Toysoldier Thor Posted March 16, 2011 Share Posted March 16, 2011 Pearl Vollmar wrote: Did I understand it right? People have to log in to the marketplace to see the products even if they are in the general category? :womansurprised: I checked it myself. We can see the general items withouth logging in. For a moment I thought they had made the marketplace kind of a closed thing only for members. My sales are slowly going back to normal, at least demos are going out. No... I said that a not logged in SLM SHOPPER/BROWER will "only" see GENERAL items. All other items will be blocked - even the Moderate items (which while logged in - Moderate content can be seen). If a non-logged in SLM shopper had even GENERAL filtered out - there would be nothing to see. Sadlly, what Brooke's team has totally forgotten - or simply doesnt care - is that most SLM shoppers start out as non-logged-in shoppers of SLM. So, unless and/or until they find a product they are looking for in SLM, they wont log in. And this makes sense because why would I waste any of my time logging into SLM to just look for what I was looking for? As a general shopper of SLM, I would have to naturally assume that when the main SLM home page pops up and I start using search, my results will obviously give me results for ALL CONTENT that meets the criteria. I would come to the conclusion because the Commerce Team has not displayed a big sign to the BROWSING shopper that they are only seeing a GENERAL-TEENIFIED filtered view of the content in SLM. And lets go a step further.... EVEN IF Brooke and team cared enough about the Merchants to consider putting this big sign up on the home have warning all shoppers that not-logged-in shoppers are TEEN FILTERED, this is only part of the problem to their strategy damaging merchant sales... There are a lot of BROWSING shoppers that might see this future sign and say "ohh thats ok - I was just looking for nice bedroom furnishings only" so I still cant be bothered logging into SLM. As such, these users will not see content results from NON-GENERAL content that could lead to an impromptu sale of MODERATE or ADULT content. Afterall - they are in the mood to shop for bedroom stuff - a sex bed might interest them.... but not in our beloved SLM. So, I can now see Brooke's team spinning their wheels and thinking up another knee-jerk solution to the problem they just caused from last week's problems.... "WHY DONT WE JUST FORCE ALL SLM SHOPPERS TO LOG IN TO SLM BEFORE THEY CAN DO ANY BROWSING OR SHOPPING?" So although in theory that sound ok, all it would do is reduce overall SLM shopping on all categories by yet another 10 or 15% since many shoppers simply cannot be bothered and will close the SLM window. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Major McCaw Posted March 16, 2011 Share Posted March 16, 2011 Greetings, While I have noticed a slight decrease in my SLM sales, I have noticed a major decrease in inworld sales. I began to notice a decrease in the last week of February and ended up with about a 20 percent decrease for that month. So far in March, that has become about a 40 percent decrease to date. Since I sell landscaping water features, and there are other comments about reduced home sales and sculpt map sales on this thread, it indicates to me that people are not landscaping their sims, or are not buying/renting new land. There could be a number of circumstances that are causing this. 1. The alt viewer issue spooking buyers 2. The restrictions in viewing items on SLM 3. The current tragedy in japan 4. The current real world financial situation I do know that the current sales situation does force me to consider abandoning at least one sim due to loss of income to pay tier. So if this is a problem based on the first two factors, LL should address it swiftly (I knew I could make you laugh) before more business owners have to abandon sims. I really don't think LL can sell an additional L$1,600,000 on SLM to make up for the lost of each sim inworld. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gavin Hird Posted March 16, 2011 Share Posted March 16, 2011 There might be a fifth factor; the web based profiles. Often, if I see an interesting object in-world I look at it to see who the creator is, and check out their profile for classifieds and picks. With profiles opening as slow as molasses in viewer 2.5x I guess many simply can't be bothered to go that route any more. Exactly what the impact would be is hard to say, but it might be a contributing factor. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zhoie Zimermann Posted March 17, 2011 Author Share Posted March 17, 2011 I realized while searching for my products that I used to show up on page 1, a lot of times right at the top of the page. Now, I'm either nowhere to be found or on pages very far along. This also has to be a reason my sales are suffering. I build up my spot and marketplace changes it's search critera, dumping me back down the line. I can't win. It's 2 steps forward, 3 steps back...constantly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Insaniac Xue Posted March 17, 2011 Share Posted March 17, 2011 My store is offline. After having to deal with a bunch of failed deliveries and people asking for refunds or products I had enough of it. I never received their $L and they never received my products, unless I dealt with inworld, this is too stupid for words. LL only f*cks up everything, and I am not going to deal with their sh*t, I simply don't have the