Super String Posted June 28, 2012 Share Posted June 28, 2012 Sassy Romano wrote: SL has slowed up dramatically recently. People just aren't spending money. the world economy is bad, hope it won't last long... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brayla Ravenhurst Posted June 28, 2012 Share Posted June 28, 2012 I concurr that it has to be a combination of summer and the economy. The US economy has been limping for the past 2 years - and the faeces hit the fan on the Eurozone just recently. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Deja Letov Posted June 28, 2012 Share Posted June 28, 2012 I agree, I think it's this total crap shoot on how well your sales are based on how well your sales are! It's total bullcrap that a SEARCH that is supposed to be based on relevance has anything to do with how many sales it's gotten. I have phases that products go through where an item will get sold several times during the week because I've announced it in groups I am, sent it out to my subscriber list, etc but when those buyers have started to die down, then sales go down of course and it falls off the first one or two pages of the search. then sales completely stop altogether because it isn't a purchased item. Even if an item is even more relevant than another similar item, it still comes down in search. I am fairly convinced after watching certain terms, on a daily basis for a month SOLID, that certain merchants are probably buying a copy of their own product once a day, if it's not selling normally, simply to keep it in the top of the search. it's not hard to spot which ones are doing it either. It's not the ones that jump around, it's the ones that are consistently staying on the first page, maybe the second. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Medhue Simoni Posted July 1, 2012 Share Posted July 1, 2012 Personally, I think the search gives views too much weight, cause it seems to me that the same few products stay at the very top, forever!!!! Oh and, of course, we still have the issue of too many freebies and cheap items showing way too high. How I think a good marketplace search should work, for the benefit of all, is a search based on the most profitable and most relevant. Here me out. If a product gets 20 views a day, is high priced, and sells 10 a day, that average is extremely high, and should be ranked high. The profitablity curve would be crazy high. On the contrary, if a product is super cheap, and gets 1000 views a day, but it only sells 20, then the profitablity curve would be low and it should be ranked lower. So, with the combination of views, sales, price and relevance, a proper equalibrium should come about. Of course, there would need to be a limit as to the lowest number of views and sales that qualifies your product to even be eligible. Probably spreading the calculations out to a month to month basis would produce the best results, omitting any product with less that 10 sales per relevant search term, from the equation. Possibly, this would cause issues with search terms that are more obscure, so maybe the search gives the top 20 results irreguardless how many sales, but still ranking them by their profitablity curves. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Josh Susanto Posted July 2, 2012 Share Posted July 2, 2012 I'm occasionally having weird periods of about 12 hours with almost no sales at all, but the more general pattern in my case has been a slow, steady increase in total sales per month since I started selling. I'm happy with this, but I do have to wonder what makes all the sales dry up so quickly when that does happen. When I look for anything specific that might explain it, I don't really find much. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pamela Galli Posted July 2, 2012 Share Posted July 2, 2012 Medhue Simoni wrote: Personally, I think the search gives views too much weight, cause it seems to me that the same few products stay at the very top, forever!!!! Oh and, of course, we still have the issue of too many freebies and cheap items showing way too high. How I think a good marketplace search should work, for the benefit of all, is a search based on the most profitable and most relevant. Here me out. If a product gets 20 views a day, is high priced, and sells 10 a day, that average is extremely high, and should be ranked high. The profitablity curve would be crazy high. On the contrary, if a product is super cheap, and gets 1000 views a day, but it only sells 20, then the profitablity curve would be low and it should be ranked lower. So, with the combination of views, sales, price and relevance, a proper equalibrium should come about. Of course, there would need to be a limit as to the lowest number of views and sales that qualifies your product to even be eligible. Probably spreading the calculations out to a month to month basis would produce the best results, omitting any product with less that 10 sales per relevant search term, from the equation. Possibly, this would cause issues with search terms that are more obscure, so maybe the search gives the top 20 results irreguardless how many sales, but still ranking them by their profitablity curves. Views? Why would they rank according to views? Never occurred to me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Medhue Simoni Posted July 2, 2012 Share Posted July 2, 2012 Seems to me that sales and views drives the search the most, but price and profit are not in the equation at all. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Deja Letov Posted July 2, 2012 Share Posted July 2, 2012 Personally...when i do a search on relevance, I'd like to see results based on...ya know...relevance. That's why there is a drop down to sort by highest ranking, number of prims, price, best selling, etc. If i wanted results based on most views or highest sales, I would use those sorts. When I swearch by relevance, I want to see a list of products that match the words I'm searching for. