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MARKETPLACE BROKEN AGAIN


SerArthur56
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Over 5 weeks ago, I start ot open TIcket, Jira and post here. I copy transparent where they said "we have no Eta atm, or be patient we hear you and notice all". I try to contact and explain with lots of Shots like many other here. Or I add Tommy Linden here in Posts with hope he talk with us" cause I can't understand why they closed Tickets, Jira all without any words. No transparency, no Info what they would do and how to help us. In the last week open more and more Merchants Jira and send Infos about: how and why we need help - nothing. We knew that the Update would come and had Hope - but when we see how the Info comes about this Update for yesterday - it was not a special Info - only that they work and fixed "something in MP". 

We hope that the Update fixed "Listing Enhancements" but they don't. All other Bugs are the same Mess like before too and I was full of hope too that my Listenings shows me not like today again the old Stuff from New year, Xmas or Halloween ... 

I ask before this all realy was a Problem here in Forum for a Rollback in one big Post - nothing. But they take 10 % from the small Sales we have at last and what I don't understand is this: LL must have massive loss in Sales too and it seems that is not a big problem for them and how they "work with us" shocks me realy. They are hard working on SL20 Birthday and SL Mobile .. but they show here now how "important" Merchants are for them. It seems we come at last .. and THIS makes me realy realy sad. 

The Team had Time enough to made a Rollback 5 Weeks ago as the Mess starts .. and now we sit day by day, week by week and feel lost. Thank you LL/MP-Team for this "great Easter Egg" 😌 thank you for nothing! They did this Mess in Search every Single Year in Spring/Valentine/Easter but fixed them mostly in one week. We lost at this time much they don't learn and send us again with an Update 5 weeks ago in a Nightmare again and this Time they let us alone. I can't believe it  .. I can't and ask myself: why?? ..the Rollback was our Chance ... but none of the Team was willing to hear. 

My Jira is still open maybe not long like the other and will be closed like the other from you and you and you  .. 

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-233609

Edited by Caren Jewell
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Regarding this blog post:

Quote

Recently we made a change to the default sort for merchant stores to "newest first" instead of "relevance."

Nope, it's not. The default is still "relevance". [Edit - MERCHANT STORE - I read that wrong]

Quote

Your product may not be appearing in the same position as it used to in relevance sort for product search for a number of reasons. [...] Titles [...] How well it sells [...] Keywords [...] features

Nope, not true at all, none of these reasons. Just type in a few search words, like "game" or "teleporter", and then you'll immediately notice it's still completely broken.

Quote

We have adjusted the weighting of each of these factors with the last search upgrade.

Nope. It's broken. When I search for 'teleporter', the number 1 result is a ten year-old piece of crap that uses outdated sit-tp technology that does not work beyond 2600 meters'. When I search for 'game', on #1, I get a prop from a popular Korean TV series, heavily infringing trademarks, not a game at all. And beyond these results, mostly more irrelevant junk. I repeat: it's broken. For months now.

Quote

we are also continuing maintenance and have a planned release Monday April 10th to fix a bug impacting merchant product listing enhancements

Thanks for the two weeks of free ads, that remain in effect until April 14, as compensation for prior ads not working - these compensatory ads themselves - which, ironically, are currently also not working. I guess I have a time window from the 10th to the 14th to check whether the changes will actually be effective and whether I'll be paying for new listing anhancements at all, or not, after that.

[Update 2] Over the past few hours, front page ads seem to have suddenly switched from a limited set of 40-ish to a lot of different ads again now. Hope that'll reflect in the listing enhancement reports and the sales.

Edited by Arduenn Schwartzman
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43 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

General search is still Relevance.

Granted, one extremely minor grievance less.

Let's hope that somehow, the two major, very consequential ones can be reasoned away like that too.

LL has one major ace up the sleeve in claiming that it's still all a work in progress.

Edited by Arduenn Schwartzman
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Whatever.... sales my are back to ZERO again after this new update LOL 

I really lost faith in Marketplace, I don't know what is LL trying to do, I'm relying my sales on in-world events

If you know in-world events please share the info!! Marketplace is a LOST CASE,  they don't want to help us at all, that's clear.

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We need to come to the realization sales or views apparently don’t matter anymore. What matters now is what is saleing at this moment. Your hard work doesn’t matter to them because apparently they think it’s either old or not saleing to there expectations  and now the marketplace is pretty much a joke. On the lighter side it’s a joke in the “now”.

