The new Marketplace Features coming - Merchant Survey Requirement

[Luna Bliss]

There are a LOT of people that ONLY have land because they are able to recoup some of the cost with some MP sales.

This fee increase is making it so some of these merchants/land owners will have to give up their land -- LL is shooting themselves in the foot with too great a fee increase.

And yes there are a lot of people watching this thread too shy to post on forums, and I've had emails from some -- they don't like what's happening.

[Love Zhaoying]

9 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

This fee increase is making it so some of these merchants/land owners will have to give up their land -- LL is shooting themselves in the foot with too great a fee increase.

I missed this in all the other news. What fee increase?

[Luna Bliss]

"They saw something on the internet and thought that's how SL should be" -- I think that's a good epithet for most all past problems.
And they're still doing it...looking at other 3DModeling sites and thinking they should imitate fees, while not taking into consideration the differing characteristics that make up SL.

Kitely too...much more expensive to live and work along with other variables...so the comparison doesn't hold..

[Luna Bliss]

3 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

I missed this in all the other news. What fee increase?

Commission fees...cashout fees....buying lindens -- I probably missed a few on top of those..

[Love Zhaoying]

1 minute ago, Luna Bliss said:

Commission fees...cashout fees....buying lindens -- I probably missed a few on top of those..

Will definitely weed out the unprofitable sellers.

[Love Zhaoying]

Ohhhhh I get it, Tax the merchants to pay for new Premium benefit. Zero-sum game for LL!

[ChinRey]

1 hour ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Ohhhhh I get it, Tax the merchants to pay for new Premium benefit. Zero-sum game for LL!

That's the basic idea, yes. Unfortunately some greedy, selfish merchants are a bit reluctant to foot the bill. Essentially, they are only willing to let LL have a bigger slice of the cake if the Lindens can come up with a way to make the cake bigger and they aren't convinced that the announced improvements will achieve that.

[Love Zhaoying]

5 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

That's the basic idea, yes. Unfortunately some greedy, selfish merchants are a bit reluctant to foot the bill. Essentially, they are only willing to let LL have a bigger slice of the cake if the Lindens can come up with a way to make the cake bigger and they aren't convinced that the announced improvements will achieve that.

(Picture is the “Child Catcher” villain from “Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang”. The Child Catcher represents the Evil Merchants, while the helpless children represents Linden Labs.)

[Arwen Serpente]

I honestly didn't need to laugh that hard before going to bed. I'll never get to sleep now!

 

[Love Zhaoying]

3 minutes ago, Arwen Serpente said:

I honestly didn't need to laugh that hard before going to bed. I'll never get to sleep now!

 

I forgot to add the “nightmare fuel” warning!

[ChinRey]

31 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

(Picture is the “Child Catcher” villain from “Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang”. The Child Catcher represents the Evil Merchants, while the helpless children represents Linden Labs.)

Something like that, yes.

But to be fair to the evil merchants, LL's past record in matters like this isn't exactly spotless so they do have reason to worry. For now I think we should give LL the benefit of the doubt. And there's no shortage of doubt here, that at least is certain.

Edited March 26, 2018 by ChinRey

[Love Zhaoying]

10 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

Something like that, yes.

But to be fair to the evil merchants, LL's past record in matters like this isn't exactly spotless so they do have reason to worry. For now I think we should give LL the benefit of the doubt and if there's something we have a lot of here, it's doubt.

Glad I’m a simple mainland owner, unaffected by merchant changes, cash-out changes, reduced demand for rentals on private sims, and the like.

Edited March 26, 2018 by Love Zhaoying

[Gunner Grun]

13 hours ago, OptimoMaximo said:

That's where the MP web designer should be smarter than that: the ban should be applied on recipient name. Match that against the ban list and show a "can't proceed with this transaction" message.

I didn't read all the posts here, but among all those i could read, the manager option to grant access to someone else to do the dirty work for us is my fave.

I would add my idea too, but as i said i didn't go through all the previous posts and this may have been said already: create a co-workers list, with preset percentage, allowed to load their content on the main store's MP from their own inventory. This would really decrease the fuss of handing stuff over to the MP's account.

I still don't understand wanting to ban someone from the marketplace. I've banned bad apples from my sim for behaving badly but if they want to go on the marketplace and give me their lindens I'll take it. 

