Marketplace needs an overhaul!

[Exavor Diesel]

I think the Marketplace needs a design overhaul. If memory serves me correctly it was last updated significantly back in 2011. Given that it is the gateway for SL e-commerce for many, I think it's deserving of an update.

As present the GUI is starting to look dated, not optimised for mobile devices and in all honesty is quite uninviting. With more modern screen resolutions, there's also a lot of wasted space at the sides, which could be put to better use. 

In real life, shops are designed to be as inviting as possible as to encourage people to stay there longer and thus spend more money. Updating the interface will likely attract more sales which would be a win win for everyone.

Appreciate that some may be against the idea of potentially detracting from in-world sales, but I'm not sure it would. Often on the MP merchants link to their in-world store and as such the MP acts as a gateway to them. With many merchants offering an incentive/discount for subsequently purchasing in-world. 

 

Edited July 2, 2021 by Exavor Diesel

[Chris Corvinus]

On 7/2/2021 at 1:46 PM, Exavor Diesel said:

I think the Marketplace needs a design overhaul. If memory serves me correctly it was last updated significantly back in 2011. Given that it is the gateway for SL e-commerce for many, I think it's deserving of an update.

As present the GUI is starting to look dated, not optimised for mobile devices and in all honesty is quite uninviting. With more modern screen resolutions, there's also a lot of wasted space at the sides, which could be put to better use. 

In real life, shops are designed to be as inviting as possible as to encourage people to stay there longer and thus spend more money. Updating the interface will likely attract more sales which would be a win win for everyone.

Appreciate that some may be against the idea of potentially detracting from in-world sales, but I'm not sure it would. Often on the MP merchants link to their in-world store and as such the MP acts as a gateway to them. With many merchants offering an incentive/discount for subsequently purchasing in-world. 

 

I've been saying it needs a design update for the last 5 years. Its had the same design since it started in 2010. Its an 11 year old design that looks like its from the mid 2000's. Mind you, responsive design has been around since the late 2000's. Its ancient in 2021, on the same level as a website made with Geocities.

[Exavor Diesel]

On 7/10/2021 at 1:40 AM, Chris Nova said:

I've been saying it needs a design update for the last 5 years. Its had the same design since it started in 2010. Its an 11 year old design that looks like its from the mid 2000's. Mind you, responsive design has been around since the late 2000's. Its ancient in 2021, on the same level as a website made with Geocities.

Exactly. I don't know why they don't place priority on this as it's an easy way to increase sales and thus increase revenue. I don't spend much time on the Marketplace because I don't like navigating it. It's not enjoyable and as such I make fewer purchases than I otherwise would. I'm sure this is a common theme.

[bigmoe Whitfield]

On 7/22/2021 at 1:32 PM, Exavor Diesel said:

Exactly. I don't know why they don't place priority on this as it's an easy way to increase sales and thus increase revenue. I don't spend much time on the Marketplace because I don't like navigating it. It's not enjoyable and as such I make fewer purchases than I otherwise would. I'm sure this is a common theme.

why?  no point in fixing it currently,  plus I'm gonna go out on a limb and maybe just maybe think that this is build around their backend and is not as straight forward and rip and rebuild and that's just gonna be that.

[Flea Yatsenko]

4 hours ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

why?  no point in fixing it currently,  plus I'm gonna go out on a limb and maybe just maybe think that this is build around their backend and is not as straight forward and rip and rebuild and that's just gonna be that.

SLMP is basically an eCommerce site, but LL is the mediator, it's a lot like eBay. A ton of research and improvements with increasing sales has been done since the last time SLMP was ever touched. And go compare it to another eCommerce site like Amazon or eBay. Amazon and eBay both load almost instantly on my computer, and when you log in you see what you've recently purchased and recommendations on what you might like. It's a clean design, no extra stuff, no fancy colored banners, just a focus on the products for sale.

Now go to SLMP, the page takes a long time to load (anything over 300ms is basically death for an eCommerce website), a quarter of the width of the page is just a bunch of categories which could be used to display relevant products instead. The top part is a carousel (which no one uses anymore) suggesting what I assume are promoted goods. Under that is another carousel with promoted goods merchants pay to have promoted. Below that is a few listings of what people are "buying now". Which, by the way, doesn't even use remotely standard CSS like a flex box to display and instead uses floats.

SLMP needs a huge redesign. These out-dated carousels need to go, it needs to load faster, it needs to show similar items to what you purchased, make recommendations, and do a better job shoving products in your face that you might like. Look at all the categories a place like Amazon or eBay has when you load the home page logged in. Recommended categories, recently viewed items I looked at but didn't buy (so I can be reminded and maybe they can get a sale out of me), a special deal of the day, recommended videos, items related to stuff I've looked at, more items I might like because of my buying and viewing history, a few little seasonal things that aren't really tailored to me after all the stuff that's been tailored to me. A ton of recommendations for things based on categories of products I view or buy. EBay is similar just not as good.