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I have one product listing on Marketplace.  It was not showing up in search results and apparently almost never has.  My listing shows up in search results after I removed special characters and a version number from my listing's title.  My listing has a three-word title.  When I type the exact title in as a search string my listing shows up as the second result, among other listings with the same three words in their titles.  When I enter 2 words into search, my listing shows up as the 47th result among titles with those two words in them.  The other listings at the top contain NO SPECIAL CHARACTERS.  Some distance down the list are a few with hyphens and one with braces.

I was using Sort by: Relevance.

One data point may not be sufficient, but it appears that changing the listing title to remove the garbage characters helped immensely.

 

Edited by Ardy Lay
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19 hours ago, Happy Toshi said:

We need to come to the realization sales or views apparently don’t matter anymore. What matters now is what is saleing at this moment. Your hard work doesn’t matter to them because apparently they think it’s either old or not saleing to there expectations  and now the marketplace is pretty much a joke. On the lighter side it’s a joke in the “now”.

 

On 4/8/2023 at 6:43 AM, Rowan Amore said:

The default when searching a merchant's store is Newest.  General search is still Relevance.

 

19 hours ago, Happy Toshi said:

We need to come to the realization sales or views apparently don’t matter anymore. What matters now is what is saleing at this moment. Your hard work doesn’t matter to them because apparently they think it’s either old or not saleing to there expectations  and now the marketplace is pretty much a joke. On the lighter side it’s a joke in the “now”.

They should rename both Best selling and relevance "Random"

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12 hours ago, Ardy Lay said:

I have one product listing on Marketplace.  It was not showing up in search results and apparently almost never has.  My listing shows up in search results after I removed special characters and a version number from my listing's title.  My listing has a three-word title.  When I type the exact title in as a search string my listing shows up as the second result, among other listings with the same three words in their titles.  When I enter 2 words into search, my listing shows up as the 47th result among titles with those two words in them.  The other listings at the top contain NO SPECIAL CHARACTERS.  Some distance down the list are a few with hyphens and one with braces.

I was using Sort by: Relevance.

One data point may not be sufficient, but it appears that changing the listing title to remove the garbage characters helped immensely.

I tested this to see if I could reproduce it. My test product did move from second place to first place for the test search when I removed the info in brackets (leaving three words as the title). However, when I added random words with no special characters to the title, it went right down the search results. When I had the title with the three words and a random hyphen, I was in the top spot again.

I think what's happening here is that the more words there are, the less important each word is seen as being. It's not so much the special characters, but just that it's more stuff in the title. People only tend to add hyphens and brackets when they've used a lot of words.

In another thread, I commented on adding keywords to the features section to make my products go up in search. Doing that and making the titles shorter is getting my stuff to the top of some searches, so it's worth making the edits.

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Really can’t see how stuff moving this fast on the marketplace down the list is better for anyone…. I know how you feel.. only had one sale … someone over there in linden labs either hates the marketplace or has to much time on there hands. Times are tough now second life depression.

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Even if LL managed to somehow completely fix marketplace overnight it would still take days or weeks for the proper changes to show up. I.E. if they are weighing results with sales in the slightest, and the last several months have been boosting sales of lower quality or older items because they've been given preferential treatment in search results. It takes time for users to correct it by buying the right stuff. Mainly the power users who can search for something, skip past all the prim/sculpty/etc stuff and find the good stuff, then buy it.

There really needs to be an opt in thing for each store, where the merchant does an action that shows they are still active, and then users can filter active stores or not. I.E. a merchant just clicks a button on their dashboard to say they're active, then when people search they can filter by stores that have clicked the button, have not, or ignore that filter. I think no matter how hard LL tries they will never get SLMP marketplace search and sort working that well, because they listings they have to index are not very high quality a lot of the time and there's so much legacy stuff. There are a lot of stores older than a lot of very popular websites that exist right now. Even just excluding stores that haven't created a new listing in the last year and removing them from default search unless someone goes out of their way to enable it. LL needs more filters to sift through all the listings.

And FYI no matter what LL does to the search there are guaranteed to be winners and losers. My BFF also has an SLMP store and with the constant changes to search, we've always been at odds, when my sales are good and his aren't, and then they change the algos and my sales are bad and his are good.

My sales are still well below normal for year over year (this April compared to April 2022), but they've finally started trending in the right direction. I hope this is a sign things are slowly starting to improve because if they kept trending they way they were I wouldn't really have much reason to create any content for SL anymore.