[Chic Aeon]

So I was wondering where that 30% number is coming from and I see it is SANSAR.  Well, it isn't like people are flocking there in droves to put their goods on the Sansar Marketplace. Some folks that said they were "migrating" never showed up. I would hope (well hey we can hope) that The Lab has seen that isn't the best method of revenue collection. 

IF they raised the rates to 10% and make some easy but important changes to the Marketplace functionality I doubt that many folks would throw in the towel (or throw in the Marketplace towel anyway). But heading up to 30%? Personally I would tack that onto all my exiting products. The product would sell less and The Lab would get less money (perhaps a lot less money). I can't believe that someone in the boardroom (or coffee shop) didn't mention this possibility. 

I was thinking this afternoon that IF the lab got way too greedy it might be a big boon to the events places. Aside from The Marketplace, events are the next best (for me the best) place to sell. Unless you are Maitreya or Catwa etc :D.  They have been hurting lately too across the board. Too many venues and not enough creators -- or maybe not enough creators that want "exposure" and not "dinero".  So IF people start seeing a big cut of their profits (not to mention the cashing out fee increases of their US dollars) they might just decide to go the venue route and a whole sub-culture of "we buy inworld" might emerge. 

Just spinning thoughts here :D.   

Remember the TOS of August 2013?  Well I left SL except for checking in to take care of LEA7 (Machinima Open Studio Project) and spent all my time in Opensim learning and testing and selling there. I dind't upload ANYTHING in SL except two sign textures for MOSP in over eight months. If enough people get (upset) there could easily be another uprising LOL.

So think carefully oh powers that be *wink*. 

 

[Pamela Galli]

1 hour ago, Gunner Grun said:

I still don't understand wanting to ban someone from the marketplace. I've banned bad apples from my sim for behaving badly but if they want to go on the marketplace and give me their lindens I'll take it. 

 If someone buys something from me, I am obligated to provide customer support even if the customer in question is a psychopath. I would like to skip any involvement with a psychopath. 

[Luna Bliss]

25 minutes ago, Chic Aeon said:

So IF people start seeing a big cut of their profits (not to mention the cashing out fee increases of their US dollars) they might just decide to go the venue route and a whole sub-culture of "we buy inworld" might emerge. 

I like this idea, and I remember someone earlier in the thread mentioned that quite a few people sell mostly inworld, or at least a lot compared to MP. Yes there is hope -- we are not powerless.

We could give incentives to buy inworld -- perhaps gifts.

What about the Casper vendors that have, or had, a store connected to them. Last time I looked it wasn't operational, but it did lead one to his own store listings connected to all his vendors. Many people could create setups like this.

[Luna Bliss]

1 hour ago, Gunner Grun said:

I still don't understand wanting to ban someone from the marketplace.

Never underestimate the creativity of a determined griefer!!

[OptimoMaximo]

2 hours ago, Luna Bliss said:

4 hours ago, Gunner Grun said:

I still don't understand wanting to ban someone from the marketplace.

Never underestimate the creativity of a determined griefer!!

I actually was thinking of scammers, that happen to me a lot. Buy the demo, 5 minutes later they buy the full product and 1 minute later they IM threatening a bad review if i don't refund them. I can stand the refund just to get that person out of the way, but then i don't want to become their ATM

[Froukje Hoorenbeek]

 

1. Automatic delisting of all listings that have not sold for over 365 days. This would leave the MP with the only latest and the best. A merchant would be forced to think the listing over before having to actively relist and that would save a lot of clutter. 

2: The Lindens take care of all the inventory loss from now on, instead of making it a merchants problem and forcing us to buy expensive tools or spend hours a week making up for what is essentially a problem between Linden Lab and the end user. Customers that loose inventory should be able to go to you, not to us. 

3: Make it possible to do redeliveries or updates in bulk. 

4: we cannot search transaction history for people that have gotten a gift, only for the purchaser now. Add the name of the receiver of a MP gift to the excell sheets and such. Related to this: what is going to happen to the transaction info after the names of avatars can change? Is the transaction info going to be by key or name?  Are they going to be 2 different kinds of transaction history? 

4: Ban possibilities on the MP. We can control most of our SL, but you leave us open to anyone that wants to throw dirt at us on the MP.

