The debacle that is the Marketplace...

[Annie Rubanis]

I know that LL has been conducting a survey to determine what residents would like from the Marketplace and that's great.  Does anyone know when any sort of action might take place to improve the dreadful situation with it NOW?  I really just don't understand how thousands of other shopping websites can conduct business in a timely fashion and the LL Marketplace is about as slow as an old dial-up connection (and not even a 56k connection).  Any info would be greatly appreciated. 

 

 

[Christin73]

Well I know I have a few things that wouldn't mind seeing change in mp. For one I would like an option of weather or not to get demo's in search. I hate when I am searching for something and find nothing but demo's. Another thing I don't like is it takes 4 diffrent proccesses to buy something. Other then that mp is good.

[Medhue Simoni]

I don't think she is talking about how it generally works, tho that could easily be talked about. I think what she is talking about is that the site runs slow, like to a crawl. I'm a merchant, so I see it in my sales. 1 half of a day sales are crazy, the other half, or for 6 hours no sales at all. I'm not some huge store, but I've always had regular sales, not long periods of no sales. Everytime I investigate, it's because the site takes forever to load a single page.

Some people might think, big deal, some merchants lose sales, but the failing goes much further than that. Do those merchants own a sim? Not just merchants but almost every1 that owns a sim. Normal people don't just pay 300 for a sim so they can build their dream house. People pay 300 because the sim brings some kind of return that is more than 300. If the major driver of the economy fails, alot less money is getting moved around to the spots that require it's support. The whole economy fails. But, LL allows it to happen.

[Annie Rubanis]

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Innula Zenovka wrote:

-The arrival of a new CEO always has some of us who create "Adult Content" in SL feeling a bit nervous, since some of your predecessors have given the impression they find us rather an embarrassment and that they'd rather pretend we weren't around.    Some of us still have rather bitter memories of how we were packed off to Zindra.

Your immediate predecessor always seemed to me, at least, reasonably supportive of SL's Adult Content market, in that he made us a lot more visible and seemed content for LL to work with projects like the Adult Hub, in which I'm involved, who provide an orientation and resource centre for new people who are particularly interested in Adult SL.

Do you have any particular views on Adult SL?  Are we, in your view, a welcome part of the economy who help attract new customers, or would you rather we had a lower profile?

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/me adjusts her D-K Effect hat to achieve the most flattering effect . . .

I find this a fascinating subject, and it's certainly one that has come up before.

There's little doubt that the adult market is an important part of the SL economy, I think -- Linden Lab will know better than we exactly how important. And I don't think that there's anything wrong with that at all, although I have always suspected that those who focus narrowly on this side of the "SL Experience" tend to overestimate its importance.

I think we need to keep the "adult" in Second Life because, generally, it enriches the culture and content here. By that I personally don't mean the sex shoppes and clubs, or the adult role play (although obviously those are important to many), but rather the greater freedom that it permits everyone -- artists, creators, and just everyday wanders -- for expression and experience. SL would be much impoverished by a puritanical approach to content.

I also don't think that SL should "hide" its adult content; that would be both self-defeating and frankly dishonest. Let's be forthright about what this place is, and what happens here.

That said, the "adult" end of things here is only one part of what goes on, and what can be done here, and I have frankly been dismayed by the apparent tendency of LL's marketing to focus overly much on the sex/romance side of things here, as though we were a better class of IMVU or one of those adults-only virtual worlds like RC (does that even exist anymore?) I think it does a disservice to the other amazing things that happen in SL, and I think, frankly, it's a turn-off for a great many people. It certainly reinforces some rather negative stereotypes about the platform.

Surely clever marketing can target diverse audiences? It must be possible to market the adult experience in places where that is likely to be received well, while focusing on other sides of Second Life -- the creativity, the art, the communities -- in other places? Isn't that what Facebook's and Google's algorithms are supposed to achieve? (Even if they don't achieve it very well.)

The biggest objection I've had to LL's marketing strategy since Rosdale left the first time is the tendency to treat SL as a one-size-fits-all experience. It's not. That's the whole point of this place, as a digital sandbox, it can be many things. It can be almost anything.

We don't want to be swamped by people just looks for the seks. And, at the same time, we don't want to lose that side of things either. Surely it is possible, on a platform as flexible as Second Life, to cater to all, and, almost as importantly, to market the whole range of experiences to nice markets where they are likely to be appreciated?

[Pussycat Catnap]

Bad underlying eCommerce software could do that. If they're using something like Magento for example... Magento scales very poorly and starts to devour itself like a snake eating its own tail, and requires a LOT of modification to fix.

eCommerce sites that perform well have massive IT budgets to built the engine that does it, or are small businesses that can work with something like Magento where it shines.

And changing out your entire eCommerce engine for another is not a trivial 'do it now' task. Once you've picked your brand of poison you're stuck with it for years as the costs of building out an eCommerce platform for a fast moving inventory are astronomical.

They've already done it twice: buying xStreet and merging it with the other thing that was bought at the same time. And then again building out Marketplace and having that absorb xStreet. These things will perform well at one scale, and you can miss the issues that will cause them to fail to perform well when they hit a whole different scale of operation...