Anyways, whatever LL has been doing, even if they fixed it completely (which they won't without adding some sort of extra filters to limit what they have to search and sort), it could take weeks for it to show up properly in your sales. I don't want to sound like a suck up, LL's shenanigans have cost me a lot of money. But it's going to take time for whatever they've done to show up as a positive for us. I have been checking lighthouse and other website performance tools on marketplace and the site is getting pretty quick, honestly. They are putting in some good effort.

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7 hours ago, Polenth Yue said:

I tested this to see if I could reproduce it. My test product did move from second place to first place for the test search when I removed the info in brackets (leaving three words as the title). However, when I added random words with no special characters to the title, it went right down the search results. When I had the title with the three words and a random hyphen, I was in the top spot again.

I think what's happening here is that the more words there are, the less important each word is seen as being. It's not so much the special characters, but just that it's more stuff in the title. People only tend to add hyphens and brackets when they've used a lot of words.

In another thread, I commented on adding keywords to the features section to make my products go up in search. Doing that and making the titles shorter is getting my stuff to the top of some searches, so it's worth making the edits.

Yes if you have a good store and you sell 500 different houses, change the name of all 500 houses to just "House" I bet you would make alot of money

Edited by Billysue Bluebird
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The following is still broken on my personal Marketplace store: 

  • Best selling: shows my Gacha's at top that are no-copy, and can only be sold once!  INSTEAD of my bento animations that have been sold many of times.  Did old data sales get lost? 😅
  • Relevance: Doesn't show any of my store items on top of my page in my Marketplace store.
  • Name:  A-Z or Z-A doesn't work in my Marketplace store.

 

I like to see some updated news from LL how progress is going?
It's been almost 8 weeks (one of my first posts) now that the MP issues started. 

 

 

 

 

PS: My sales have been awful as well. 

Edited by Yeya Zuta
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These are my key takeaways from the LL "What the heck happened to my Marketplace store" post:
1. Newness is now the default sort for stores
2. Weighting of key factors going into Relevance has been changed
3. Indexing to the top 50k items in the MP is now a key determinant in Best Selling (and possibly Relevance - not clear on that)
4. LL has increased revenue from these changes.
 
So, all the changes have been intentional. And are working as expected. They knew it would have a negative impact on a segment of Merchants, and did it anyway. They did not communicate any of this in the past 6 weeks. They say they are still "tweeking" which means they have no intention of reverting to the prior coding.
 
So, the bug reports (JIRA), support tickets, forum posts have been shouting in the wind, because it is all working as expected. So all the time and energy that went into reporting for the past 6 weeks has been a waste. LL's lack of communication during those 6 weeks was irresponsible. They could have/should have addressed the feedback a month ago.
 
The only real bug has been the mess with enhancements - which WILL be fixed.
 
It won't matter what we call out or comment on - it is all part of the plan - the plan is working for some Merchants (apparently) and for LL.
 
If there were changes/fixes, this is what I'd ask for:
1. Re-visit, revise, re-balance weighting of key factors going into Relevance. The new weighting appears to favor Titles (and simple ones at that) above all else. Volume, recency of sale, rating have all been buried. In effect, to benefit from the new weighting, Merchants would need to revise listings - and that is an unreasonable expectation, especially if LL "tweeks" weighting again.
2. Indexing to 50k items is ludicrous - that's under 1% of the MP items. So an item has to be in the top 1% to matter in sorting results. Given that the order of products in stores PRIOR to these changes made some sense when sorted by Relevance or Best Selling, indexing must not have been used or used in a different way. So now, most stores will always see a jumble for Relevance/Best Selling because they will never reach this new 1% threshold. Get rid of it.
3. If 1 & 2 are done, then the Relevance/Best selling sorts would work again and could be reinstated as the default. The only reason it was changed to Newness was that they KNEW these changes messed up so many stores.
 
I have little hope at this point that meaningful revisions will be made. LL says they are seeing increased revenue from the changes, so to them it has all been a success.
 
Edited by Arwen Serpente
misspelled "been"
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Daily check/example: I create realy much Stuff for Spring/Easter this year. Under "Newes first" in my Store are all visible, sure and a Spring Ruin Gate on Top. Under "Relevance" 5 Spring or new Items, the Rest Xmas or much older Stuff - but on Top this Spring Ruin Gate too. Best Selling: The Spring Ruin Gate again at first on Top. The rest I don't know, old or mix and match from anything. This Gate jump in all Lists on Top - yes, I notice I sold it cause it was near the only Spring/Easter Stuff I sold over weeks now and Easter Weekend and missing all other Sales. What I mean is:

I sold this Gate, nothing more - the rest in my Shop in SL. I notice the badest Spring/Easter Season I ever had in over 14 years MP/Store. Never ever had this before. It shows for me clear that People buy what they see and if they can't see in in my Store the "Best Selling Stuff" or good sort Lists like before the Update comes: They go! (I can only speak for my Store) 

I checked other Stores in MP in search with simple Words like "Spring or Easter" and found tons of Shops yes but not the Top Sellers (I wount type names now) but I found tons of OLD Stuff in the List. But when I try to find "lingerie" all categories shows it near perfect.