time, nor the patience for that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Medhue Simoni Posted March 18, 2011 Share Posted March 18, 2011 Couldbe Yue wrote: even though this is actually off topic, I think I finally worked out who the missing millions are. If you look at the site stats, you'll see the under 17s are a huge group compared to their actual presence in the teen grid. I think they thought they could tap into that market, rather than realising that the kids are probably hanging out here because they get their titilation from the discussions. I'd like to hope I'm wrong but on LL past performance I'd say I'm probably spot on. After all, it is an amazing amount of disruption just for a couple of hundred teen accounts. The other thing to remember is that LL prefers to only deal with a few creators rather than a sea of them. Each change reduces the number of creators and I'm sure they're more than comfortable with it. Assuming the amount of money being spent on the marketplace hasn't decreased then I would say they're more than fine with what is happening. I think the problem they may find is that most people these days aren't happy to keep paying tier when the income isn't there and they've never quite managed to understand that diversity is the key. Hey ho. Well put. I'm not against the teens, and I saw alot of this coming when they introduced 3 different maturity ratings. I was actually looking for G land when I bought my sim, thinking that some day, it would be the only category that LL would allow every1 to populate. I was convinced by my friends that SL would never go that way, lol. So now I sit with an M sim, and LL won't change my sim to G, even tho I don't sell any adult items. Is it a big deal to change a sim to G? WTF? I guess 200 a month is not enough to make some1 change a setting. Really, LL, I'll pay you a few hundreds more to change it, if that is what it takes. Just tell me what I have to do. No, LL has a mainland where G land is spread out all over the place, and has no designated area. Who planned this crap? I feel bad for the teens, they are getting shafted almost as much as us. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Couldbe Yue Posted March 18, 2011 Share Posted March 18, 2011 Zhoie Zimermann wrote: I realized while searching for my products that I used to show up on page 1, a lot of times right at the top of the page. Now, I'm either nowhere to be found or on pages very far along. This also has to be a reason my sales are suffering. I build up my spot and marketplace changes it's search critera, dumping me back down the line. I can't win. It's 2 steps forward, 3 steps back...constantly. it's probably because it now mirrors the inworld weighting for relevance and rates pg items higher than mature than adult. so it means that despite your item being a perfect fit for the search terms you can be hidden by all the partial matches that are a pg rating or that have more reviews or more sales or whatever else they use to make sure search results don't actually match the terms used. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zhoie Zimermann Posted March 18, 2011 Author Share Posted March 18, 2011 Wow i had no idea about marketplace search mirroring in world. It' just keeps getting better and better (sarcasm). On another note, wondering if someone can help me out. In my desperate attempt to raise my sales back up I put in 3 ads in marketplace (1 PG product ad and 2 adult product ads). As many times as I have refreshed and viewed the featured items, I have only come across 1 of my ads 1x (1 of my adult items). No times for the other 2. However, in this time I came across other merchants products numerous times each for the same ad. Can someone that knows tell me how this can be? Is this also affected by the new mirroring of in world searchs? Is just refreshing your page and looking through the new featured items not an accurate account ? Thanks so much! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Couldbe Yue Posted March 18, 2011 Share Posted March 18, 2011 Zhoie Zimermann wrote: Wow i had no idea about marketplace search mirroring in world. It' just keeps getting better and better (sarcasm). On another note, wondering if someone can help me out. In my desperate attempt to raise my sales back up I put in 3 ads in marketplace (1 PG product ad and 2 adult product ads). As many times as I have refreshed and viewed the featured items, I have only come across 1 of my ads 1x (1 of my adult items). No times for the other 2. However, in this time I came across other merchants products numerous times each for the same ad. Can someone that knows tell me how this can be? Is this also affected by the new mirroring of in world searchs? Is just refreshing your page and looking through the new featured items not an accurate account ? Thanks so much! I probably should have been more explicit when I said "probably" in the previous post. I seem to remember brooke saying the marketplace was going to mirror inworld search so it was just a guess and on past performance I'd put nothing past them. your problem may be something as simple as you made a change to a listing and it dropped in relevance - which happens sometimes if it is a newish listing, hasn't had a lot of views, sales etc. tbh though I doubt anyone can tell you for sure apart from LL. as for your other question - that's a perennial question. consensus is that you never see your own stuff but i don't think that has ever been confirmed but if you're seeing the same ad multiple times then it sounds like they've used the same code as the old site - supposedly it evens itself out by the end of the day. no one ever really knows because we've never been told, you've just got to take it on trust that you get the same approx number of views as everyone else each day. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pearl Vollmar Posted March 18, 2011 Share Posted March 18, 2011 I have one ad in categories right now and had one featured on the homepage for a week. I never came across any of my ads. No matter how much I refreshed. I sold one from the one featured on the homepage. I don't understand how that works. And I don't understand the statiscts they show us on the report. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zhoie Zimermann Posted March 18, 2011 Author Share Posted March 18, 2011 Is it comfirmed that changing something in your ad can bump you down the line? Example: changing your wording in some way? How about changing from moderate to adult? I did just this last night, however saw no change in the page number in which I appeared on, wouldn't that make one assume it makes no difference? I just don't know anymore LOL btw: thanks for replying Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Couldbe Yue Posted March 18, 2011 Share Posted March 18, 2011 Zhoie Zimermann wrote: Is it comfirmed that changing something in your ad can bump you down the line? Example: changing your wording in some way? How about changing from moderate to adult? I recently did just this, however saw no change in the page number in which I appeared on, wouldn't that make one assume it makes no difference? I just don't know anymore LOL btw: thanks for replying you're not the only one who doesn't have a clue.. but at least we have an excuse, I'd love to know what LL's is I certainly know that for items that came across from the old site and didn't bring their previous views/sales history etc that when I made changes they were bumped down the bottom of the relevance return for my items. that's not been fixed and i remember in the last missive from LL they threatened to tinker further with relevance. and mine dropped for a myriad of different reasons, adding a picture, changing text, adding keywords.. basically anything that required you to save the listing triggered the drop and it still does. how that affects the overall marketplace search return is anyone's guess. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zhoie Zimermann Posted March 18, 2011 Author Share Posted March 18, 2011 wonderful, so changing a spelling error could bump me down, wow. I have to start laughing at this else cry. I wish I could say I was laughing all the way to the bank, but since the new changes, that is no longer the case...more LOL's Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Toysoldier Thor Posted March 18, 2011 Share Posted March 18, 2011 Brooke already stated in her response to my questions in the other thread that they have a couple more slm search changes in the works. They REALLY DONT GET IT... they need to remove item popularity and sales rank and and price and all that other fluff from the SEARCH SORT BY RELEVANCE. It should strictly be based on which items most tightly fit in title, keywords, and features to the query phrase Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Medhue Simoni Posted March 18, 2011 Share Posted March 18, 2011 Zhoie Zimermann wrote: On another note, wondering if someone can help me out. In my desperate attempt to raise my sales back up I put in 3 ads in marketplace (1 PG product ad and 2 adult product ads). As many times as I have refreshed and viewed the featured items, I have only come across 1 of my ads 1x (1 of my adult items). No times for the other 2. However, in this time I came across other merchants products numerous times each for the same ad. Can someone that knows tell me how this can be? Is this also affected by the new mirroring of in world searchs? Is just refreshing your page and looking through the new featured items not an accurate account ? Thanks so much! It all depends on the category. For example: Thousands of people are paying for homepage listings, and not even checking or caring if it shows. With so many people buying homepage enhancements, it is virtually impossible for you to actually see your own ad, since the system seems to only show some 20-30 in the window. If you choose a category that only has a few ads, your ad will show every single time. Personally, I wonder why so many people think that some1 is going to look thru the homepage ads, other than merchants looking for their items. Who just sits there on the homepage? A long time ago, on Xstreet, I would just leave the homepage open, because i also saw all my stats, and we had that cool forum ticker to see when hot topics popped up. On our new marketplace, there is no reason at all to have the homepage just sitting there open. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zhoie Zimermann Posted March 19, 2011 Author Share Posted March 19, 2011 Thanks everyone for your information. Whatever LL is doing it just doesn't make sense. For example I have two bedroom sets, both have the exact same keywords. One is my most popular product and the other is my least (by far) popular product. The least popular product shows up in a search for "sex bed" on page 15 and the most popular shows up on page 21. I'm um...confused. Keep in mind that before the marketplace changes my most popular was on page 1. So I got dumped back badly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zhoie Zimermann Posted March 19, 2011 Author Share Posted March 19, 2011 Marketplace search needs some serious help. I do a search for "sex bed" I order by "best selling" I get my least popular sex bed that I never sell any of basically coming up as my first product where as my best selling selling sex bed (by a land slide) is nowhere to be found in the best selling list. Something is terribly wrong and LL needs to fix it before myself and other merchants lose our businesses. I also did a search in general for "bed" looking for my full line of PG beds. What came up on page 2, well before any of my products were prim DOGS. I looked in advert and no mention of the word bed. I looked at the source code for keywords, no word bed mentioned, in fact here were the key words... dog, dogs, pet, pets, Artificial Intelligence, Scripted, Papillon. Also BEFORE any of my bed products I came across, trucks, chairs, wearable sweat, medicated needle, twister mat, and a TON of other things. There is seriously something wrong with Marketplace search. If they think this is relevant they are wrong. No wonder my sales are suffering. How can anyone find my furniture when they get so many unrelated items that don't even have the key words in them so how are they showing up? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Toysoldier Thor Posted March 22, 2011 Share Posted March 22, 2011 WOW!! This is crazy.... Since the last SLM Changes Brooke's team put in place two weeks ago, my sales have ground to almost a complete halt - specially in the last week to 10 days. I have mentioned this before but my normal weekly sales pace for my products has a very consistent steady rate of about $25K to $27K Lindens a week. In other words, I within between 6 to 8 days - I attain my magic $27K of Linden sales which I liquidate to paypal. Last time I liquidated my account of $L to $0L was last Tuesday. As such, based on normal sales pace, I should have reached $27K or very close to it and liquidating today. As of this posting, my account is only at $14.4K. This puts me only pace of sales being 48% down. Today I have not even made a sale! BROOKE! What the heck have you done to SLM !!?? My products are all GENERAL so the known changes you made to SLM should not have even directly impacted me. I also know there might be a small factor of sales drop because of the Japanese customer base that might currently be off the market right now (for obvious reasons of having much more critical RL things to deal with). But, your team has seriously damaged SLM further with your tinkering of the search engine and adding more SLM Maturity filtering. When is the SLM Commerce Team going to make some changes that will actually HELP MERCHANTS!? This is rediculous Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Porky Gorky Posted March 22, 2011 Share Posted March 22, 2011 My in-world sales have returned to normal over the last 7 days but SLM sales have declined more, last 2 weeks they have been about 50% down overall. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Toysoldier Thor Posted March 22, 2011 Share Posted March 22, 2011 Porky Gorky wrote: My in-world sales have returned to normal over the last 7 days but SLM sales have declined more, last 2 weeks they have been about 50% down overall. MY problem is that for my customer base and products - most of my sales are dependant on Xstreet / SLM. In the past 5 months I have made a major promotional push to get customers to consider buying my products that they only seem to find in SLM - inworld with inworld rebate offers. This has shifted my sales ratio somewhat off of the the SLM that the SL commerce team is continuing to destroy... and moreso into my inworld store... but right now about 70% of my sales are still from SLM. So sadly, Brooke's team is directly hurting my SL Business with their Teenification of the marketplace and their poor tinkering of the SLM search engine. I suspect that Brooke's team his directly hurting my business more because of their further messings with Search. My product's visibility in SLM Search was not too bad (even though many of my primary products were not getting to the top of relevent search sorts compared to completely irrelevent items. BUT... now even my biggest seller is not bubbling up to the top of very relevent search queries. So... they are majorly messing SLM up. At least before Brooke's arrival to the SLM Commerce Team, my sales were not growing BUT they were not collapsing either. Now... her team is making a bad situation even worse. Not insults.... this is based on FACTS on my sales. And I do not have an effective inworld search to get customers to find my products inworld. So my only search lifeline is being destroyed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zhoie Zimermann Posted March 23, 2011 Author Share Posted March 23, 2011 I am so sorry to hear of all the merchants suffering through this time. It's really sad and I dunno whether it's going to change or not. When our rl pocketbooks are affected it sure hurts. I've started drawing up a business plan in RL and trust me, when I go out of SL, i plan to go out with a bang. Something odd happened to my marketplace sales this week and I wanted to get people's feedback on what it could be. I truely do want to get a grasp on what is happening, so if anyone has any ideas, please let me know. My sales have been dead up till Monday... Below