Last month was weird, how is this month?

[Deja Letov]

I know a lot of us had a weird month last month. Many of us were rather dead at the start of the month, for at least a couple of weeks some reported marketplace sales dropped in a huge way. I experienced a slight downturn myself and then it picked back up towards the end of the month. So just curious, have sales gone back up for you in the new month? not just marketplace either, but how are your in world sales compared to last month? mine all seem to be back on track for the month of July, so I'm hoping that's a good sign for all!

[Czari Zenovka]

Last month wasn't as bad for me as others have reported.  For me, I sold a bit less this month, with the same cycle of a few good sales days, then nothing for several days.

[Niall Braveheart]

Been an odd month for me but kind of in a good way ....

I usually only get 2-3 sales a week, but this month one of my items sold daily for the first 15 days, but since the 15th of the month I've only had 2 sales in total!!

The product hat sold well is a welcome sign/greeter so can't really put the sudden popularity down to it being a seasonable item.

[Toysoldier Thor]

Still not Great Deja.  In fact I am still having days where I am making ZERO sales on MP. I get the occassional spike of sales for a day but usually because one customer went on a buying spree.

Ever since early June it has been BLAH !

I sure do hope its just an unsual business cycle that I havent seen in previous years for this time of year.

But now my head is down overhauling my new combined Store / Gallery so my sales are what they are,

[Dora Gustafson]

How June looked to me. It shows value so sale of free items doesn't show.
The day to day value is very unpredectable, but that is how it has always been.
Sometimes I worry when sales are down but june was not too bad though below June 2010 and June 2011
I have nothing to say about July until it is over.

The chart does not include inworld transactions

[Deja Letov]

---

Toysoldier Thor wrote:

Still not Great Deja.  In fact I am still having days where I am making ZERO sales on MP. I get the occassional spike of sales for a day but usually because one customer went on a buying spree.

Ever since early June it has been BLAH !

I sure do hope its just an unsual business cycle that I havent seen in previous years for this time of year.

But now my head is down overhauling my new combined Store / Gallery so my sales are what they are,

---

That's so strange Toy, i'm sorry you're having to deal with that. I hope more people do report in on this because you as an individual seem to be affected by it quite a bit while others dont. Makes me wonder...why? I've even looked through some of your products, I'm assuming your terrain packs are your best selling? The only thing I can see is that there is a lot of competition for them. However, I still found your products fairly early in the list, page 1 with 48 items per page pagination. So then it begs the question of are people in need of your product at the moment? Or is the decrease in terrain sculpts possibly due to a decreased amount of people getting their own land which means less people building something that would require terrains, or what about all the people leaving SL, and they are no longer needing those items as well. by the looks of it, terrain packs and art seems to be the what the bulk of your store is and it may just be because you are creating such a niche product, could the sales  be tapering off due to that? Are you noticing a difference in your inworld sales?

[Toysoldier Thor]

Thanks Deja for the insights.  I am not 100% sure why I noticed a sudden drop in early June and for the most part it has stayed low.  Could be the weather.  Could be an instant customer wide realization that I have competitors that I have always had.  Could be that Everyone decided that buying Sculpties now is outdated even though mesh is not great for large landscape terrains.  could just be a quiet cycle.

My inworld sales have ALWAYS been the minor part of my overall sales - about 20%.  As such I can go days some times without an inworld sale.  So I cant really use that as an example.  Also, you are correct that my 6 Landscape terrain sculpty packs of all my items in MP make up about 90% of all my sales.  My art sales are not even really sales - since typically in SL art is not something that anyone will get rich on.

In SL there is generally an impression that Art in SL is nothing more than another pretty texture.  As such, the vast majority of SL residents cant justify why they would pay 495 or even over 1000 L for a pretty texture.  As such, Art is typically sold to a VERY SMALL % of the SL population - those that really do appreciate the art for being ART and not just a very expensive texture.

Sadly there is also a lot of art in SL that is simply stolen as some SL residents actuall come to art galleries and take inworld snapshots of the art and make them into textures for themselves or they just take an illegal copy of it from flickr and bring it inworld.