I change the Text from an old Item "Easter cart planter" (Title was before longer) and this old Cart jumps on top.

What I mean is: it seems that short Title send an Item to top? Not important if I sold it or not? This Cart is realy old but on Top in List by me now. What should this bring? And I can not change the Title for tons of Easter Stuff in "Easter Egg" or "Easter Wreath" cause I have TONS of different Stuff like them. But not one is showing in my Lists on first sides in my Store. No Sales, no listening. And why no sales? Bad Lists at all since Update.

at last: If the MP Team are bothering and like to change anything in Search (I didn't say that all was bad before) why the Hell over years now in our best selling Time? Valentine/Spring/Easter. Why not in Summer when more quiet time stands before. I be always open for news and understand that something must change and new and update is important, yes.

But Hell - why in our best selling Time. All the work/creation for this Season in MP Store was for me for nothing. And that was the point why I can't be quiet and send tons of Posts/open Tickets/Jira and now we got an Update. I sort this out in another Post and it shows for me not realy help how long they see "good sales" and I sit here and notice over weeks the badest Time ever in my Shop.

I let it run .. I can't change over 1300 Items in short title and btw I don't know if this realy would help. For testing is this for to much work and I let now my Store run .. and work for Shop/SL. I feel lost over weeks and it costs not only my sales no. It was hard to sit and see daily my store running in Hell and can't do anything. Happy Easter

Edit: An Update should be better for all and not only for a part of them. And if this Changes from an Update shows the result maybe in weeks or months like this here, is it for me a no go to be so long quiet from the Team and special in this Times of Seasons where we had good Sales before without any problems

 

Edited by Caren Jewell
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2 hours ago, Arwen Serpente said:
These are my key takeaways from the LL "What the heck happened to my Marketplace store" post:
1. Newness is now the default sort for stores
2. Weighting of key factors going into Relevance has been changed
3. Indexing to the top 50k items in the MP is now a key determinant in Best Selling (and possibly Relevance - not clear on that)
4. LL has increased revenue from these changes.
 
So, all the changes have been intentional. And are working as expected. They knew it would have a negative impact on a segment of Merchants, and did it anyway. They did not communicate any of this in the past 6 weeks. They say they are still "tweeking" which means they have no intention of reverting to the prior coding.
 
So, the bug reports (JIRA), support tickets, forum posts have been shouting in the wind, because it is all working as expected. So all the time and energy that went into reporting for the past 6 weeks has been a waste. LL's lack of communication during those 6 weeks was irresponsible. They could have/should have addressed the feedback a month ago.
 
The only real bug has been the mess with enhancements - which WILL be fixed.
 
It won't matter what we call out or comment on - it is all part of the plan - the plan is working for some Merchants (apparently) and for LL.
 
If there were changes/fixes, this is what I'd ask for:
1. Re-visit, revise, re-balance weighting of key factors going into Relevance. The new weighting appears to favor Titles (and simple ones at that) above all else. Volume, recency of sale, rating have all been buried. In effect, to benefit from the new weighting, Merchants would need to revise listings - and that is an unreasonable expectation, especially if LL "tweeks" weighting again.
2. Indexing to 50k items is ludicrous - that's under 1% of the MP items. So an item has to be in the top 1% to matter in sorting results. Given that the order of products in stores PRIOR to these changes made some sense when sorted by Relevance or Best Selling, indexing must not have been used or used in a different way. So now, most stores will always see a jumble for Relevance/Best Selling because they will never reach this new 1% threshold. Get rid of it.
3. If 1 & 2 are done, then the Relevance/Best selling sorts would work again and could be reinstated as the default. The only reason it was changed to Newness was that they KNEW these changes messed up so many stores.
 
I have little hope at this point that meaningful revisions will be made. LL says they are seeing increased revenue from the changes, so to them it has all been a success.
 

