Dash Deal Thread

[Toysoldier Thor]

Yeah... so exactly how would this promotion serve the SLM Merchant community if out of 1000's of applicants they can only serve a few of their friend merchants? so even if LL did a Dummy Dash each day evey day.... with thousands of applications - as u said - they could only do 365 a year!

AND... LL would be sending daily advertising spam to all their residents EVERY STINKING DAY!

Are we all seeing a problem here???

Apparently not Brooke and her team.

DUMB IDEA  (or an excuse LL created to allow them to promote LL friend merhants under a lame promo excuse that most will never get to see even if they wanted to.  explains why Brooke forged ahead with the idea even though there was almost not good comments about the idea) 

[Sassy Romano]

Toy...on all of what you just said here..

I AGREE WITH YOU!

ok maybe not all of it, after all, there will always be those in a more privileged position who have more favours, better profile, more "general appeal" but I certainly don't want my LL subscribed email for communications from the company to be reduced to nothing more than irrelevant spam. 

As someone else already commented, they can't send us useful information like when a product has been flagged, reviewed or whatever but can spam us without a moments thought.

We need an opt out of Dash Deal spam without any doubt.

[Lexbot Sinister]

 

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Paladin Pinion wrote:

I thought I'd give it a shot so I applied, and received a "sorry, you weren't selected" email a few days ago. LL said there were thousands of applicants and they only had six slots for this test run. I was surprised when I saw today that the first item was a dress. You'd think they'd choose something less gender-specific for their "wide audience" appeal.

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Don't be sorry!

I don't know about others, but i definitly am going to boycott any merchant that comes up in the dash deal program. Their name goes straight to the " do not buy " list. Why? i don't belive for a second that what i've seen so far deserves any special promotion (generic dress anyone?), asking to be handpicked by the lindens is bad, and the whole idea reeks of customer abuse and favoritism. Linden buttbuddies don't get my money.

[Ricky Zhichao]

Quite a whining thread again. First deal of that test dash deal and worth so many cries. Sure anyway good to know what could be better as testing just started.

Anyway my point is that everything is worth try. Or if not ..then not worth to do anything. Right?

And sure there is other grids to make things better. At least I just dont know any better virtual worlds for commerce working. Not even near sl. 

[Toysoldier Thor]

 

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Ricky Zhichao wrote:

Quite a whining thread again. First deal of that test dash deal and worth so many cries. Sure anyway good to know what could be better as testing just started.

Anyway my point is that everything is worth try. Or if not ..then not worth to do anything. Right?

And sure there is other grids to make things better. At least I just dont know any better virtual worlds for commerce working. Not even near sl. 

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No Ricky... contrary to your statement.... "Everything is NOT worth a try".

If you are running a business (like LL is) and you are majorly resource constrained to the point that you must ration all your customer complaints, requests, demands, issues onto a long lengthy backlog of things that you can never seem to get to (like LL is)...

Then a SMART COMPANY doesnt follow a philosophy of "Everything is worth a try".

A smart company and smart management team assess what are critical drivers and goals to attain and what efforts / activities / ideas would have either little or even negagtive impact to attaining these goals.  They then allocate their rationed resources to focus on the projects and activities that have the highest impact to meet their goals.

The DASH DEAL - in almost every way - does absolutely NOTHING to help meet the larger goals of SLM.  It's long term deployment would (even if the test was somehow successful and LL was able to increase ONE MERCHANT of 50,000+ Merchants sales by 500%) also be a strategic mistake because LL would never be able to promote the vast majority of SLM Merchants that would want to be in the queue to have LL ADVERTISE SPAM its customer base. 

There are only 365 days in a year and if one participant's merchant was correct, even if there were 2000 Merchant applications to the Dash Deal and no more joined after day 1, it would take up to 5.4 years for a Merchant to get their product SPAMMED but LL.

By then, most SL Residents that have not already requested LL to stop spamming them daily or have already blocked LL Emails as a filter, would surely do so within the first 6 months !

LL would have essentially destroyed their important Customer Service Email communication tool to the greater SL Customer base (a tool that is meant to be used by LL to send important notices).

So Ricky...

NOT EVERYTHING IS WORTH A TRY - Not if a company wants to be smart.

