Marketplace Search

[AmeliaJ08]

On 1/24/2020 at 6:01 PM, Miller Thor said:

As we all know, it is more than difficult for us, who belong to the 50+ generation, and also in Second Life we are not afraid to show our age, to find suitable skins or hair, etc. What would you think of a subsection 50+ in the corresponding marketplace sections, or whatever you would like to call it, to set up articles that make it easier to find suitable articles faster? At the moment it often takes days until you accidentally find something that would really fit.

I think this is a great idea, MP really needs much more granular categories to help people find specific things.  I can only imagine the pain you must be having trying to find something like that, really your only option is to click through a zillion pages and hope not to miss something.

 

[RoxanaSaphire]

I have a question about the algorythm: default search option is "relavance".

What exactly does that mean from the view of a seller/ creator?

 

Is it better to use less keywords? So the algorythm would for exapmple give my sold item in the first pages of search results, if i for example sell a shape, and i have the only keyword "shape" and the customer searched for "shape"? Would algorythm then give a 100% match and list it in the first pages?

And would it not list in in the first pages if i sell a shape, the customers seaches shape, but i have maybe 10 keywords like "shape", "styling" "body" "legacy" "lelutka" and so on?

Or how exactly does it work to get listed in the first pages of search results?

 

[Rowan Amore]

26 minutes ago, RoxanaSaphire said:

I have a question about the algorythm: default search option is "relavance".

What exactly does that mean from the view of a seller/ creator?

 

Is it better to use less keywords? So the algorythm would for exapmple give my sold item in the first pages of search results, if i for example sell a shape, and i have the only keyword "shape" and the customer searched for "shape"? Would algorythm then give a 100% match and list it in the first pages?

And would it not list in in the first pages if i sell a shape, the customers seaches shape, but i have maybe 10 keywords like "shape", "styling" "body" "legacy" "lelutka" and so on?

Or how exactly does it work to get listed in the first pages of search results?

 

From the knowledge base article...

Improving your search results

We keep our search relevancy formula private to prevent people from gaming the system. However, we can tell you that the formula includes:

• Average rating
• Past sales over a chosen time period
• Sales rank
• Search term matching

The best way to improve your search results is by creating excellent products and marketing them effectively. Learn more about search rankings. 

[RoxanaSaphire]

Just now, Rowan Amore said:

From the knowledge base article...

Improving your search results

We keep our search relevancy formula private to prevent people from gaming the system. However, we can tell you that the formula includes:

• Average rating
• Past sales over a chosen time period
• Sales rank
• Search term matching

The best way to improve your search results is by creating excellent products and marketing them effectively. Learn more about search rankings. 

That sounds good and logical. Also i see that my best sold items are front up, and the less sold items more in the later pages, and all have exactly the same description and key words.

[RoxanaSaphire]

After checking the Marketplace search results more, i must say that i really dont see any logic in the priority of the listed things in search - but maybe i just dont get it.

For example when i type in the search "Shape legacy" i get 416 pages of results. In the first pages appear shapes who dont have even one rating in many cases, and/or who are also very old, and/or have a very bad layout. For example this: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Landon-premade-shape-legacy/24121678

5.000 linden for a shape, not even one rating and a very bad layout. Listed on page 7 of 416 pages!?!?

Or this: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/SHAPE-LEGACY-MALE-LELUTKA-LOGAN/23334357

Or this: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/KMarkese-Shape-Legacy-Lelutka/22181983

In same time the well known creators for quality shapes appear no-where on the first sites.

My most sold shape, comes on page 8, i have 10 five star ratings, more than every other product listed before my product appears.

 

Also other creaotors with much ratings (and i know they do sell much items) dont appear in the first pages. But obviously likely lower quality products appear on the first pages.

Why?

Edited January 25, 2023 by RoxanaSaphire

[DeanFiend]

They seemingly are still in "programmers are always right"-mode, despite these changes having been conceptualized by people who definitely have a rather theoretical knowledge about searching the marketplace for specific items and no clue about intuitive handling. 

Anyway, this is going to be reversed once the quarterly reports reveal how much revenue they lost does to this nonsense. Excluding vendor names for the search alone is a grave mistake, but there is no use in complaing. This is going to solve itself eventually.

[MeshPromo]

Please return to the old search method ASAP.

Because, once regular SL residents lose their confidence in the marketplace search results, they not gonna use it again. They'll simply ask friends and visit mainstream stores. 

This is not a beta grid to test. The new update already made a huge impact.

Thousands of dedicated small merchants who depend on the marketplace, going to be eliminated from trading.

