldn't let me rez anything.  I could create new prims and they would rez just fine...but the rest...not so much.

 

[Kampu Oyen]

Thanks for mentioning that, Marcus.

I'm not seeing this part of the pattern this time myself, but on all earlier occasions when sales went into a slump, I have noticed either a problem getting things to rez or a problem with getting inventory to open.

It's not difficult for me to imagine that fewer people will want to buy something if they can't open inventory or can't rez anything.

And with the speed at which money moves in SL, even a fraction of people being so affected for some short period of time could produce a bottleneck that slows down the SL econonomy more generally.

[Kylie Jaxxon]

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Marcus Hancroft wrote:

I have definitely seen a hard downturn in sales last week.  The week of 4/29 to 5/5 was good, but beginning on 5/6, something big changed.

And I think it's more than the marketplace.  I was trying to do some work on my inworld store (still working on getting it set up) and I couldn't rez ANYTHING.  I kept getting the "Can't rez object...owner doesn't allow it" error.  Of course, I'M the parcel owner, I have rezzing turned on for everybody (with a 5 minute return), plenty of prims, and I always have my store group active.  So I don't know why the system wouldn't let me rez anything.  I could create new prims and they would rez just fine...but the rest...not so much.

 

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There has been a problem with this for a lot of people, see this thread:

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/General-Discussion/why-cant-i-rezz-objects-in-my-own-home/td-p/1509815

[Spica Inventor]

Very unusual slowdowns in sales seem to be happening alot, but at different times for different peeps. What can we conclude from this? My conspiratorial light bulb is starting to flair up again. It also seems to me that L.L. is (slowly) modifying over time the relevance search result weights in an attempt to keep peeps from noticing it's happening as i've noticed that the real cheap stuff is falling off the first search result page more often now and at the same time more of the very expensive stuff is all bunched together at the top. ;-)

[Blot Brickworks]

Could be this.....................

May 10, 2012

Marketplace was updated today. Please see the Marketplace Release Notes for more details.

My steady sales have tanked since. This weekend has been my worst for 2 years.....................

[mtwtfss71]

And since this 'update', I cannot get into the edit functionality on the Manage Subscriptions page to stop automatic renewal of my featured items. It takes me to a rogue page. I put in a ticket on Friday but luckily, noone works over the weekend to fix things. I'll get charged again for featuring items I don't want to feature.

Anyone else having this issue?

[Spica Inventor]

This is the second weekend in a row where my sales have been sub par. How is everyone elses weekend sales? Could be that we are having global warming as part of it anyway. hehe ;-)

[Kampu Oyen]

The fact that I'm seeing sales up quite a bit is pretty weird.

It makes me think maybe someone it trying to buy off my discontent with less business interference.

If so, nothing doing.

Where the game is rigged, it's unfair to all players, including to those who win.

[Czari Zenovka]

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Flea Yatsenko wrote:

Can you elaborate on that pattern?

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I'll look at the exact dates and post them here either later tonight or tomorrow.  I haven't paid as much attention to the dates as the predictable cycle, but will go have a look. Now you have me curious...lol.

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Flea Yatsenko wrote:

 

So, sales are about half, but people are buying less expensive goods. This is another pattern I've noticed when there's problems with marketplace. People stop buying expensive builder's kits and pre-fabs and opt for smaller items that sell for about L$200.

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Every item in my store is less than 200L, so, at least in my case,  it's not a question of price - although, with word of the MP issues starting to spread amongst residents, people may not want to risk purchasing more expensive items via the MP - although that doesn't explain my fluctuations either.

I was in my shop a few nights ago and was startled when a customer arrived...lol.  Most of my items are sold via the MP; as I've mentioned on the forums previously I've had MP sales but note that the some of the same customers were in my shop but purchased online.

Anyway, I began talking to the customer and told her that my entire line of products were not in my shop and directed her to the MP for the complete listing.  She replied that she preferred shopping in world.  I did not ask her if this was due to the MP issues or just her personal preference, but I found it interesting.