This thread is not whining - this thread is trying to inform LL Commerce Team that they are wasting time on Dash Deal which was a bad idea from the start and to focus on the critical SLM issues.  Some day the LL Commerce Team will listen.

[Ricky Zhichao]

Well..sure there is always smarter ones to do things better but I myself welcomed this opprtunity 100%. I cant see any negative in it.  And maybe those other things are then also something which are not worth trying. Who knows if dont try. Anyway np for me.

[Les White]

It's ingenious ideas like this that remind me why I stopped making things for this backwards 'platform' that is ran by halfwits.

[Mike Arabello]

"Couture" means custom-made, which seems inappropriate in the case of the recent first Dash Deal.

Anyway, this is not such a bad idea, I think LL means well, but it needs a little fine tuning (for example the notion of advertising a 24-hour special with a "weekly" email).

 

[JubJub Forder]

Anyone can hold a sale and call it what they like.
Thats the beauty of competition - I can compete against  a Linden promotion easily.

And unlike theirs;

 

• mine is advertised on the Marketplace Homepage, and other pages within their site (via highlighted items).
• i get  45% of original price - not 25
• i'm not email spamming people who haven't "opted in" to my sales notifications
• I get to decide duration, date, terms

Mines called the "Jubly Jub Deal" - 50% off - 3 days - Xstreet Only

I won't link in case Moderators use it as an excuse to remove this post - I don't think this qualifies under their "don't mention the competition" rules

[Sylva Petrov]

The whole "Hand Picked" element pretty much kills the idea for me. Yet another opportunity for LL to decide who will gain a special 'hand up' based on their own preferences.

[Jim Tarber]

>> "I thought I'd give it a shot so I applied, and received a "sorry, you weren't selected" email a few days ago. LL said there were thousands of applicants and they only had six slots for this test run."

There are so many problems with this plan that it's difficult to know where to begin.  A so-called open program that has no transparency at all, it isn't even literally open (it closed March 28th before the promotions even started), so they are not accepting submissions, and if we just ball-park the entries at 2000 and you tried a submission before the first email, your chances for being denied were about 97%.  (1994 of 2000)  It would take years to work through submissions fairly, and that assumes that during that period no new submissions were added.  This simply cannot succeed.

Regardless of the submission numbers, this is a program to highlight a very small number of specific vendors at the discretion of unnamed people within LL with no transparency on the criteria for selection, not that it mattered since the submissions were bound to be sufficient and deals filled before most vendors interested would get word of it anyway.  So there are these submission problems, the limited places should be enough to raise red flags and file this one under "unworkable", but to me this is all just the sideshow avoiding the real issue, below.

Second Life has a huge commerce component, and Linden Lab needs to be doing everything they can to provide a level playing field, consistent rules for commerce, and even opportunities for those with sound or unsound business plans to succeed or fail on their own merits.  SL is a environment of capitalism, and for the overlords of that system to muck around with that in such a careless and haphazard way would be like a central bank saying "Product X from Corp Y is a good deal right now".  It's... just... so wrong.  They don't seem to understand that they are the overlords, not the s%#@ disturbers, and that this brings with it a responsibility.  They should be enabling commerce across the whole virtual goods industry, not selecting a few enterprises to highlight.

That brings me to the third point, their manner of highlighting.  It is a complete abuse of my email address to send me a notice of 50% off price for a dress, especially one that is not being sold by Linden Lab.  They are using their direct communications channel to me for third-party marketing, in a manner that is so unfair that I was immediately shocked when reading the email.  And as far as I know, there is no opt-out for this.  I understand that LL might want to email me a marketing blurb, and like their inappropriate direct promotion of Ozimals, this is direct interference by Linden Lab in the business plans of their residents.  Was Amaretto given a similar promotion?  No.  Will the competitors of this dress get an equal opportunity for direct promotion?  No, but I hope not anyway.  This program will end, long before the thousands of applicants are given a fair opportunity.  So end it now.  I would not even proceed with the remaining 5 "chosen ones".

It is a program destined to fail and designed to fail and what I find most appalling is that this should be obvious to anyone working there, otherwise, as I said earlier, they are in way over their head.  Singling out specific products from specific content creators is an abuse of LL's email channel. Selecting a very small number of vendors to reward unfairly is a failure of free enterprise. Let the SL markets -- the buyers -- decide fairly.