Also, LL will lose lots of income as big stores not gonna pay commissions to LL for Casper vend sales.

[Lunachelsea]

This is absolute complete madness. Its jus so inconceivable to me.Being a larger store,My Losses are astronimical.In The 6 Digits. and we are only 8 days in. 

Average number of Mp transactions daily are between 200 - 300. Thats Daily, I have not even done 40 For a whole week.

Its definitely creating a snowball effect, I laid off 4 employees yesterday and if it keeps up at the end of the month, My region will have to go as well. Its just NOT Ok.If my Losses are this big, i can only imagine the losses LL is taking atm, and again will send the SL economy into a spin. 

Edited March 9, 2023 by Lunachelsea

[Fergie Finesmith]

Please, for god sake! roll back to the old searching system.  This is ridiculous, my sales are plumetting 90% for today  Why are you doing this to us merchants? I don't get it, we move SL economy, and for some of us this is one of our main income. You can't change the rules in this negative way from one day to another.

[Modulated]

nm

Edited March 10, 2023 by Modulated

[Rowan Amore]

Fairly certain they aren't doing it on purpose and if were as easy as.people seem to think it is to.just "roll back", they would have.  They're losing money, too.

[Elvina Ewing]

or it could be that "the Right hand (or more likely, the Head in this case) doesn't know what the Left hand is doing"... By the time the Head realizes what's going on, it's too late already 🤷‍♀️ anyway, i'm not holding my breath. Just LL being their usual self

[Caren Jewell]

Its all so frustrated that LL need so long for fixing something in MP. They can change it in 1 Sec from good to bad but need near 2 weeks to listen what happen and how bad this Update goes in the sales - and do nothing. I remember, 2022 or 2021 that each year had near the same Problem at same time. Valentine Sales goes down, Easter Sales gone to zero - and each time was it why LL changes the searches and Work end with tons of Issues for Customers/Merchants. I don't know why they try to make Updates and never check BEFORE if this will be good or bad for us. And when the Mess kills us, they need loooooooooooong time to fix it. I be tired to send Tickets with all the same Wish over long time now to make a Rollback please. Why need this so long, why is it so hard to make a check before the Update goes on - sometimes I think they "play and see" and when sales goes down - ***** happen. But I thought LL earn from the sales in MP too and don't will lost them too. Something work here very bad ... and LL still need again tooooooooooo long to fix this Mess. If this would be not so sad I would laugh so much when I see every day my Winter Punch Bowl under Relevance on first side beside Snow Globes and Xmas Wreath .... 😕

[platearmor]

5 hours ago, Caren Jewell said:

LLがMPで何かを修正するのに非常に長い時間がかかるのはとてもイライラしています。彼らは 1 秒でそれを良いものから悪いものに変えることができますが、何が起こって、このアップデートが売り上げにどれほど悪いかを聞くのに 2 週間近くかかります - そして何もしません. 2022 年または 2021 年に、毎年同じ時期にほぼ同じ問題が発生したことを覚えています。バレンタインの売り上げは減少し、イースターの売り上げはゼロになりました。そのたびに、LL は検索を変更し、顧客/商人に大量の問題を抱えて作業を終了しました。なぜ彼らがアップデートを行おうとして、これが私たちにとって良いことなのか悪いことなのかを事前に確認しないのか、私にはわかりません. そして、混乱が私たちを殺したとき、彼らはそれを修正するのに非常に長い時間を必要とします. ロールバックをするために、長い間同じウィッシュのチケットを送信するのにうんざりしています。なぜこれがそんなに長く必要なのか、アップデートが始まる前にチェックするのがなぜそんなに難しいのか - 時々私は思う」 😕

I agree with your opinion and I feel very sad when I think about this situation. I can only hope that LL is prioritizing the resolution of this issue.

[MeshPromo]

I wonder why doesn't Linden Lab have a beta marketplace to test the new updates? It should be a mirror of the marketplace website but disabled the buy and edit options.

If LL has a test site, they can first add the new update to that test site and then they can publish about it in the relevant community forum then let the concerned residents to test it and put their opinions on the forum thread.

That way LL and merchants won't have to deal with this much financial losses as well the regular customers won't get bad search experiences. Also, the LL web developers won't have to drink so much coffee on many nights

[Wulfie Reanimator]

3 hours ago, MeshPromo said:

I wonder why doesn't Linden Lab have a beta marketplace to test the new updates? It should be a mirror of the marketplace website but disabled the buy and edit options.