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Toysoldier Thor Posted July 2, 2012 Author Share Posted July 2, 2012 Deja Letov wrote: Personally...when i do a search on relevance, I'd like to see results based on...ya know...relevance. That's why there is a drop down to sort by highest ranking, number of prims, price, best selling, etc. If i wanted results based on most views or highest sales, I would use those sorts. When I swearch by relevance, I want to see a list of products that match the words I'm searching for. I totally agree and about two years ago when the topic of search in the forums were hotly discussed I did a couple large posts that discussed this issue of how search by RELEVANCE should be exactly that - only by RELEVANCE of what the person is searching for. When a MP customer enters a search request of "red armored underwear", the MP search listings that are show as results should be based on their relevance and ability to match the words in search. Search sort order should be based on the listings that came the closest to the search.... So any listings that has "red armored underwear" as a phrase in all the TITLE, KEYWORDS, DESCRIPTION fields should be given highest search sort rank. Listings that lower sort order ranks from this point down... phrase in title & either keywords / description phrase in title & some of the words in keywords phrase in title & some of the words in the description 2 of the words in title and keywords 2 of the words in title and less or no words in keywords 2 words in keywords and lass or no words in title At least 1 word in title and keywords At least 1 word in Title At least 1 word in Keywords ... ... ... this is search / sort results based on RELEVANCE. Why? because the sort order is 100% based on how well the any of the MP listings matched the customer's requested search. It was not based on which listing had a higher listing price or sold the most or viewed the most - that is NOT RELEVANT to the customer that is looking for any listing that has "RED ENAMORED UNDERWEAR". As Deja said... there are sort order options that allow the customer to change the search order results if they wanted results in an order other than relevance. But this was explained to previous LL Commerce Management in detail and although it didnt fall on deaf ears, the team back then simply deployed a half baked and poorly designed search function to provide search by relevance. So we have what we have now.... and we all know that the current LL Commerce Team does not have the skills to fix search - they still have their hands full trying to still fix all the problems with DD that many of us knew they would struggle with before they deployed DD. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phoebe Avro Posted July 2, 2012 Share Posted July 2, 2012 Toy i think your find the reason for less sales is the fact a lot of creators are cutting back buying sculpts, textures etc to save money! I have only bought one full perm item in the last couple of months, I have an inv full of textures and sculpts i never use as a rule i dont buy textures now i always try to use what i have and mod them or make my own new ones! I have been keeping an eye on traffic at some of the places i go to or know and traffic over all has dropped a lot in the last few months! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Deja Letov Posted July 2, 2012 Share Posted July 2, 2012 Now that June is over and I can get total end of month report on total sales now, I do have to say, I actually experienced an increase over previous months sales, but only a 4% increase. Early in the month I was experiencing a downfall of sales but at the end of the month, it picked up. But again, I believe it is due to new product releases and the marketing of it that I do in world. I am sure once it's not longer "popular" on pages closer to the front, since results are based on sales instead of actual relevance, those numbers will drop again unless I do a new release. mhhh that might be something I might do some more testing on to compare a month with no new releases, compared to if I do one each week. Might have to give that a go! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Medhue Simoni Posted July 2, 2012 Share Posted July 2, 2012 Of course relevance would always be the primary driver of the search. I guess I should have said that. Yeah, I did my totals today for the month, and this was my worst month in years. That said, The last 3 days, have been more than all of last week, not counting Sat. It's pretty strange how all of a sudden sales jumped. SL9B did just end, but other than that, I can't see any other changes. Maybe SL9B drew in more users, but It's only been a few days. Peculating at this point is premature. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Deja Letov Posted July 3, 2012 Share Posted July 3, 2012 Interesting. Did anyone else experience low sales for the month but an increase at the end of the month over the last few days? I've talked to a few in game and they said the same thing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Czari Zenovka Posted July 3, 2012 Share Posted July 3, 2012 Deja Letov wrote: Interesting. Did anyone else experience low sales for the month but an increase at the end of the month over the last few days? I've talked to a few in game and they said the same thing. As I mentioned in a post near the beginning of this thread, my sales for the past month have been the best since DD was deployed. I did do two things that could be contributory: 1. The entire month of June was the Silk Road Hunt in which I participated. This definitely drove a LOT of traffic into my store, but that may or may not result in sales. 2. I've joined several more designer groups very specific to the items I sell and have been posting the hunt and new products in them. I am very pleased to see that I had more in world sales this month than I have all totaled from probably the last year. I'm convinced that the above 2 items have contributed to the in world sales, although I did well in the MP also this month. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Deja Letov Posted July 3, 2012 Share Posted July 3, 2012 Czari Zenovka wrote: Deja Letov wrote: Interesting. Did anyone else experience low sales for the month but an increase at the end of the month over the last few days? I've talked to a few in game and they said the same thing. As I mentioned in a post near the beginning of this thread, my sales for the past month have been the best since DD was deployed. I did do two things that could be contributory: 1. The entire month of June was the Silk Road Hunt in which I participated. This definitely drove a LOT of traffic into my store, but that may or may not result in sales. 2. I've joined several more designer groups very specific to the items I sell and have been posting the hunt and new products in them. I am very pleased to see that I had more in world sales this month than I have all totaled from probably the last year. I'm convinced that the above 2 items have contributed to the in world sales, although I did well in the MP also this month. Totally agree with that! I typically do around 4-6 hunts per month but in June I only did 3 because of some health things I was dealing with and I can tell you my sales felt it. I had 592 in world transactions the previous month and only 348 this month. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Czari Zenovka Posted July 3, 2012 Share Posted July 3, 2012 That's great to know info, Deja. This is actually the first hunt in which I've participated as a merchant and wasn't sure how it would translate sales-wise. I signed up for 2 more hunts - 1 in Aug. and 1 in Sept. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Toysoldier Thor Posted July 4, 2012 Author Share Posted July 4, 2012 OK I took time tonight to chart my sales on a weekly basis from my SL fiscal Year Begin of Sep 1 2011. I placed a few notes in the chart like what my avg weekly sales were prior to Aug 1 2011 when LL did something that majorly shifted down my avg weekly sales from just over $20k L. You can see where DD was officially announced and that I only migrated those of my MP listings that were not my big sellers (my big sellers are still on MB and generally make up about 90% of my weekly sales). I showed the Christmas Holiday season sales collapse which for my items is a normal sales slump period. Then you can see my sales collapse in early June that I was talking about. Seems this week its crawling back. I will also note that I do NO promotional events - havent inworld or MP in over a year. My sales are purely based on what is generated from search and word of mouth. Also, about 70% of my sales happen on MP not inworld. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Josh Susanto Posted July 4, 2012 Share Posted July 4, 2012 >Then you can see my sales collapse in early June that I was talking about. Seems this week its crawling back. Yes, and the same thing happened with available work hours on both my RL jobs in Colombia. Not to completely dismiss what you say, but I think it may be a weak point of focus when added to the larger picture. I think we all know that someone was away from LL for about 60 days, and now that that person has returned, we can all smell it like a fart in a car. Not everything improved while that person was away, but nothing that I know of got worse that couldn't be just as easily explained as seasonal market dynamics. If LL isn't going to premanently remove that person, maybe we could at least be told when that person will be away for a week or more so that we know it's safe to buy listing enhancements. Maybe? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Porky Gorky Posted July 5, 2012 Share Posted July 5, 2012 Is there a set date for when DD wil become madatory and MB's will not longer work? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sassy Romano Posted July 5, 2012 Share Posted July 5, 2012 In a word... NO It was supposed to be 1st August but with a minimum of 4 weeks notice so since we're now inside that window, one must only assume that the cut off is at least always a rolling 4 weeks from the present date. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Porky Gorky Posted July 5, 2012 Share Posted July 5, 2012 Cool, thanks Sassy, I shall continue to adopt my "can't be arsed with it" approach then. :matte-motes-big-grin-evil: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Czari Zenovka Posted July 5, 2012 Share Posted July 5, 2012 Porky Gorky wrote: Cool, thanks Sassy, I shall continue to adopt my "can't be arsed with it" approach then. :matte-motes-big-grin-evil: I like that motto Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Deja Letov Posted July 5, 2012 Share Posted July 5, 2012 Toysoldier Thor wrote: OK I took time tonight to chart my sales on a weekly basis from my SL fiscal Year Begin of Sep 1 2011. I placed a few notes in the chart like what my avg weekly sales were prior to Aug 1 2011 when LL did something that majorly shifted down my avg weekly sales from just over $20k L. You can see where DD was officially announced and that I only migrated those of my MP listings that were not my big sellers (my big sellers are still on MB and generally make up about 90% of my weekly sales). I showed the Christmas Holiday season sales collapse which for my items is a normal sales slump period. Then you can see my sales collapse in early June that I was talking about. Seems this week its crawling back. I will also note that I do NO promotional events - havent inworld or MP in over a year. My sales are purely based on what is generated from search and word of mouth. Also, about 70% of my sales happen on MP not inworld. I don't know Toy...assuming I'm looking at your chart correctly...it doesn't seem like you've take a massive hit, yes you did go down a bit, but to me it looks far worse because of 2 or 3 really good weeks prior to that, but those don't appear to be normal on your chart. Your sales are really all over the place, I see them going up and down constantly. You do have a few spikes, but if you take out those 4 or 5 spikes, it just kinda looks like a gradual wave. I see where you see the massive drop, but that's right after a huge massive spike of sales the previous week from the looks of it. Definitely not your norm. And it looks like it mainly dropped for one week and then starts to climb back up. But you said it yourself, you do no promotions or anything, you just rely on search. That's a big risk and hard to expect consistent sales, because another guy can come along with the same products as you and knock you out with some major promotional activity. I don't mean to discount your complaint at all but I just wonder if relying on pure luck is really grounds to be confused on why sales aren't consistent. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Deja Letov Posted July 5, 2012 Share Posted July 5, 2012 One other thing...did you do any research on competition during those low times Toy? Just curious if in fact that did happen with someone else coming in behind you and selling a similar product. I see you have really good placement right now for a lot of your products. Did you document to see what they were like during those low times to see if it was due to search placement or people just not buying? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chelsea Malibu Posted July 5, 2012 Share Posted July 5, 2012 I'm sorta late to this post but you really can't compare week to week with any sales system, you need to compare that week with the same week a year ago. Online sales for everything across the board decline significantly during the summer which is often called the Summer Slump. I've seen it every year for 6 years now. Also considering that SL is on a decline and attrition rates are increasing, my assumption is that last year will show better than this year and this year will be better than next. Face it, SL sales are not going to ever be what they used to be even with the new mesh builders and such as they too will probably see a decrease next year of this year. It will never be what it used to be. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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