 

I like to think it's still "work in progress". It won't benefit anyone for non or less sales 'intentionally'.
There are more "smaller" MP stores out there, then big brand names. It would be "commercial suicide" for LL to put their eggs in one basket only (no pun intended ) 😊 🥚🐣

 

 

 

Edited by Yeya Zuta
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Glad you're optimistic, Yeya. Sadly and obviously, I'm not so optimistic. I agree with you regarding "intent". I don't think the changes are malicious, but they are aware of the negative impact - they indicate it in their post several times:

"We recently made changes to the Marketplace that had some results that our community was not expecting."

"When using product search Your product may not be appearing in the same position as it used to in relevance sort"

"When viewing a Marketplace store page or the product search with relevance sort enabled and no search term, you will get unexpected results." 

"If your items do not fall into the top 50k they will all be ranked the same. This is why your best selling sort may not match your best selling reports. In short, your items will only have a sales rank if they fall into the top 50k."

They know there will be winners and losers with these changes.  It isn't so much dependent on the size of the store, but how an item fares with the new factor weighting, and if a product breaks into the top 50k. As far as they can report so far, it is successful and increasing their revenue.  So some Merchants are winning, we just don't know which ones and how large or small they are.

They refer to future "tweeks" which yes, means a work in progress, but to me a tweek is a small move, not what many here have been asking for.

Edited to add: If they do have big changes planned, I hope they will communicate to the community before making them. They tend to like the "ta da!" of implementing change and announcing after.  Communication from LL over the past 6 weeks has been very poor, leading to the post "What the heck happened to my Marketplace store".

 

Edited by Arwen Serpente
edited for additional commentary
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9 minutes ago, Arwen Serpente said:

Glad you're optimistic, Yeya. Sadly and obviously, I'm not so optimistic. I agree with you regarding "intent". I don't think the changes are malicious, but they are aware of the negative impact - they indicate it in their post several times:

"We recently made changes to the Marketplace that had some results that our community was not expecting."

"When using product search Your product may not be appearing in the same position as it used to in relevance sort"

"When viewing a Marketplace store page or the product search with relevance sort enabled and no search term, you will get unexpected results." 

"If your items do not fall into the top 50k they will all be ranked the same. This is why your best selling sort may not match your best selling reports. In short, your items will only have a sales rank if they fall into the top 50k."

They know there will be winners and losers with these changes.  It isn't so much dependent on the size of the store, but how an item fares with the new factor weighting, and if a product breaks into the top 50k. As far as they can report so far, it is successful and increasing their revenue.  So some Merchants are winning, we just don't know which ones and how large or small they are.

They refer to future "tweeks" which yes, means a work in progress, but to me a tweek is a small move, not what many here have been asking for.

 

 

Aha,  I missed that part. SL is a platform that is content creator based. What hurts us will eventually hurt SL...  Time will tell. 

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28 minutes ago, Arwen Serpente said:

"If your items do not fall into the top 50k they will all be ranked the same. This is why your best selling sort may not match your best selling reports. In short, your items will only have a sales rank if they fall into the top 50k."

Does this means that old big brands will always have advantage, and new brands have no change on MP..... OR very old products (that use to sell well) from like 15 years ago will come up more?   🤔

Edited by Yeya Zuta
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Grid status shows nothing for today - okay maybe they planed it hidden... like important parts they changed without asking what Merchants/Sellers think about it. My Problem all the time is to understand their way. If I have a Company with so much People is it not my opinion to save only a part of them to have good sales and the rest can do what they want. I would check out BEFORE I make so massive changings who win and who not and sorry but none should lost. And when this is realy for me important like they say "All Merchants have priority top" then should I work so and in 5 weeks comes nothing - they changed, mess comes and they be quiet over this full time. Listening Enhance maybe will work now (I still delete mine weeks ago) cause yes, I think they lost much Money but the rest - I see the Mess like before and maybe it will be fixed in future - should it work then after weeks then till it runs better? Waiting near 6 weeks, waiting till they start to fix this mess and then waiting weeks till it seems it help. Its a count over tooo long weeks for something they change without knowing if this good or bad. IF they changed something like this blind in SL with Landlandlords/Landladies and they have massive Problems to got their Rent and can't pay anymore the rent or the Sims would be down - what do you think how long will it need that the LL Team jump and help and fix it?

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4 minutes ago, Yeya Zuta said:

Does this means that old big brands will always have advantage, and new brands have no change on MP..... or very old products, that use to sell a lot like 15 years ago?   🤔

This can be maybe the answer why it shows only tons of old Stuff in MP/Lists or in different Stores on top

Edited by Caren Jewell
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