If LL has a test site, they can first add the new update to that test site and then they can publish about it in the relevant community forum then let the concerned residents to test it and put their opinions on the forum thread.

That way LL and merchants won't have to deal with this much financial losses as well the regular customers won't get bad search experiences. Also, the LL web developers won't have to drink so much coffee on many nights

They 100% have at least one. No doubt about it.

It makes no sense to work in the "production environment." Developers write code on their own computers, so they need a way to run the software locally to make sure their code even does anything. Every developer has their own personal copy of the store, probably with some smaller set of products. (Their code changes are then sent to some central location where the work of every dev is collected, and the code is then deployed somewhere.)

With modern tech, it's trivially easy to host multiple environments of your software/store. The code that gets sent to The Real Marketplace™️ can just as easily be sent to a "testing environment." I even recall Lindens talking about this environment in the past, before any of the current issues.

Edit: It's not public as far as I know.

Edited March 14, 2023 by Wulfie Reanimator

[MeshPromo]

1 hour ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

They 100% have at least one. No doubt about it.

 

If it is publically available as the beta grid / Agni, SL residents can give feedback through this community forum.

The problem is so far LL don't test how the new marketplace updates work for the community before they make it permanent. The developers can only assure about how the coding work, but not about how the majority of the SL customers feel about it.

If the test site is publically available, all of those issues won't happen.

[RoxanaSaphire]

OMFG!!!

 

I was thinking i am the only one! And i was so much thinking bout myself and what i did wrong that suddenly my sellling rates broke down to nearly zero since end of february.

Thank god that i found this thread.

Linden? Are you reading this thread? Do you wanna destroy us and the diversity in SL and Marketplace? Another shift to the big fishes, like in the real world?

 

Please roll that back immediately.

 

 

[RoxanaSaphire]

Bug seems fixed for me. Tested with 10 people now. 

Not only that, for me it works better than ever before. Im on page one search results. 

 

Guess they did yesterday during MP maintenance

[MeshPromo]

Still not working properly for me. For example, I searched "Signature Shirt" and I got this list as "relevance" but earlier it shows shirts that have more ratings and more sales.

Seems like "ratings" and "number of sales" are not included in the priority of sorting.

[Flea Yatsenko]

2 hours ago, MeshPromo said:

Still not working properly for me. For example, I searched "Signature Shirt" and I got this list as "relevance" but earlier it shows shirts that have more ratings and more sales.

Seems like "ratings" and "number of sales" are not included in the priority of sorting.

What's not working? I see a lot of signature shirts. Problem may be because you're looking for signature body shirts and signature is just a common name outside of the brand. This is more of a branding issue. The results are quite good for "legacy signature shirt". And I am one who usually complains about search quality.

[Caren Jewell]

5 hours ago, MeshPromo said:

 .......

Seems like "ratings" and "number of sales" are not included in the priority of sorting.

Maybe hard to understand for some but the missing Number of Sales and bad mixed in the sorting under Best Sales or Top Sales is the biggest Problem at all and can't show the right Stuff under Searches - not important what you try to type in search. Important and a Issue is what MeshPromo clear says in his Post and I agree 100 %

5 hours ago, MeshPromo said:

 

 

[RoxanaSaphire]

22 hours ago, MeshPromo said:

Still not working properly for me. For example, I searched "Signature Shirt" and I got this list as "relevance" but earlier it shows shirts that have more ratings and more sales.

Seems like "ratings" and "number of sales" are not included in the priority of sorting.

How do you know the selling rate of other products? Or are these shown products all yours?

 

At my search, for example, i get listed on page one, even if i dont have the most sellings, cause my shop is only some months old. But my ratings are very good.

 

I would not say that ratings are not relevant. I feel like that most important is now the word matching. If you have any word in your product headline that does not match the words in the search, then the product gets listed more later.

 

Thats why i changed all my product names in headline just to "Lelutka LEGACY SHAPE", and so im on top one page. I made more specific informations only in descritpion, not in headline.

 

Edited March 18, 2023 by RoxanaSaphire

[RoxanaSaphire]

What i even dont understand is that my "click throughs" are STILL zero. For Day and also LAST WEEK. 

Now, as the search seems to work, i would guess i get clicks again and sells. But no - still dead. WHY? 

Edited March 18, 2023 by RoxanaSaphire

[DulceDiva]

Wow...thank God I found this thread.My sales went down so quickly and I had no idea why! It's still not fixed for me, I am getting results that are irrelevant when searching for something on the Marketplace 😭.

LindenLab, please fix this ASAP!