So... I do not have an art gallery for the prime purpose of making me rich in sl.  I love showing my art off in SL and if ppl want to buy some of my art - great!  I sell my art RL on my RL art website.

[Josh Susanto]

In my own case, the general trend was a continuing increase in revenues.

But some days were so wildly inconsistent (the bad kind of inconsistent) that I should stop short of leaving anyone with the impression that I consider there to have been no kind of problem. 

On dismally slow sales days I was still selling a normal number of freebies, so it's easy to interpret the data as saying that whatever was producing lower total revenues was a matter of user behavior and had nothing to do with LL.

That could be correct, but it does seem like some long periods during which people all around the world spontaneously agreed only to buy freebies. Such a uniform response would seem unlikely in the absence of any kind of uniform stimulus.

What seem less unlikely are 2 possibilities which are not necessarily mutually exclusive:

1) That bad delivery rates were enough to discourage people from paying for things, but not enough to discourage people from ordering things at no risk.

2) That some number of sales, not to include freebies, simply did not show. Whether anything was paid or anything delivered are 2 other questions, but I guess you can imagine what I would expect. That there would be nothing for anyone to gain by making freebie orders invisible would seem to explain why they were allowed to show. At least continuing freebie orders could be pointed to as evidence that the system was still working, in order to slow down any administrative process that might have to lead to anything like a timely investigation of the perceived problem. 

 

[Josh Susanto]

Nice graph!

Please note the sudden dry-up of (visible) orders just as CTL suddenly starts posting again. 

Do you have graphs for the 2 preceding months?

How do I know that they'll show an abrupt increase in visible orders right after CTL makes her last April communication?

[Toysoldier Thor]

OK!!!

I just realized why my MP sales have sunk in that past week at least.   GRRR !!

I just got a message from a customer that said he order product and he got a failed delivery on one of my packs.  I went in to MP Transaction History and my jaw dropped when I noticed that since July 20th I have getting a rash of Delivery Failures!

Prior to the past week I amost NEVER get delivery failures.  Since the 20th I hve had 9 delivery failures - mostly on my sculpty packs (my big ticket items).  And they of course are my MB.

GRRRRr

 

[Toysoldier Thor]

So it seems sometime around July 20th, LL somehow tried to force my MB items to become DD listings.  It failed and I had DD listings with no asset item tied to it and my MB listings were orphaned.  I have lost about $8K in sales this past week from all these failed deliveries!

So much for advanced notice of MBs being abandoned.

[Darrius Gothly]

HOLY #^$#%@!!! Are you sure Toy? Were your MP listings set with no Associated Item and marked as "Direct" on the Manage Listings page? Are ALL your listings set for "Direct"?

WTF is up with that?!?

[Toysoldier Thor]

i created another thread that explains it all......

My MB listings were all switched to DD on July 22 (maybe a lil ealry as i can only see the first time my MB sales ll started failing).  When i came onto my inventory i saw my MB listings where set to DD even though i didnt do that AND i obviously had none of the items uploaded to MP (since i had no plans to convert them).

I was forced to convert them to make them work.

[Deja Letov]

---

Toysoldier Thor wrote:

OK!!!

I just realized why my MP sales have sunk in that past week at least.   GRRR !!

I just got a message from a customer that said he order product and he got a failed delivery on one of my packs.  I went in to MP Transaction History and my jaw dropped when I noticed that since July 20th I have getting a rash of Delivery Failures!

Prior to the past week I amost NEVER get delivery failures.  Since the 20th I hve had 9 delivery failures - mostly on my sculpty packs (my big ticket items).  And they of course are my MB.

GRRRRr

 

---

I just saw this on another thread. That sucks! Totally unfair to do. I know some think of SL as a game but for a lot of merchants if the sales don't come in we would be out REAL money. I'd say hit em with a massive complaint...but we all know how well that helps things.   I'll be hoping for some better luck for you in the coming months friend.

[Deja Letov]

---

Josh Susanto wrote:

Nice graph!