Linden Lab should let the market of SL live; it's fine when they don't muck with it. If the reliability of in-world operations was fixed, and they stopped directly competing with their own residents (e.g. Linden Homes competing directly with landlords), fixed search so that it didn't use traffic as a ranking mechanism (i.e. wasn't polluted by gaming the system) and didn't use payments as a ranking mechanism (polluting results in exchange for L$), Second Life would actually provide an excellent virtual business environment.

I haven't given up hope that one day they will wake up and let the SL market operate freely.  But realistically, they muck with SL businesses in significant ways at least yearly.

[Argus Collingwood]

Next Deal is out...

 http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Featured-News/Introducing-Dash-Deals-on-the-SL-Marketplace/ba-p/826981

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/FP-VENECIA-Black-and-White-Dash-Deal/2157390

 

 

[Toysoldier Thor]

I am not even going to click on the links to see what it is.  Do not support this half-baked LL promotion and the LL team is ignoring feedback from their Merchants that this is a badddd idea and pushing this idea on.  So best thing to do is to ignore it and do not promote it in any way by moving any eyes or traffic to it (unless you are going to the link to see what Merchant / product you might protest avoid for participating / supporting this promotion)

[Cerise Sorbet]

They listened to somebody or something, Dash Deals are dead.

Update (May 6, 2011)

 

We have decided to discontinue the Dash Deal program. This decision was not made lightly and is due to several factors, including technical limitations which made the management of the program inefficient. We expect to test other programs of this type in the future, once we have resolved these issues.

[Zanara Zenovka]

ROFL

What a ridiculous waste of time that was.

Not surprised after seeing those shoes - they look like a lampshade tried to mate with a pair of hooker heels and got strangled by the curtains in the process.

[Toysoldier Thor]

I guess the part that bothers me about the whole DASH DEAL fiasco / half baked idea was that everyone says how the NEW LL Commerce Team listens to the Merchants much more than the previous administration.

YET... once again, even though almost immediately after Brooke announced this korny SLM Marketing idea as a complete surprise to the Merchants where the general response from the Merchants was that it was a very bad porrly thought out idea that should be abandoned before it start, Brooke and Team plugged their ears and rammed this dumb idea forward. 

Wasted her team's time to work on a an an initiative that NO MERCHANTS WANTED NOR THOUGHT WAS A A GOOD IDEA, while at the same time the number of SLM sales deliveries continue to get worse since her team to the helm of SLM.

As per normal from the LL Commerce Team - NO FOCUS AND CHASING BUTTERFLY IDEAS ALL OVER THE FIELD.

[Ricky Zhichao]

My point of this all whining and raging and crying is that NOBODY..and I mean NOBODY..should say that NOBODY thought something  was not good idea.  We can sure all state our own besserwissercomments, but telling that EVERYBODY agrees that..means underestimating of rest of community.

 

Anyway its maybe better not to do anything while there is bugs and problems, only wait until there is none. For example search problems, I also want that all my items are always on first page and others on next page if even there.  But maybe google is not so clever thing.And sure there is a lot to develop in marketplace reports for example but I suppose Brooke is not the only if at all programmer who working for them.

 

Anyway raging and cursing sure been always good idea to talk about things. Anyway it can look funny;)

[Pamela Galli]

 

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Zanara Zenovka wrote:

ROFL

What a ridiculous waste of time that was.

Not surprised after seeing those shoes - they look like a lampshade tried to mate with a pair of hooker heels and got strangled by the curtains in the process.

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This made me really LOL!  So it's not just me having no fashion sense.

 

I think it is a good sign -- the team may or may not be listening to us but at least when something is not working they do not cling to it with a death grip. Before it was like, oh let's just keep trying to ram this square peg into this round hole no matter what.

[Madeliefste Oh]

[Storyof Oh]

Wow that was special...after taking a break from the admin side of SL i thought i had missed something..only to discover it's yet another big idea that has died a death.  Wonder how many Lindens bought embarrassment skins on a special deal?

[Argus Collingwood]

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Madeliefste Oh wrote:

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In April, we tested the Dash Deal promotional program. Though we did see some positive results from the first two Dash Deals, we hit some technical limitations which made management of the program inefficient. As a result, we have discontinued the program.