5: Make the comments option under the reviews only open for reaction from the merchant. I have had over 20 mails of Linden Lab in one hour once, all with comments, deletions and new comments. Merchants cannot ban emails from Linden Lab and are forced to read all those. Via your system.

6. Proactive defense of original content and creators. Don't leave obviously stolen content on your MP for years. If you see characters from another game or a Disney movie on the MP, take it down. If you see one of your own merchants harrassed with copybotted designs, help them out. Don't force merchants into incredibly complicated and risky legal actions to help your customers, the end users.

7. Make a list of the 100 biggest MP merchants and talk to them about what they need.

8. Whatever you do, don't force us into the same sad bleak anonymity as on the Sansar MP. 

Thanks for reading. 

 

[Elvina Ewing]

10 hours ago, Chic Aeon said:

Knowing (and living with in the past) some folks that work on the giant back-end systems like the Marketplace I can tell you that many of the things you are asking for would be tremendously expensive in time and wages so I don't see them happening. 

Exactly. Make a full list out of all MP improvements suggested in this entire thread. Then looking at each entry, ask yourself this question: how much money and resources will it take to implement? And then you will get an idea of what to expect in the end. It will be those things that will cost (next to) nothing for LL to implement. Because really, do you believe LL, - who are apparently in a great need of their revenue increase, - are prepared to invest into a better Marketplace, just to make/keep the merchants happy? It will be something easy, and most likely something quite useless... Although deleting old obsolete listings sounds easy to implement (i'm not a programmer, so no idea actually) and could be one of the few useful things...

[Robar Colter]

I would love to have more control over global updates.  When you find yourself with 200 plus items, updates such as adding or removing revenue distributions, or making  location changes become quite a chore.

[Majestic Kohime]

Hello, i never talked about all the previous TOS changes from LL publicly, but today, i really feel that i have to say a last word about all this matter. Back in the past i used to IM inworld Lindens employees to denounce the unfair, this era is over since 2011, it seems that discussions employees-customers are IMPOSSIBLE.

First of all, people needs to understand a few basics about what is currently happening to Sl and creators for the past 5 years. This is part of my argumentation about marketplace changes, read, and you will understand my point.

2012: LL TOS change about the ownership of every uploaded content upon Sl: result-> a lot of multiplatforms skilled creators left SL.

2013: TOS changes about the third party websites that are selling L$: in 24h LL ruined a lot of important buisness: result: a lot of rich buisnessmen LEFT SL.

2014: TOS changes about money games creation: LL is ADDING fees, and giving the monopoly of the money games creation to a strictly limited CLIQUE, kicking other comptetitors from SL.

    REsult: a part of SL economy is litterally destroyed, trust between scripters and LL is broken forever.

    Another , and personal result: you ruined me, as scripter, and also owner of money games devices, with this new TOS, and made me (andmany other skilled scripters), leaving SL and iam really depressed about this since 2015, you RUINED HUNDRED hours of work, ruined my own buiness and made me lose a lot of time and money. All the trust between coders and LL is BROKEN.

 

NOTICE THAT ANY PEOPLE THAT HAD BOUGHT IN PAST MONEY GAMES LEGALLY (the TOS was different, so it was fully legal towards SL TOS) had them desactivated BY LL in 20174: you ruined also THOUSANDS OF CUSTOMER, some of them had invested many thousands dollars in money games devices in SL-> you made those people sick and they left SL/

2014-2015: a new algorythm is added, concerning the search in marketplace and also new uploading on marketplace system (through the viewer), in the first place we do believe that it is a good thing, tho, the truth is clearly revealing itself:

    - The new search algorythm doesnt work, a lot of garbage products from 10 years ago is, most of the time in the first result, wathever the search keyword is, also, a lot of sellers are abusing with keywords linked to their products; so we dont even get what we are looking for as result. The only solution to fix this, as creator,  was TO PAY MORE FEATURED ADVERTISING.

Congrats, again MORE FEES

   - Another result is the ABUSE by many BIG brands of the uploading feature. Its quite common in 2018 to see big brands uploading 1000+ demos and 5000+ products.

Here you can see the total stupidity of the whole system: big brands are killing freelancers/ solo creators by uploading NUMEROUS VERSIONS OF THE SAME PRODUCT.

Example: a TSHIRT: uploaded 10 times each time for a different colour +a demo, it will get 10th times more visibility on marketplace search.