Please note the sudden dry-up of (visible) orders just as CTL suddenly starts posting again. 

Do you have graphs for the 2 preceding months?

How do I know that they'll show an abrupt increase in visible orders right after CTL makes her last April communication?

---

Hey Josh...Ill post mine, I don't know what the actual dates are that you are comparing to. What dates exactly are they? Here is mine for June and July. I'll post my April as well since you mentioned that one too. I can say that most of my spikes for high sales days are weekends, if you follow the waves, which is pretty normal for me. June definitely had less waves but that's because for most of the month sales were not fantastic.

 

[Josh Susanto]

These actually don't look all that different, but I don't want to cherry-pick people's graphs in order to make my point, so if I am eventually able to produce an aggregate graph of some kind, I'll be sure to include your data. 

I may be confused about the precise dates when CTL was gone.

Can anyone help me figure that out?

 

[Josh Susanto]

I'm seeing the appearance of messages "Linden Lab" starting on 20 May.

That's essentially the point at which I would like to know whether there was an upward or downward sales trend.

 

[Dora Gustafson]

Just like Deja I am puzzled about your intentions and I am dying to learn what the abbreviation CTL is in this context.
If it makes sense I will consider to reveal my charts for April and May too.

[Josh Susanto]

Obviously I'm not doing a good job of digging through the thousands of messages, sorry.

But I think you all know that the person identifying as CTL was gone for some period of time, based on what was posted.

I also believe that there was an improvement in marketplace function during that time.

Of course, that's splitting hairs.

If everyone will just post their sales figures for as far back as they can go, I expect I'll have no problem showing that total sales are substantially higher on days when CTL does not post anything, which is the more important total pattern.

 

[Josh Susanto]

Does anyone else get the impression that some dates have been changed and messages reattributed?

 

[Flea Yatsenko]

Whoever is noticing this pattern, please correlate it with the activity in WEB-4587. I have noticed that the more active that JIRA is, the worse sales performance is. For example, the week before this one was pretty good. This week, the JIRA has been busy, Toy Solider  experienced what I assume is another database corruption (which happens to be in an area we've never seen it happen in before), and my sales have been bad.

I feel that there is something fundamentally wrong with the SLMP software stack, and these patterns are affecting the sales of merchants rather heavily.

There may be other bugs which correlate to bad sales. The pattern I've noticed (sorry, I don't feel like making graphs and digging through data to show it) is that the longer sales are good, the longer sales will be bad. After the WEB-4587 emails stop, sales slowly pick up until they crash and WEB 4587 becomes active again.

And by the way, I feel the reason that it affects some people and not others is that there are several different servers running different people's stores and that some have issues while other do not.

[Dora Gustafson]

Are you saying that someone is illegally redirecting some of the marketplace money stream to his own pocket?
That sounds like a serious crime to me.
Give me an hour and I will supply my marketplace sale for April, May and June.

[Dora Gustafson]

The promised charts and some more:

