And AGAIN the same 2 things.

[Josh Susanto]

1) Textures will not load.

2) No one is buying anything from me.

At what point can we all stop calling it a mere coincidence?

[Randall Ahren]

I'm getting sales. Maybe everyone that wants a rock has already bought one? What do you mean textures won't load? You mean upload? Have you tried uploading from different sims?

[WADE1 Jya]

I've been getting some sales... but not a strong day. Are many people having trouble loading textures today? :matte-motes-frown:

Hope people aren't all lost in a sea of gray out there, I'm having no issues... but then again I have one of those ridiculous unlimited super-bandwidth kind of plans so not a good example of standard SL user most likely :matte-motes-bashful:

[Tiffy Vella]

Sometimes my textures won't load. People still buy my stuff.

You could try-

a) clear cache and use smaller resolution textures and

b) make better stuff.

Just poking you about number two, sorry. I'd recommend using an alt to test a cross section of your vendors, both inworld and on the MP. See if they can make purchases. If they can, check your land settings to make sure you arent stopping people arriving somehow. Then check that you and your store/s are showing in Search. If you have had a sudden and dramatic stoppage of all sales that were healthy before there is definately something weird happening, and I'd guess Search is  the probable culprit.

[Lyra Blackthorne]

I cannot see any way that those two issues could possibly be linked.  One is a personal problem - the textures and the other is a product issue.  No way one effects the other, except for wishful thinking maybe

For textures not loading I would: clear cache and check your graphic settings first if that does not work I would try using another viewer

If your work is not selling look at what competitive items look like, how they are packaged and what they sell for.  If your items are not perceived as being the best value proposition (quality+price) then they wont sell.  Just having things to sell does not mean they will sell.

 

[Medhue Simoni]

I will validate you a little, lol. The texture issue is a problem with the cache, which also creates other problems. These include:

*Open GL problems which result in crash at log in

*Texture problems that result in graphics problems

*Other login problems

Yeah, it is crazy, and probably resulting in loss of sales. I personally switch from viewer to viewer, and I constantly have to delete both Secondlife folders just to log in.

There are many other possible reasons for loss of sales tho. Some is the timing. I never really believe that the summer is really a down trend for sales, or that less people log in. What I do see tho, are short time periods in the summer that are less profitable.

My son recently graduated from high school, and the timing makes sense that less people are going to be spending money in SL because they are going to alot of graduation parties and such, which is not cheap, lol.

[Josh Susanto]

>I'm getting sales.

And I am now getting orders again, AND texture problems have now gone away again.

>Maybe everyone that wants a rock has already bought one?

I keep thinking that must be true, but it seems like the more rocks I provide, the more people want.  It's pretty weird.

>What do you mean textures won't load? You mean upload? Have you tried uploading from different sims?

Yes. I usually make a point of starting the whole system from scratch, but it doesn't seem to have any effect while I'm still noting zero orders for an hour or more (that's a long time in my case).

[Josh Susanto]

>b) make better stuff.

Poke away all you like.

I have made more sophisticated stuff, but it just isn't as profitable. 

There seems to be no limit to the number of slightly different huge slabs of rock people will buy if they price is low enough.

Honestly, no one is more surprised by this than I am.

> I'd recommend using an alt to test a cross section of your vendors, both inworld and on the MP.

I am the only vendor, and I sell only on MP.

>Search is  the probable culprit.

I will try SLM searches next time. Thanks for the suggestion. I do know that the items are not unlisted or otherwise unavailable. But if they are somehow invisible in searches, that's pretty important to know.

[Tiffy Vella]

---

Josh Susanto wrote:

 

There seems to be no limit to the number of slightly different huge slabs of rock people will buy if they price is low enough.

Honestly, no one is more surprised by this than I am.

---

Nothing wrong with bits of rock. They are very useful things in gardens, especially if you want to hide mundane terrain textures.

Perhaps you could also enlist a few friends to try and find your product on the MP. It might help you hone your keywords if you watch what they use to search with. Don't let them cheat and just punch your name in..they have to pretend they've never heard of you.

[Josh Susanto]

[i cannot see any way that those two issues could possibly be linked. One is a personal problem - the textures and the other is a product issue. No way one effects the other, except for wishful thinking maybe] 

What you say should seem to be true, and yet it most observably is not. My price structure and large number of items allow me to basically track significant changes in sales rate on an hourly basis if I want to badly enough. When I get no sales for over an hour, that's almost always a sign that something has gone very wrong. When I can already tell what's going to be wrong in SL by looking at sales before I log in to SL, that's oddly not as gratifying as you might imagine. Not anymore, anyway.

One classic hypothesis in such cases is that there is a 3rd variable that affects the other 2, but which is not obvious. Another hypothesis is that there is a causal relationship which is not yet understood.

My current working hypothesis is that there is a loss of concurrency due to load and rez issues that primaily affects the same demographic group of users who normally shop for my items. That is; if sh## just doesn't work in-world, they won't go shopping, either.
Another possibility I see is that if each thing ultimately boils down to a bandwidth problem, they could each occur at the same time for that reason and simply appear to be some other issue.

