Toysoldier Thor Posted May 16, 2012 Author Share Posted May 16, 2012 Pamela, If I were @Rodvik , I would realize that ALL the content that is ingested into SL and what basically makes SL worth participating in comes from all the creators / merchants. If the source of this stream / distribution channel for all thhis amazing content were to be damaged or even cease to flow, then the natural thinking is that this would speed up the sliding customer interest in participating in SL. Imagine a SL world if there was no content to buy and use. As @Rodvik, I would also know from talking to merchants of SL that selling and getting your products noticed / found inworld has become near impossible. So I would realize the critical value of the SL MARKETPLACE. I would quickly realize that I need to ensure MP not only stays healthy, stable, retain merchants of SL.... I would want to ensure that for the sake of a healthy and attracting SL, the MP needs to be very popular and friendly and useful for both Merchants and Customers. If I as @Rodvik were smart enough to realize all this... a couple things I would put as a top priority in my books and make sure every Sr. Exec at LL knew was: To ensure LL has the most competent and skilled Commerce Team management to be able to lead the effective direction and growth of Marketplace. To ensure ALL LL staff are trained and skilled to communicate with the Merchants and Customers of MP so that LL was completely on top of knowing what is needed with MP. To provide top customer service to both merchants and customers of MP so that MP is a place both sides enjoy working with and trust using. To be 100% sure that any new features and functions development on MP is carried out with all mature aspects of software development, testing, and deployment. This is to make sure there are only minor or no disruptions to this critical MP operation. Since @Rodvik clearly does not have any of what was mentioned above. In fact since @Rodvik does not even seem to be aware how critical MP is to the growth of SL, what @Rodvik should be strongly considering is to outsource the entire MP to a partnering business that has these skills, has the passion/desire to service their customers, and can focus on MP being a priority for them and LL. Its better that LL outsource this work to a skilled motivated team and lose the sales commissions from MP than to lose MP all together from a corrupted, unstable, untrusted service that the current Commerce Team is turning MP into now. Sadly, @Rodvik clearly does not see the value of MP and is fully content to leave this inexperienced Commerce Team drive MP into the ground. I am not sure how a CEO of a small company like LL has such disregard for such a critical aspect of SL. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Flea Yatsenko Posted May 16, 2012 Share Posted May 16, 2012 Honestly, a part of me thinks LL should just close the marketplace the way it is now. They should remove the commerce section of it and change it so that all products have SLURLs to purchase the product in world. How often do you see an in world purchase fail? Hardly ever. It would make the grid start growing again, it would kill off the awful recolored template market, and it would be great for the grid I think. A lot of people use SLMP because it's the best way to find products in SL. In world search is a joke, and if you're looking for specific products, you're screwed. I bet a lot of people don't care how it's delivered, they just want a better way to find things. SLMP provides that, but at the cost of all these reliability issues and problems. In my opinion, the market place is full of keyword spam and irrelevant junk because there's no risk to creating an SLMP store. Merchants should at least be able to afford a small 300 prim parcel with the income they make from a small store. If you can't do that, you're doing something wrong. I have no idea how good of an idea that is, if it's even a good idea. I've just been thinking of a product search engine or something like that for a little bit. If things are broken the best way to fix them is to simplify things until you can get them under control again, and removing the commerce section and creating a web application that focused on finding the best products and providing the best shopping experience seems like the smartest thing to do. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pamela Galli Posted May 16, 2012 Share Posted May 16, 2012 Flea Yatsenko wrote: Honestly, a part of me thinks LL should just close the marketplace the way it is now. They should remove the commerce section of it and change it so that all products have SLURLs to purchase the product in world. How often do you see an in world purchase fail? Hardly ever. It would make the grid start growing again, it would kill off the awful recolored template market, and it would be great for the grid I think. A lot of people use SLMP because it's the best way to find products in SL. In world search is a joke, and if you're looking for specific products, you're screwed. I bet a lot of people don't care how it's delivered, they just want a better way to find things. SLMP provides that, but at the cost of all these reliability issues and problems. In my opinion, the market place is full of keyword spam and irrelevant junk because there's no risk to creating an SLMP store. Merchants should at least be able to afford a small 300 prim parcel with the income they make from a small store. If you can't do that, you're doing something wrong. I have no idea how good of an idea that is, if it's even a good idea. I've just been thinking of a product search engine or something like that for a little bit. If things are broken the best way to fix them is to simplify things until you can get them under control again, and removing the commerce section and creating a web application that focused on finding the best products and providing the best shopping experience seems like the smartest thing to do. Well LL could not get their cut unless they started taking a cut of inworld sales. As far as merchants having to invest even 4 cents in their marketplace stores, the very suggestion has caused some to publicly disembowel themselves. In RL. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mtwtfss71 Posted May 16, 2012 Share Posted May 16, 2012 Tweeted @rodvik I asked him when we can expect an official update on the MP for merchants as DD deadline looms. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Super String Posted May 16, 2012 Share Posted May 16, 2012 Toy, I still think merchants need an out-world platform/association like real life Labor Union, at least this kind of union is the only workable way how RL workers can deal with unfair treatment and government disability in human history. If we can't find an effective way to focus our energies and appeals, nothing will be solved in the end. We need our own SL Merchants Union. We deserve our own labor union. Maybe it will take a little more time to establish this union and recruit enough merchants, but as long as quite enough merchants join us, this union can be representative for SL merchants, and then merchants can speak loudly and effectively and finally ask the company to be responsive to all kinds of problems. As long as we have such an union, even if someday some merchants really need to sue this company for any reason, they can sue the company collectively and share the lawsuit fee altogether. It's very important that we should use a public out-world platform such as Facebook instead of an inworld group. Because that even though LL tends to ignore complaints from residents, it does care its own public reputations in RL. Only when our union and voices exist in a public platform, the company itself (its reputation and public image) is really involved with (and threaten by) those inworld issues. In this situation, Facebook is a pretty ideal platform for us, it's free and easily accessible and very public... (don't forget even the SL CEO himself choses only to use out-world platforms to response inworld issues) Besides, in order to aviod this union being overloaded at work, we can consider to still use this forum here for discussing daily ordinay issues, and use the SL Merchants Union for only dealing with serious issues, important notifications, and votes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dartagan Shepherd Posted May 16, 2012 Share Posted May 16, 2012 WADE1 Jya wrote: Kampu Oyen wrote: Maybe by the time they've finally "upgraded" to an all-text format, they'll also finally have purged their user pool of any cynical naysayers who still think that simply committing more processor rescources might have been a better direction to go in from the start. LOL Rodvik so happens to be a huge fan of alltext games so this potentially is a real item on the itinerary. Very cost effective for Linden Lab - its a true win-win. Only trick might be making it look like residents asked for it :matte-motes-confused: Getting people to cough up $300 USD a month for alltext 'sims' might prove tricky as well :catlol: Reduced once again to: heh. I was charging $200 a month for hosting for text games/worlds. Of course for that price you could build as many games/worlds as you wanted to, because that bought you a dedicated machine with root access. People had full control over what they did with their own accounts and resources. We worked on one engine that patched into VRML, so basically it was an early version of SL. You could create a 3D virtual world, a game or an educational or simulation environment with it. Admins and players created their own goods, homes, etc. It had two scripting languages, hundreds more functions than LSL, was more lightweight and it could run on old Pentium servers. Tossed in a C parser so you could write in C syntax if that was your thing, rather than the stack based scripting language. Including a custom client, it took 7 guys less than a year to do. For free as a hobby. And this in the mid 1990's. Odd timing, started a new blog recently and I'll be interviewing some of the folks I worked with over the years on the retro stuff this week, and general history of that era in a series of ongoing "then and now" articles on game dev. But right, even in the interactive fiction/text game department, LL are amateurs. It wouldn't be much better than now as an experience and it certainly wouldn't be as rich, complex or adaptable work that was done in the 80's and 90's. Let's just see if they can handle a shopping cart for 5% commission while they cripple the world with land impact and region idling for $200-300/month. In the end it all comes down to value for dollar and quality of product, which seems to continually elude their overly monetized minds. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gavin Hird Posted May 16, 2012 Share Posted May 16, 2012 > in fact since @Rodvik does not even seem to be aware how critical MP is to the growth of SL Here is a novel thought: What if the MP is not critical to the growth of SL at all? For one, it drives in-world participation down and erodes tier payment from merchants and creators. If they develop client for mobile devices (which they have said they do), there might be other mechanisms like in-app purchases (not the same as in-world purchases) that is driving their direction, and the current MP is just a transitional tool in which they don't want to invest too much in. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lasher Oh Posted May 16, 2012 Share Posted May 16, 2012 "They should remove the commerce section of it and change it so that all products have SLURLs to purchase the product in world" Surely that would cripple quite a few sims belonging to or rented by high selling merchants. With Sims barely able to carry more than 30 people at a time shopping in world would more than likely become a real nightmare at some places. Law of unintended consequences would no doubt kick in. The problems started when LL got greedy and bought out Xstreet and On Rez both 3rd party very well run operations, and then decided to try and integrate the shopping experience with their unbelieveably bad viewer. They functioned very well relied on drop boxes that hardly ever failed and did not dramatically hurt in world shopping the way the current marketplace has. I'd love to see the marketplace sold back to a third party operator but I also agree with what Pam said earlier, another round of relisting and migratiions would do me in. But who knows what other nasty surprises the commerce team are dreaming up for us right now. ^L^ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rival Destiny Posted May 16, 2012 Share Posted May 16, 2012 ...kk, what DD Deadline?? I thought all deadllines were on hold. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Czari Zenovka Posted May 16, 2012 Share Posted May 16, 2012 Lasher Oh wrote: Or perhaps sell it back to the original owners who knew how to run a marketplace facility ! ^L^ I'd love this!!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Toysoldier Thor Posted May 16, 2012 Author Share Posted May 16, 2012 Rival Destiny wrote: ...kk, what DD Deadline?? I thought all deadllines were on hold. I think he meant MB Deadline. The commerce team stated a while back that due to all the problems they were encountering with the DD deployment that they would push back the MB retirement deadline. I believe they mentioned that the new deadline was in June but I also understood that this was not cast in stone either. But since LL is so fearful of communicating to the Merchants that they cannot even provide a quick weekly blog of all that is happening or even a rare blog that updates all us merchants on the status of the MB deadline... all we can do is guess and wait for them to come down from the mountain to suprprise us on a date. The Commerce Team has a habbit of very short deadlines after announcements so it wouldnt be surprising that they post a blog one day and say "MB will now be retired and please be off it in 2 weeks" I would like to know what the current % of listings in MP are still on MB and not DD. I know my 6 top sellers are not migrated over but my 42~ other listings are all migrated over. Lets guess that about 40% of all listings are still on MB. Lets say that even if LL announces a drop dead date of JUN 30 for MB to be shut down and that 25% of all listings on that date are still on MB.... Do you all think LL would have the nerve and smarts and guts to shut down MB and destroy 25% of all MP's listings? LL has proven by their actions to often not be the sharpest tool in the shed but I cant believe even they would destroy 25% of all MP listings simply because they set an arbitrary deadline to retire a delivery system that in all honesty is not negatively impacting their operations by running. It hurts no one that MB continues to run. So do you really think LL would be that stupid to wipe 25% of listings?? What are your thoughts. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Toysoldier Thor Posted May 16, 2012 Author Share Posted May 16, 2012 Gavin Hird wrote: > in fact since @Rodvik does not even seem to be aware how critical MP is to the growth of SL Here is a novel thought: What if the MP is not critical to the growth of SL at all? For one, it drives in-world participation down and erodes tier payment from merchants and creators. If they develop client for mobile devices (which they have said they do), there might be other mechanisms like in-app purchases (not the same as in-world purchases) that is driving their direction, and the current MP is just a transitional tool in which they don't want to invest too much in. Although your points are valid Gavin and MP has been one of the biggest factors (along with the Midnight Mania marketing tools fad) to devastate both the inworld economy as well as content value deflation, the problem is that LL has long since opened this door and let MP loose on the SL economy. Putting the dragon back into the cave now would likely not rejuvenate the inworld economy - it would likely further devastate the ecommerce in SL. I know that MP makes up over 70% of all my sales in SL. It does this because MP's advantage over inworld sales/distribution for a merchant is product search. Inworld search is a complete mess and was not designed to effectively search for actual MERCHANT PRODUCTS. Since every rezzed prim in SL can be marked as make searchable, the search results we complain about in MP is still a BMW in class of search function for merchants compared to the tricycle classed search inworld for merchant products. I would likely shut down my inworld store if MP or any other 3rd party web merchant site for SL would to be removed from SL. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ann Otoole Posted May 16, 2012 Share Posted May 16, 2012 I have about half of mine migrated. I found out the nested folders don't work very well so I have a lot of things that will just have to be box delivered. I suppose that makes it easier. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gavin Hird Posted May 16, 2012 Share Posted May 16, 2012 I don't suggest that they would shut down the marketplace as we know it anytime soon. I am only suggesting that their development efforts are channeled into supporting a different market (and clients) still in development. The culprit for the current state of affairs is that they don't see the merchants and content creators as partners. They are hardly seen as stakeholders at all, hence they don't need to be consulted nor informed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Spica Inventor Posted May 16, 2012 Share Posted May 16, 2012 "A lot of people use SLMP because it's the best way to find products in SL." Actually the full reason is this.... A lot of people use SLMP because it's the best way to find products in SL much faster and much less expensive. It caters to those not making six figure salaries in the real world. All reasons why LL thinks their profit margins are suffering when the opposite is the case of course in the medium and longer term. ;-) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Spica Inventor Posted May 16, 2012 Share Posted May 16, 2012 So do you really think LL would be that stupid to wipe 25% of listings?? Increasingly, yes I do. hehe Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Spica Inventor Posted May 16, 2012 Share Posted May 16, 2012 hehe love your ideas. :-D Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mtwtfss71 Posted May 16, 2012 Share Posted May 16, 2012 Toysoldier Thor wrote: Rival Destiny wrote: ...kk, what DD Deadline?? I thought all deadllines were on hold. I think he meant MB Deadline. The commerce team stated a while back that due to all the problems they were encountering with the DD deployment that they would push back the MB retirement deadline. I believe they mentioned that the new deadline was in June but I also understood that this was not cast in stone either. Here is the last known update about migration from the Commerce Team: Update (March 31, 2012): While we work to address current Marketplace issues, we will not require any Merchants to migrate listings away from Magic Boxes to Direct Delivery before June 1, 2012. So, does that mean June 1st is the deadline? That's how I read it until told otherwise. Oh, and 'He' is a 'She', Toy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Josh Susanto Posted May 16, 2012 Share Posted May 16, 2012 >Here is a novel thought: >What if the MP is not critical to the growth of SL at all? For one, it drives in-world participation down and erodes tier payment from merchants and creators. Yeah, that's way novel. I wonder why no one ever mentioned that before. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Josh Susanto Posted May 16, 2012 Share Posted May 16, 2012 >So do you really think LL would be that stupid to wipe 25% of listings?? They have already said that they will. They just haven't been explicit about it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ann Otoole Posted May 16, 2012 Share Posted May 16, 2012 people are trying to start a rumor that SLM is being shut down. fun times. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Czari Zenovka Posted May 16, 2012 Share Posted May 16, 2012 Toysoldier Thor wrote: The Commerce Team has a habbit of very short deadlines after announcements so it wouldnt be surprising that they post a blog one day and say "MB will now be retired and please be off it in 2 weeks" I would like to know what the current % of listings in MP are still on MB and not DD. I know my 6 top sellers are not migrated over but my 42~ other listings are all migrated over. Lets guess that about 40% of all listings are still on MB. Lets say that even if LL announces a drop dead date of JUN 30 for MB to be shut down and that 25% of all listings on that date are still on MB.... Do you all think LL would have the nerve and smarts and guts to shut down MB and destroy 25% of all MP's listings? LL has proven by their actions to often not be the sharpest tool in the shed but I cant believe even they would destroy 25% of all MP listings simply because they set an arbitrary deadline to retire a delivery system that in all honesty is not negatively impacting their operations by running. It hurts no one that MB continues to run. So do you really think LL would be that stupid to wipe 25% of listings?? What are your thoughts. Based on my past experience, I could honestly believe that LL would give a "2 week notice" (if that much) that they were shutting off MBs, even if it affects 25% of the merchant listings. My reasoning is two-fold: 1. LL seems to have this "attitude" that once they announce something, even something that didn't pan out as expected, residents don't like it, complaints and jiras come flooding in, etc., they are still too tunnel-visioned or maybe just plain arrogant to back down. 2. As long as the 25% (or whatever percentage) of merchants not migrated over to DD are not in their cadre of favorite top-producing merchants (whoever they may be), they could care less about the small - medium merchants or probably, for that matter, large businesses that are not in their "group." IMO this has been amply demonstrated by the total lack of concern or communication to the merchant community by LL these past two months. As for me, I'm still using my MB and when/if they are shut down *shrugs* - not sure yet. I may just concentrate solely on my in world store. I'm definitely not going to rush to migrate over regardless what happens. If the whole thing gets to be a major cluster in general, I'll quit selling, create as I choose, give away or donate items to charity, events, etc. Just depends. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Josh Susanto Posted May 16, 2012 Share Posted May 16, 2012 >people are trying to start a rumor that SLM is being shut down. It's not a rumor. It's a behavioral projection based on the established trends. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WADE1 Jya Posted May 17, 2012 Share Posted May 17, 2012 Gavin hits the crux of the matter. Nobody wants rumor marketplace is shutting down, its just what we think is most likely to happen next. Trends are easy to predict. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ann Otoole Posted May 17, 2012 Share Posted May 17, 2012 I am getting sales on things that have never ever sold on SLM. After I converted them to DD. Interesting eh? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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