Process Credit Fees Raised. Again.

[Charlotte Bartlett]

I have a random question, some of us use vendors (won't mention the names, but most creators will know the ones I mean).    The one I use already has a marketplace (not working at the moment).    In light of the above, what's to stop a networking solution where people can buy on a third party marketplace in USD/PayPal set up to be "cheaper" than if purchased inworld / SL Marketplace and the drop box system delivers the item - bypassing Linden Purchases / Lindex and cashing out etc.    Saving the purchaser money on not having to buy more expensive Lindens and the creator money not having to cash out via LL as they could take anon PayPal/other methods etc.      Almost taking us back years and years lol, OnRez anyone?

I see a ton of issues with that approach, but one thing I know about SL creators we/they are a nifty bunch who work around so many issues on a daily basis - I wonder if they collectively will start to work around this one too if the fees continue to rise.

I always wondered after SL Marketplace why another competitor who could solve all our asks didn't come along - is there something I am missing where it's now not possible to do third party marketplaces (I know they wouldn't be able to use Linden Dollars I think due to third party exchanges?) / or it's just too hard to get traction/creators onboard?

 

Edited November 4, 2017 by Charlotte Bartlett
typo

[Charlotte Bartlett]

I should add to this, I always then wondered (haha) outside of the big vendor companies why a viewer company didn't do a marketplace and have integration with their viewer....  you can tell I am not technical!  

[Cain Maven]

20 hours ago, Charlotte Bartlett said:

I always wondered after SL Marketplace why another competitor who could solve all our asks didn't come along - is there something I am missing where it's now not possible to do third party marketplaces (I know they wouldn't be able to use Linden Dollars I think due to third party exchanges?) / or it's just too hard to get traction/creators onboard?

 

I don't think it's that hard from a technical point of view. There are of course trust/fraud issues that might be harder to solve, not to mention that LL would be very unhappy and probably throw the TOS book at any such system (and/or revise the TOS as needed.)

That said, it's perfectly reasonable and predictable that people start looking for alternative solutions when something like this happens.

 

[Paul Hexem]

Careful what you say in this thread, everyone.

Personal greivances against other residents (Beancounter Linden, maybe?) are against the TOS.

Just a helpful reminder!

[Chellynne Bailey]

On 11/3/2017 at 3:20 AM, Theresa Tennyson said:

http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2016/05/second-life-linden-dollar-market.html

Now let's do some math:

Cash out $1,000,000 at 254 Lindens/dollar, less $25 fee: $3912

And, as I'm sure you're aware, that was just at the beginning of the "panic" and the exchange rate was over 260 for months.

Cash out $1,000,000 at the current quick-sell number of 247 Lindens/dollar, less 2.5% fee: $3947.

The point: you'll make more money with expensive Lindens and a high fee than cheap Lindens and a low fee, and if you believe that Linden Lab doesn't control the exchange rate you're delusional - the market is set up so that Linden Lab has to constantly "print" and sell Lindens. The higher cash-out fee mostly serves to make re-investment in SL (tier, etc.) slightly more attractive than cashing out.

 

 

Are you suggesting that higher fees might discourage people from selling Ls, thus pushing up and stabilizing the cost of Ls a bit? If so, It's an interesting theory, and I hope you're right.
Still, it's a bit angering to have defended their last rate increase because it was fairly reasonable, to be hit with this one, which if you've been doing it right and waiting until you have 10k to cash out, your fees go from 25 bucks to 250. >.> Still, I shall forgive if the L rate does go down and stay down.

Edit: I may have tossed this in their suggestion box: https://gyazo.com/b3fa9c25df756e34cfa9ce05f442ac80
Think they'd do it? Or would it placate anyone? x.x

Edited November 7, 2017 by Chellynne Bailey

[rasterscan]

More people will give up. Well done LL - NOT

[Phil Deakins]

On 03/11/2017 at 10:55 AM, Phil Deakins said:

Of course they throw in a little bone or two to sweeten it, and, when the bone arrives, everyone will shout, "Well done LL, What a nice bone. We are so lucky. Keep up the good work".

And there's the bone:-

It's worthless.

[Pamela Galli]

16 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

And there's the bone:-

It's worthless.

For most creators it is, since we download our transactions anyway,

[Luna Bliss]

[ChinRey]

1 hour ago, Phil Deakins said:

It's worthless.

Maybe but there's on piece of info there that is interesting, not sure if they really meant to tell us that.

L$ 16,000,000 a day adds up to a little bit more than USD 23,000,000 a year. That means Linden Lab's MP provisions amounts to about 1,000,000 USD a year, not including the LindEx transaction fees generated when people pay directly with US dollars.

It also means that the average yearly income for an MP store is about 110 US dollar but that number doesn't say much since many of the stores there are empty and inactive.

[Pamela Galli]

Also if I did care about the bone, I still would not put my account at risk of cancellation by becoming premium.

