Product Categories! We Need More!

[Medhue Simoni]

Ok, I just did a good run thru of a bunch of categories. Of course, I would only do this because I'm seeing issues with sales and trying to figure out what the issues are. Right off the bat, some of the issues are totally obvious. I asked, well over a year ago, for a female and male category under Animations/Animation Overides. Now, although this category is not as flooded with products as others, it is greatly needed, yet we can't even get that. I also noticed that as I start searching thru the different options like price and other options, I see that many people just put things where ever. So, I go to flag a few for being in the wrong categories, and there is no option to flag a product for this. WTF! But.... we do have a flag option for "Infringes on My IP rights". Why the hell is that even in there. We have a process for this called a DMCA.

Who the heck is running this Marketplace, cause it looks like a total mess to me?

Back on topic - Now, I goto the main page. OMG! Has any1 looked at how many total products there are? It is completely crazy how fast products are being added. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but if the site only has this limited amount of categories, the total amount will easily overwhelm any1, and cause complete instability in the markets. LL needs to have a fulltime person constantly creating new categories. As I just when thru some of the largest, outside of clothing apparel, it is obvious that the Marketplace needs more. I say outside of apparel, cause they seem to have quite a few categories, not that they couldn't have more. Again tho, I'd like to point out that animation is not 1 of those that is flooded, but that's where I started looking, as I'm in that market, and we need many more.

Let's just take a look at some that are totally and completely flooded, just to give a few examples that should show what I mean, too the extreme. Oh, and this is me just looking at categories with large amounts in them. It doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out that they need more categories, as you will see.

 

Home and Garden/Living Room Furniture - 25,109 items

I'm not an interior designer, but I can think of half a dozen categories to put under Living Room Furniture.

 

Building Components/Structures/Residential Structures - 26,474 items

There are 2 categories underneath this but the bulk of the items are not in either. Any1 ever heard of a Treehouse, or how about a shed, what about a garage? I could go on and on.

 

Recreational and Entertainment/Food and Drinks - 10,938 items

Do I even need to ask why Food and Drinks are 1 category? I think we all understand there are many types of both foods and drinks.

 

Vehicle/Ground Vehicles/Cars and Trucks - 5,214 items

Again, shouldn't each be it's own category, at the very least?

 

These are just a few that I pulled out just by looking at the numbers. And.... they are totally obvious. Yeah, we have a word search but we all know how keywords are abused. Having all these items in such broad categories not only hurts the merchants that sell them, but also LL. How does it hurt LL? By all the categories that they are losing out on the Listing Enhancements for. Worst of all tho, it hurts the customers by having to dig through thousands of products.

Considering that the Marketplace is the main way that customer find items, I would think LL would take the site more seriously and hire the appropriate amount of staff to cover the issues related to it. I'm sure that merchants actually in the many saturated categories will be able to point out more glaringly obvious category problems. Adding categories in a marketplace that grows by the thousands daily, is not a "We'll add them when we have the time" kind of situation or job, it's a full time deal, IMHO. LL should have a staff member talking with us daily, in the forums, about categories. Just the gain in Listing Enhancements alone, would pay for the job position.

 

[VonGklugelstein Alter]

Textures also has some holes in it.

 

The main ones missing are:

Roof Textures

Door Textures

[Tiffy Vella]

Imagine having animations sorted at least into still poses, pose props, moving animations and gestures. Even this would help enormously.

[phaedra Exonar]

There was a good post about this about 2 months ago LL actually seam to be reading and taking advice and reacting to comments from the post It was actually looking hopeful that LL was changing some of there ways, but then all most complete silence form them again... 

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Merchants/Next-Marketplace-Banner-and-New-Categories/td-p/1539595

I think one of the problems is that the whole list of categories needs to be redone. One of the most requested changes was to move houses and other complete building out of Building Components.  I can't find it ATM but there is all so a JIRA for suggesting new category names.

Some of the sub categories are silly to, why have to click to get to a sub category with only 2 category's in it when then could have just been listed in the main category in the first place.

Some of the changes that LL made all so showed a disconnect to how people use SL they added the sub categories for multi family building and single family houses to residential structures.  I would think that shoppers in SL would be more likely to need to know the size of the foot print more then the family size of the building. For building and other large land structures, a filter for size might be better then more sub categories or in addition to more categories.

I don't think there's much of a chance of anything getting done with this until DD is finally working.

I'd all so like to see communities as categories that would be able to have Listing Enhancements, it would be a much more direct type of marketing for those markets.  

 

 

[Darrius Gothly]

Once they create new categories, they need to let people know so they can move their products. However, even moving a small number of products is a MAJOR pain. What's needed is a web-based drag-n-drop utility that can be run via any web browser and allows you to rapidly select as many products as desired then drag them into a new Category. It could even be run from "the back side" (LL's staff) to do the same thing only it would send out emails to Merchants informing them their products have been moved to a new category.

But until someone creates that utility ... making new categories won't have much effect. Even though the new categories are there, you still need to get people to move their products into them and with the interface we have now? OUCH!!!

[Medhue Simoni]

IDK, when I asked for a male and female AO category, over a year ago, I check to see if it happened once a week or so, as I was told by a Linden it was a good suggestion. I shouldn't even need to ask, as it is so obvious. People are always looking for ways to improve their position. Plus, we would talk about the new categories here, and LL should announce them here.

I really like your idea of a drag and drog tho. We do see this everywhere now. I even have this on my own marketplace site.

[Medhue Simoni]

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VonGklugelstein Alter wrote:

Textures also has some holes in it.

 

The main ones missing are:

Roof Textures

Door Textures

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Yeah, I was going to put textures as an example. Don't know why I did not.

[Medhue Simoni]

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Tiffy Vella wrote:

Imagine having animations sorted

at least

into still poses, pose props, moving animations and gestures. Even this would help enormously.

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Yeah, I can think of dozens of animation categories. LL likes the jiras tho, and that's just a sinkhole to me. Conversations about this stuff should happen right here in the forum, IMHO.

[Medhue Simoni]

I think the MP staff is just way too small to handle even the basic stuff.

[Spica Inventor]

"I think the MP staff is just way too small to handle even the basic stuff."

More like laziness, complacency, but especially control freakiness. hehe ;-)

Out of some 140 employees it should require only one of them to keep up with and refine the search category formats in a logical manner as a part time job.

[Josh Susanto]

Of course they could do that.

But not doing it provides a distraction for merchants who might otherwise continue to focus on the continuing failure to address "showstopper" JIRAs.

Keeping a few easy-fix problems handy is probably allowing someone to keep her job by letting her show immediate progress any time there's a whiff of anybody possibly being held accountable for anything. 

[Darrius Gothly]

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Spica Inventor wrote:

"I think the MP staff is just way too small to handle even the basic stuff."

More like laziness, complacency, but especially control freakiness. hehe ;-)

Out of some 140 employees it should require only one of them to keep up with and refine the search category formats in a logical manner as a part time job.

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Give it to Dakota. There are very few if any Lindens that know the Marketplace as well as Dakota. And I'm sure she's got virtually nothing to do now anyway.

(ducks and runs for cover .. chuckling the entire way ... )

[Madeliefste Oh]

Yeah right, another pain in the ass is the mesh versus sculpties categories in 'building tools'.

There are no sub categories at all in 'Mesh Creator Tools'. Since mesh can be anything at all it is going to be one big fat pile of 'anything anyone could use to build or create'. I do have 'mesh creator tools', but I'm not going to list them in that category as long as there are no subcategories available.