 The figures for easier analyzing

Date               Value L$
2012-01-01    2
2012-01-02    899
2012-01-03    1300
2012-01-04    0
2012-01-05    100
2012-01-06    1299
2012-01-07    160
2012-01-08    998
2012-01-09    850
2012-01-10    1878
2012-01-11    499
2012-01-12    1280
2012-01-13    1499
2012-01-14    798
2012-01-15    1200
2012-01-16    799
2012-01-17    0
2012-01-18    180
2012-01-19    659
2012-01-20    2899
2012-01-21    1000
2012-01-22    2076
2012-01-23    800
2012-01-24    1999
2012-01-25    1707
2012-01-26    1378
2012-01-27    1459
2012-01-28    1097
2012-01-29    998
2012-01-30    0
2012-01-31    199
2012-02-01    599
2012-02-02    1380
2012-02-03    100
2012-02-04    498
2012-02-05    678
2012-02-06    0
2012-02-07    0
2012-02-08    1898
2012-02-09    549
2012-02-10    1280
2012-02-11    1379
2012-02-12    1598
2012-02-13    1200
2012-02-14    2400
2012-02-15    300
2012-02-16    1201
2012-02-17    180
2012-02-18    0
2012-02-19    1200
2012-02-20    499
2012-02-21    1399
2012-02-22    0
2012-02-23    1250
2012-02-24    150
2012-02-25    149
2012-02-26    1898
2012-02-27    998
2012-02-28    579
2012-02-29    499
2012-03-01    800
2012-03-02    0
2012-03-03    800
2012-03-04    499
2012-03-05    1749
2012-03-06    0
2012-03-07    100
2012-03-08    450
2012-03-09    2000
2012-03-10    0
2012-03-11    2899
2012-03-12    2198
2012-03-13    699
2012-03-14    800
2012-03-15    2198
2012-03-16    1479
2012-03-17    1197
2012-03-18    1898
2012-03-19    2446
2012-03-20    200
2012-03-21    2298
2012-03-22    0
2012-03-23    0
2012-03-24    1760
2012-03-25    549
2012-03-26    199
2012-03-27    698
2012-03-28    100
2012-03-29    1000
2012-03-30    100
2012-04-01    579
2012-04-02    1788
2012-04-03    1779
2012-04-04    2496
2012-04-05    2000
2012-04-06    399
2012-04-07    2178
2012-04-08    1078
2012-04-09    0
2012-04-10    1699
2012-04-11    100
2012-04-12    499
2012-04-13    280
2012-04-14    249
2012-04-15    0
2012-04-16    100
2012-04-17    800
2012-04-18    2634
2012-04-19    0
2012-04-20    798
2012-04-21    998
2012-04-22    0
2012-04-23    1798
2012-04-24    1200
2012-04-25    0
2012-04-26    2697
2012-04-27    1697
2012-04-28    1497
2012-04-29    499
2012-04-30    0
2012-05-01    0
2012-05-02    398
2012-05-03    499
2012-05-04    2629
2012-05-05    499
2012-05-06    649
2012-05-07    1699
2012-05-08    998
2012-05-09    499
2012-05-10    0
2012-05-11    0
2012-05-12    499
2012-05-13    1699
2012-05-14    2899
2012-05-15    100
2012-05-16    899
2012-05-17    998
2012-05-18    0
2012-05-19    199
2012-05-20    0
2012-05-21    1349
2012-05-22    99
2012-05-23    499
2012-05-24    800
2012-05-25    1699
2012-05-26    100
2012-05-27    199
2012-05-28    0
2012-05-29    80
2012-05-30    2198
2012-05-31    1700
2012-06-01    800
2012-06-02    1699
2012-06-03    50
2012-06-04    1300
2012-06-05    1799
2012-06-06    1200
2012-06-07    199
2012-06-08    499
2012-06-09    199
2012-06-10    2899
2012-06-11    800
2012-06-12    499
2012-06-13    1599
2012-06-14    799
2012-06-15    0
2012-06-16    0
2012-06-17    1298
2012-06-18    0
2012-06-19    0
2012-06-20    0
2012-06-21    1500
2012-06-22    1699
2012-06-23    0
2012-06-24    0
2012-06-25    1097
2012-06-26    499
2012-06-27    0
2012-06-28    1599
2012-06-29    0
2012-06-30    1400

 

[Czari Zenovka]

---

Flea Yatsenko wrote:

 

And by the way, I feel the reason that it affects some people and not others is that there are several different servers running different people's stores and that some have issues while other do not.

---

Now that's interesting...I never thought of that possibility.

[Josh Susanto]

>Are you saying that someone is illegally redirecting some of the marketplace money stream to his own pocket?
That sounds like a serious crime to me.

I would be a serious crime if the TOS didn't define what is being stolen as licensed intellectual property ultimately to be regulated (or unregulated) in completely arbitrary ways by LL. 

It's sort of like a casino employee sneaking poker chips away from you, except, in this case, when you report it to the state gaming commission, it turns out that the casino actually belongs to the state, and that they already know and they already don't care.