[iamyourneighbour]

Bugger, goose getting cooked

[Rya Nitely]

I'm premium, and I don't see any change in my L$ transaction history. Still just 32 days. Nothing before this can be selected. Although at the top it says 3 months but it doesn't work for me.

Edited November 8, 2017 by Rya Nitely
trying to get rid of the image

[Rockridge Constantine]

Looks good on my dashboard.  I can get 3 months of transaction history.  Perhaps it's not quite rolled out to everyone? *shrugs*

[Sassy Romano]

Let's see, what else could they have introduced in return for the increased fees and "investment" that would have really helped merchants and customers?

How about something like buyer protection against rogue sellers and merchant protection against rogue customers.

Pamela, like you, I will not go premium on this account for the same reason of account cancellation. That's another "benefit" they *could* have introduced, "non account cancellation guarantee"!

For anyone not familiar with this, if you have a premium account which goes into arrears which aren't cleared, LL have in the past, deleted accounts and inventory. They can restore the account but not inventory.

Now, consider how that affects a merchant who may have a sudden medical situation for example, who then goes into arrears and loses their inventory. 

Doesn't happen to a free account.

[Rya Nitely]

I just needed to clear cache history, and now I can see 3 months. This may come in useful since I stopped downloading and keeping sales records about a year ago. 

[ChinRey]

2 hours ago, Sassy Romano said:

For anyone not familiar with this, if you have a premium account which goes into arrears which aren't cleared, LL have in the past, deleted accounts and inventory. They can restore the account but not inventory.

Wow, I didn't know you could loose your inventory that way. That's a serious downside to premium accounts for everybody - merchants and content creators aren't the only ones with valuable inventories here.

Not me though. Apart from a few trivial prim builds I have everything I've made backed up and if one of my accounts is ever cancelled by LL for good or bad reasons, I'll gone for good.

[iamyourneighbour]

Sounds bit extreme to lose inventories

[ChinRey]

2 hours ago, Sassy Romano said:

Let's see, what else could they have introduced in return for the increased fees and "investment" that would have really helped merchants and customers?

How about this:

• Add a little bit more data for the MP transactions
• Store the records permanently for everybody
• Add a few simple search/filtering options
• Get rid of that bloody useless MP only transaction history function

That would be a significant improvement.

The only reasonably rational explanation I can think of why entires in the main transaction history expire at all is that LL needs to save storage space and with the few data bits we're talking about here that hardly makes much sense these days. It certainly doesn't make sense when they also store so much of the same data permanently in another part of their organisation, in a different database with a user interface so poorly designed it isn't doing anybody any good.

---

Edit: With all that being said, let's not forget that the extended transaction history is a genuine improvement. It's trivial on its own of course. It doesn't deserve its own blog post and I really hope that isn't the big upgrade they promised us earlier. But it makes SL a tiny fraction better for a few and it doesn't seem to have any negative side effects. So as one step of a milllion on a stairway to heaven, it works.

Edited November 8, 2017 by ChinRey

[ChinRey]

I know I shouldn't reply to my own posts and it's a digression but I've been thinking about this:

On 8.11.2017 at 12:23 AM, ChinRey said:

That means Linden Lab's MP provisions amounts to about 1,000,000 USD a year, not including the LindEx transaction fees generated when people pay directly with US dollars.

Linden Lab has always claimed that they regard MP as a service to the users, not as a source of income. Nobody has ever believed them of course but now that we have some actual data, maybe we should?

We don't know exactly how much LL makes from MP but with L$ 16,000,000 of transactions a day, it has to be somewhere between USD 1,000,000 and USD1,500,000. That sounds like a nice sum of money at first but...

We don't know how much tier LL looses because merchants focus on MP and not on in-world stores but that figure has one more digit than their MP income. Does 15,000,000 dollars seem about right? Or is that too low? I don't think it's too high. And that means:

The effective loss Linden Lab has to suffer because the Marketplace exists, is at least as big as a quarter of their total income.

That's something to think about. It's always been obvious that the Marketplace is doing far more harm than good to SL as a whole but it wasn't until I started looking at those figures I started to realize the magnitude of the damage it has done.

This may explain why LL is so reluctant to spend time and effort upgrading the Marketplace. What it doesn't explain though, is why they're doing everything they possibly can to kill off the little in-world commerce there still is and force everybody to switch to MP.

Edited November 8, 2017 by ChinRey

[Pamela Galli]

 

2 hours ago, ChinRey said:

I know I shouldn't reply to my own posts and it's a digression but I've been thinking about this:

Linden Lab has always claimed that theyr egard MP as a service to the users, not as a source of income. Nobody has ever believed them of course but now that we have some actual data, maybe we should?

We don't know exactly how much LL makes from MP but with L$ 16,000,000 of transactions a day, it has to be somewhere between USD 1,000,000 and USD1,500,000. THat sounds like a nice sum of money at first but...