But my point is that an SLMP redesign isn't just about the way the site looks. It's about how it gets products to people and the site helps them find relevant stuff they want to buy. The home page doesn't do this at all, it's why everyone depends on search and why no one can find what they need most of the time, and why there's so many problems with search. Search is what people use when the home page isn't giving them what they need. Going to eBay or Amazon I can find stuff I'd like to buy just by opening up the home page. Marketplace is showing me some beach stuff and a ton of female clothes I'll never buy. Getting search to work on a site of user generated content that earns the creator money is pretty much impossible to get working very well. It's always going to be an uphill battle. But the home page should show you stuff you'd like to buy that you'd like that interests you. Right now it just shows you what other people are buying and some stuff merchants paid to promote to anyone (completely un-targeted advertising). SLMP needs someone with eCommerce experience to revamp the whole thing and give visitors to the home page something they want to buy before they even search.

Marketplace's performance is absolutely abysmal. It doesn't even work on the mobile version. I'm not trying to be mean to LL or the SLMP team by any means, what I'm asking for is a lot and it would require something from the outside. But I can almost guarantee you they'd make a lot more money increasing sales by showing relevant products to people on a fast loading website than they would getting paid for featured listings on the home page.

 

[Coffee Pancake]

40 minutes ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

Marketplace's performance is absolutely abysmal.

Just poked it with a couple of different tools, it's .. actually fine. Got significantly better numbers than you did.

The bulk of the data is images .. which is to be expected for an image centric shopping website.

I would also challenge your assertion that any page load over 300ms is death for ecommerce. Amazon tested on the same tool is well over 300ms and scores worse than the SLM in certain metrics.

As for the rest, you appear to be asking for LL to pay more attention to your activities in SL, profile your behavior and community participation, chat and group membership, and then tailor the marketplace to you based on that.

[Flea Yatsenko]

It takes two whole seconds for ANYTHING to show up on the page, that's before the HTML is loaded so the browser knows which images to fetch. After the first two seconds for FCP then the browser starts to download the images. Largest Contentful Paint is the time when the largest DOM element on the page is displayed. The first two seconds of that load for the page to start has nothing to do with the images, it's the time it takes a (fresh) browser to render anything on the page, including any HTML. Usually because it's waiting on the network, possibly because of excessive redirects.

FCP is not when the entire page and every image is loaded, it's when the browser displays something, anything, even if it's just the first bit of HTML that hasn't even been styled with CSS yet.

[animats]

Marketplace needs better graphic design. This has been pretty much figured out for online commerce.

Catalog (thumbnail) pages.

Some kind of fountain on SL marketplace. Too much text, dim, murky picture. Text on images is unreadable in the small thumbnails.

.

Fountain from real-world shopping site. No text, brighter image, no clutter. You can see what you're buying.

Or go for simplicity with a neutral background. Real-world shopping.

Dim images are a curse of the SL marketplace. Raw screenshots of SL are dim for a number of reasons. Try to set the overall brightness of your image around 50%. The product thumbnails should be allowed a few short lines of descriptive text. That would encourage sellers to clean up their cluttered images.

Small images must be clear, or you lose the whole effect.

LL could put in a mouse-over so that when you put the cursor over the image, it gets bigger. That's common on shopping sites. Since the thumbnail is a smaller version of a larger picture, the images are already loaded.

These are easy fixes.

Fix in-world store links and move items from departed sellers to Marketplace Archives.

If a seller doesn't log on for a year, their items should be moved to Marketplace Archives, so you know you're buying from a defunct brand.

"See item in-world" should lead to the store at least 95% of the time. If you click on one of those links and find yourself falling from 3000m, Marketplace has failed you. There are various ways to automate that. The best would be to search the target location for the name of the uploaded item, and if it's not nearby, warn the seller. After 30 days, remove the "See item in-world" link. Next best is to look at parcel ownership history, and if it's changed since upload, send a message to the seller as above. Third best is a "Report store not there" button, like flagging something as "Permanently closed' on Yelp.

Also, seller store pages should have a link to the in-world store, and a place for a picture of it.

[Extrude Ragu]

The marketplace does not even load on mobile for me. Browser says too many redirects.

[Odaks]

The entire matter of redundant landmarks is a huge frustration in all areas. It would be wonderful if an auto-update system could identify these and publish updates or deletions.

I dream too much sometimes, I think.

[Katherine Heartsong]

30 year UX design veteran here ... and I wouldn't even know where to start the redesign, it's that bad.

Give me six months and a team of 2-3 UX folks and a few devs? I'd get it there.

But that's a $150-200K investment that LL is unlikely to make, simply based on monetary ROI.

[MeshPromo]

I just checked the SLMP while reading the comments.

Edited August 31, 2021 by MeshPromo

[LittleMe Jewell]

19 minutes ago, MeshPromo said:

I just checked the SLMP while reading the comments.

That particular issue is completely related to the other problems going on right now -- which are likely related to the partial outage at Amazon Web Services.