I am referring to my main selling products on marketplace: Sunday March 20th: Sales finally started to trickle in, several sales seen (next morning noticed my items moved up in page search) Monday March 21st: More sales flowing in (next morning my items moved up again considerably. Main product appearing on page 1 of search) Tuesday March 22nd: GANGBUSTER sales day, Huge amount of my main product sold (next morning main product had fallen to page 18 on search and now...NO sales today at all) So the more I sell of a product... the more I go down in the list? That wasn't the case for Sunday and Monday, why the case for Tuesday? Tuesday best sales day ever, Wednesday morning fallen down the search list out of sight. Before the marketplace changes I used to see slow days and busy days, but never 100% dead no sales, gone down the drain days. I also never saw such huge flucuation literally over night in where my items were on page search. Why is this happening now? Maybe it's me, that I simply don't understand what is going on with the new marketplace searches, but if anyone can shed some light on this for me that would be great. I feel like I am in the dark, totally not in control of my own busines. Over all, my sales have fallen drastically each week for the last month. Even though I have just had a few great days, I won't end up with a much better week when the other days fall off the map. Please help me understand... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EndoPlasmic Posted March 23, 2011 Share Posted March 23, 2011 I just started a little MP store last week, so I can't comment on the new maturity settings with any kind of real knowledge, or how those settings may be affecting other store owners. But I know this much beyond a shadow of a doubt: Search does not work. At all. Period. I only listed 12 items total, to get a feel for how the MP worked. Of those 12 items, they have shown up in search 2,957 times. Of those times they have shown up in search, all 12 items combined have been viewed a total of 157 times. That's just over 5%. Yea, that's not gonna cut it, whether you are new or whether you have been around since the SL stone ages. That is a HORRIBLE percentage between searched and viewed items. I consider it absolutely amazing that I've even been able to sell a few items with that kind of percentage. Here's a clue for Brooke and the Commerce Team: You need people to be able to view your items so that you can, ya know, sell them. Shocking, indeed...but also very true. Whodathunkit? When you do a search for random items, like say beds, and you get results such as dogs, boats, cars, grasshoppers and little green men from mars, that may be a clue that SEARCH IS NOT WORKING. Not to mention the fact that most of the garbage that shows up in that search is a bunch of $1-5L items that are just trash. Utter garbage that the majority of customers will get tired of trying to weed thru to get to what they want. Which, of course, inevitably leads them to giving up and searching for it inworld where, wouldn't ya know it, THE SEARCH IS NOT WORKING EITHER. I don't know how certain people in charge of certain things for Second Life keep their job. Search is absolutely destroying merchants which, in turn, lowers the money that LL can make off of sales. It's mind boggling to me that whoever is tweaking this search stuff still has a job. Where else can you completely sabotage a vital part of the SL economy and continue to get paid, and CONTINUE TO BE ALLOWED TO TWEAK THE SEARCH AND WORSEN IT? When search works as it should (don't hold your breath)...then sales, both inworld and on the MP, will revert to "normal". It's sad that by then, if then ever arrives, that there will be longtime SL businesses who had to close their doors. Seriously, get a clue LL. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darrius Gothly Posted March 23, 2011 Share Posted March 23, 2011 @Zhoie - Did you check to see if someone had posted a negative review or if your item had changed maturity rating suddenly? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Couldbe Yue Posted March 23, 2011 Share Posted March 23, 2011 well, since the 16 march I have sold a grand total of one product, in a normalish week I'd sell around 20+. I'd laugh if it wasn't so pitiful. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pamela Galli Posted March 23, 2011 Share Posted March 23, 2011 My sales (of all general items) have continued to be steady since the early March slump, so I do think that maturity ratings are affecting Adult things. As far as irregular sales -- some days everyone seems in a mad rush to buy, some days they are off picnicking, and it's always been that way for me. As for search -- my greatest fear with the new MP was that all my stuff that had gained front page ranking would disappear, which they did. I will repeat again what needs to be done about search, and evidently it must be technologically extremely difficult: 1) GIVE MAXIMUM WEIGHT TO THE TITLES! LESS TO KEYWORDS! 2) RED SHOE SHOULD RETURN ONLY ITEMS WITH BOTH RED AND SHOE! Of secondary importance: 3) HIGHER PRICED ITEMS SHOULD GET SOME BOOST OR THE FIRST PAGES FILL UP WITH CHEAPIES (AT LEAS THEY GOT THE FREEBIES OFF THE FRONT PAGES). 4) CONSIDER REDUCING THE WEIGHT OF STARS SINCE THIS IS BEING SO HEAVILY GAMED WITH rWARDER. 5) CONSIDER SALES DATA FOR MORE THAN THE PREVIOUS DAY OR SO. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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