We don't know how much tier LL looses because merchants focus on MP and not on in-world stores but that figure has one more digit than their MP income. Does 15,000,000 dollars seem about right? Or is that too low? I don't think it's too high. And that means:

The effective loss Linden Lab has to suffer because the Marketplace exists, is at least as big as a quarter of their total income.

That's something to think about. It's always been obvious that the Marketplace is doing far more harm than good to SL as a whole but it wasn't until I started looking at those figures I started to realize the magnitude of the damage it has done.

This may explain why LL is so reluctant to spend time and effort upgrading the Marketplace. What it doesn't explain though, is why they're doing everything they possibly can to kill off the little in-world commerce there still is and force everybody to switch to MP.

Not understanding the bolded parts. I come out with 16,000,000L / 246 = ~$65,000 per day, which is ~$23,000,000 a year.  5% fee = $1,150,000per year.  Not bad.

I would think most high earning marketplace sellers also have inworld stores, so tier would be added to LL income. Those who give up inworld presence for marketplace only I imagine would be only marginal sellers.

Plus marketplace enhancement fees. Plus cash out fees and the soon to be exorbitant process credit robbery.

Edited November 8, 2017 by Pamela Galli

[ChinRey]

3 hours ago, Pamela Galli said:

Not understanding the bolded parts. I come out with 16,000,000L / 246 = ~$65,000 per day, which is ~$23,000,000 a year.  5% fee = $1,150,000per year.  Not bad.

Yes, that's about right. Minus some less than 10 L$ items - LL doesn't get provision from those and plus the enhanced listing fees and maybe the LindEx fee when people pay on MP with RL money (although they would of course have to go through LindEx if they were buying in-world too). So, a little bit over a million - maybe close to two but I doubt it.

 

3 hours ago, Pamela Galli said:

I would think most high earning marketplace sellers also have inworld stores, so tier would be added to LL income.

They probably have inworld stores but probably not as big. I have two examples.

I ocne had a long chat with one quite succesful and experienced builder/merchant - big enough he was making a full time living from SL - while he was working on scaling down his store from two sims two less than a quarter. He was very clear: he downsized inworld because all his sales were on MP anyway. It was mainland sims too btw so they're stil there - all abandoned land. That cost Linden Lab about 4000 dollars a year in lost tier - and that was just one single store.

A friend of mine used to have a full sim for her main store and a fairly large network of affiliate stores all over SL. The last affiliate store was at my place and we kept it only so she could have a place for a redelivery terminal and group discount vendors. We closed it last week because there hadn't been any action there for months so there was no point in keeping it. She only sells on MP now.

I could give several other similar examples and I'm sure msot others here can too. Even if merchants keep an inworld presence, it's generally not anywhere near as big as what they would have had if it wasn't for MP. Add to that the general drop in visible inworld activity and the clubs and such that have to clsoe down because nobody will rent the stores that are suppsoed to finance them - no, I don't think the 15 million guesstimate is an exaggeration. The loss is certainly far bigger than what they manage to make from the Marketplace.

[Pamela Galli]

I agree that for whatever reason, there are fewer regions, along with decreased concurrency. My regions are necessary to display my more current demos, and I still sell a lot inworld, even if buyers found them on the MP. Inworld search has been broken for years, so MP fills that function. I encourage looking at demos before buying, even tho my older stuff is only on MP. Inworld sales more than pay tier, by a large margin. I understand some products don’t require inworld demos, so not all merchants need an inworld presence — but those selling what I do usually do. Those selling, say, clothes, can do without inworld stores, but that has always been true. I never had mall stores and never understood their value.

[Chic Aeon]

14 hours ago, ChinRey said:

Wow, I didn't know you could loose your inventory that way. That's a serious downside to premium accounts for everybody - merchants and content creators aren't the only ones with valuable inventories here.

Not me though. Apart from a few trivial prim builds I have everything I've made backed up and if one of my accounts is ever cancelled by LL for good or bad reasons, I'll gone for good.

I didn't know that EITHER and while I have never been premium, I am patting myself on the back for my "independence". 

I have backups of all my files and lots of now slightly older stuff over in Opensim (hence backup) but damn that is nasty LOL.   

[Chic Aeon]

Waaaaay back at Charolette's comment about vendors and a "new marketplace", I know that it says somewhere in the marketplace TOS (or used to) that you were not allowed to sell your goods for less inworld. It would be VERY simple for The Lab to make a NEW RULE LOL, so I don't think that will fly. 

I went searching today for a sweater (any price really) for an old and forgotten alt that just got the new free ebody avatar (another thread). I don't shop often and even less on the MP, but I was astounded at all the really really old and C***Y stuff that came up at the top of the search. Dumping everything over five years and making folks reupload if they wanted (well I have a few things that I have updated a few times that are that old) would definitely be a SERVICE.   OR === here ya go, give premium folks the ability to search ONLY things put up in the last 3- 4 - 5 years LOL. THAT would be a perk.