[For textures not loading I would: clear cache and check your graphic settings first if that does not work I would try using another viewer]

Yes. Or I can get the same result by going AFK for a couple of hours rather than spending that time stupidly chasing my tail repeatedly clearing, restarting, and opening other viewers. I suspect my potential buyers are doing that, too, but since I can't see who isn't ordering, that makes it hard for me to ask them.

[if your work is not selling look at what competitive items look like, how they are packaged and what they sell for.  If your items are not perceived as being the best value proposition (quality+price) then they wont sell.  Just having things to sell does not mean they will sell.]

That would explain sluggish sales in general. It would not explain why I'm getting zero orders for a period of time during which I would normally expect a dozen or more. As a whole, I'm still selling plenty. I just get irritated when, on top of being unable to produce new products in-world, the sales of my existing products have been mysteriously shut off, as if with a toggle switch someone has arbitrarily decided to flip for a while in San Francisco.

[Josh Susanto]

[My son recently graduated from high school, and the timing makes sense that less people are going to be spending money in SL because they are going to alot of graduation parties and such, which is not cheap, lol.] 

This sort of thing would also make sense if most of my sales were coming from U.S. highschools.

But they aren't. Most of my sales come from outside the U.S., and are broadly distributed over numerous time zones, at least as well as I have been able to determine by follow-up with big spenders and people with delivery problems.

Again, I should explain that I'm not describing a seasonal slump. I'm describing a short period of an hour or more during which regular textures do not load, temp textures do not rez, and there are no sales or detected normal increases in the numbers of views or searches for newer items (which I can easily scrutinize).

 

 

[Darrius Gothly]

Really stupid question time ...

When you hit one of these "mystical confluences" .. if you try and view your Marketplace pages, do they rez the pictures rapidly or is there a long delay?

If the absence of sales is from your Sim, have you asked others to TP in and see if they also witness the textures failing to load?

I can imagine that if you can't get textures to load and it's related to a Sim issue, people coming to your in-world store who get the same problem would immediately leave because "well this Sim is down, let's go find some place else to buy".

During these outages, have you tried restarting your Sim?

A couple years ago while renting some land on a private estate, we kept having some really unusual lag and rez issues. The landlord (an absolutely excellent manager btw) did everything he could, but the symptoms were just flat weird .. neither he nor I could nail down a reason for them in relation to any other type of issue we'd encountered. Eventually, after a couple months of filing tickets with LL (and trust me, his tickets got FAST response), the LL tech staff found the problem .. an intermittent network cable between the Sim Server and the network backbone.

*click .. click .. restart* FIXED!

[Josh Susanto]

I don't have a sim, and I don't want one.

When the "coincidence" occurs, the first thing I do is TP to a different sandbox, or to the place where my box is rezzed.

So far, that hasn't made any difference.

 

[Darrius Gothly]

Okay, so the cessation of sales is with your Marketplace listings.

Which do you notice first? Textures failing to rez or a drop in sales?

When you first notice this situation, do you check your listings to be sure you can view them? (Picking random or best-sellers from your Store listing for example.)

[Darrius Gothly]

Stupid idea time ...

Textures failing to rez is usually related to bandwidth problems on your home internet connection. For some reason, you are not getting the throughput you normally get. (I'm on cable and I can tell when the neighborhood comes home from work or gets up in the morning .. bandwidth tanks. blech!)

Assuming you are detecting a drop in sales by a steady stream of "delivered xxx" IMs from your magic box, a bandwidth drop or similar communications issue could also cause those IMs to back up or get dropped as well.

The next time it happens, I suggest you log out, reboot your modem, router and any other network gear between you and the 'Net ... then log in again and check if textures load properly. If they do then also watch for the stream of IMs resuming.

You might also want to watch for this happening at specific times of the day. It could be you've got a neighbor that comes home and turns on their File Sharing software at full bandwidth for a couple hours then shuts it down.

[Josh Susanto]

I've hit this again on the previous related thread, which I guess maybe should be linked.

The rez thing I would expect to be a local bandwidth problem, but that wouldn't explain the loss of SLM orders.

I have observed the 2 things in both chronological orders, and have learned to expect to observe them in both orders.

Cleaning everything out and rebooting is something I tend to do with some regularity in any case because I'm aware of people downloading massive amounts of radical Roman Catholic propaganda only a few meters away, which clearly does jam things up.

But the problems I describe here do not correlate with other types of local bandwidth problems I have learned to expect as indicators that I'm going to hear a lot of bad post-Vatican II kinds of whiny music all in major keys, or the discovery that someone has thrown a sweaty towel on top of the router. This SL/SLM thing is very different, and even happens while everything else is working just fine, or better than just fine.

Moreover, I logged in with my emergency alt yesterday and found that textures loaded fine. So he/she also did some experimental shopping for items offered by Josh Susanto, and he/she had no problem finding, paying for, or receiving items. 

I'm still not totally ready to abandon my "foreign traffic" hypothesis, but the alt experiment would seem to support a different hypothesis related to my delivery failures epidemic hypothesis that a huge number of problems that people are told they can do something else about are actually account-specific, and are best dealt with (at this point) by leaving the main account alone until LL either gets it unf###ed, or at least stops f###ing with it, and going alt.