Notice that those big brands with 5k-10k products uploaded pay the same fees that hard working semi pros solo creators with 20 quality products. The difference is that , in 2018 you wont see the semi pro marketplace unless you spend many hours searching on Marketplace/

Notice also that GATCHAS results are poluting the whole marketplace search for many years. Add to this that a lot of big gatcha resellers "shops" are duplicating products by dupe "hacks" and you get a "search sort by date" on marketplace that is giving daily, only gtacha results.

2015-2016: the  TOS changes concerning SL-RL transferts got their fees increased: from 1$ per transaction to 3dollars minimum -250 dollars max, reducing again more and more our rl incomes.

 

People need to realise that SL slowly turned from a convivial semi-pro creators platform, to a platform owned by big brands that, are for 80% of them paying 3d professsionals to do their work, and this way, killing all solo creators that are spending tons of time in SL for many years.

 

So here comes the conclusion: in this topic people want to pay more marketplace fees, but they dont even understand that , since the previous marketplace changes nothing has been done to make the MP more interesting for customers and creators.

Most of the customers i talk to say that they gave up searching on Mp the past few years , because the results are random.

Back in the past we had a fair marketplace , we dont have this anymore for at least 4 years.

As you can see, the TOS changes already made a lot of skilled creators leaving SL and losing a lot of money. I hope that you will understand that "adding fees" on marketplace is clearly not the solution, because you already kicked enough people from SL the past few years and increased enough fees.

TY,

 

Edited March 26, 2018 by Majestic Kohime

[Sapphy Rotaru]

I read through all the posts & here is a list of what I would like to see.

Any would be an improvement as long as it doesn't bug the place out again .... I live in hope!


HOPED FOR CHANGES

Remove all trace of discontinued/de-listed products from merchant drop-down options everywhere! This renders some functions useless & is a major pain.

A category for gacha items that are resold. THIS WOULD BE A MAJOR CHANGE FOR THE BETTER!

Delete merchants who no longer have an account or have not logged in in any way for more than a year. YES PLEASE! I am sure this would improve the customer experience greatly if the number of absentee merchants who provide no backup or customer service was reduced. We might even get good reviews instead of feedback being 'customer complaints'.

A category for full perm items because there are lots of no trans or no copy items in the building supplies.

A way to change the default listing order of items within a store. (preferably to most recent if only one option)

An easier way to change & delete all the landmark within listings that actually works.

A store manager function to add someone who can edit or create listings for the merchant.

Improvement to the feedback/review system to make it fairer for merchants to take action where necessary when negative feedback is left before it is made visible to the public. At least give us 48 hours!

Remove all trace of discontinued/de-listed products from merchant drop-down options.

Ability to ban buyers we don't want to do business with.
 

Ability to have more than one marketplace storefront per avatar.

 

Ability to have different colours options in one listing with the main product, instead of multiple listings. This would make the experience better for both sides.

 

Easier updating for prices on the 'manage listings' page instead of editing each individual listing.
Easier updating for prices on the 'manage ' page instead of editing each individual listing.

 

Customer ability to get redeliveries for copy items.

 
Include demo option within the item listing, not separately.  So that when buyers filter via price they are not faced with pages of demos!

Delete merchants who no longer have an account or have not logged in in any way for more than a year.

Having the ability to 'favourite' designers/stores for customers.

The ability to search purchase history.

Ability to exclude specific stores/Merchants from the marketplace search.

Stores subscriptions to be able to follow stores and receive notifications either inworld or through emails of updates and new releases.

[Pamela Galli]

18 hours ago, Chic Aeon said:

Let me have $10,000 to cash out and I will GLADLY pay $250.   

I  used that number because $250 is the cap. I don’t sell $10000 every week :-)

To your point: It depends on how often that $10,000 process credit occurs. If its once a year, and SL employment is the only one available, and the creator is, say, a caregiver for disabled family members, then yes, a 10x raise in process fees to $250 is significant. 

 

Edited March 26, 2018 by Pamela Galli

[FatherTheo]

Plain and simple, it's silly, and it makes no sense whatsoever to lower the cost of land tiers in order to try and persuade people to come back, and new people to join with a premium subscription, only to hike up the charges on the creators to make up what's lost in the land tier. It's the epitome of anti-creator customer service policy. There are other ways in increase revenue flow than to chase out the people making the game fun and more beautiful with their creativity.