Confused with the listed BEST SELLING items in my store

[Carl Go]

I listed/searched the best selling items in my store. To my surprise, it returned items(one of the items is Fatpack)  that have 0 sales stats in the report page. Can't help it if I am a bit suspicious. As my marketplace sales really sucks for months. 

Edited May 1, 2023 by Carl Go

[Flea Yatsenko]

Best selling has been broken for a while. My sales have been very poor the last few months as well. In fact I've been selling a lot of older builders kits that are around 10 years old more than anything. Lots of people have been pretty upset, customers for wondering why things look outdated and merchants for wondering why their new stuff isn't selling when it's superior in every way. Regardless my year over year compared to last year is absolutely abysmal and I'm not alone with this problem.

They have been playing around with search result rankings a lot lately. The new algorithm, from my experience, doesn't like short keyword searches and prefers you search for multiple keywords. It happens to work very well if you're searching for avatar accessories because you can search for body and item, i.e. "jake tank top shirt" gives good results but "shirt" gives horrible results. If you're selling stuff that doesn't have multiple keywords in a typical search, you're doomed.

LL has gone silent. And I understand why, the search results have been so skewed and weird the last few months that they have no data to calculate what's been selling well and what hasn't and what deserves to be selling well and what doesn't. For me it's created a weird situation where popular items people like aren't selling yet older, outdated stuff is selling. And I don't want to unlist my older stuff because there's a small amount of users who still prefer older stuff, and I'm afraid if I unlist it I just won't sell anything anymore because it's not picking up on newer stuff.

Personally I'm demoralized, why spend 3 times as much on texture uploads when all I'm gonna do is sell old baked non-material stuff, let alone even bother uploading PBR materials to SL. Hope they fix it soon, you're not alone. But thankfully they are switching to a more industry standard workflow so if SLMP isn't working right it'll be very easy to sell stuff on other marketplaces instead of having to try and build specifically for SL, which is some sort of unholy custom baking workflow that's stuck between modern games and 2nd and 3rd gen 3d consoles where you have to bake certain maps and lighting yet let some of the engine do some of the work. Anyways I'm on a tangent but my point is that I hope LL gets a little more transparent and starts to communicate a little better because the stuff you sell on SL for $10USD can easily be sold on other game marketplaces for 5 times as much.

[Carl Go]

May I know any game markets where I can try to sell my stuff?  Thank you 

[Carl Go]

I am not sure if it's only me,  but I can see sales pattern for months. I am only selling an average of 2 items every month. It wasn't like that before, but the change in sales pattern was so abrupt after they made some enhancements in the marketplace. 

[Flea Yatsenko]

To be honest looking at your store I think you have keyword issues, I don't think most people search for appliers. They search for skins. According to some of the other members here, keywords can hurt you in your title now, so if applier isn't a popular keyword it's gonna hurt you very badly.

[JUSTUS Palianta]

The silence from Linden on this topic is deafening.

 

[Carl Go]

Thanks for the heads up.. Appreciate it. 

[Polenth Yue]

They've stated that the bestselling sort in stores is messed up unless your items are in the top sellers of the entire marketplace, but they're working on changing it. That's not the thing I'd worry about as few customers will ever visit your store and sort that way. What is worth knowing is the whole search algorithm changed, so you want to remove unnecessary words from titles and make sure important keywords are repeated in the features section.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

This is what Polenth is referring to: https://community.secondlife.com/blogs/entry/13127-what-the-heck-happened-to-my-marketplace-store/

[Fergie Finesmith]

I gave up. We're having this problem since february... They don't care about it, that's clear.

[Caren Jewell]

16 hours ago, Polenth Yue said:

They've stated that the bestselling sort in stores is messed up unless your items are in the top sellers of the entire marketplace, but they're working on changing it. That's not the thing I'd worry about as few customers will ever visit your store and sort that way. What is worth knowing is the whole search algorithm changed, so you want to remove unnecessary words from titles and make sure important keywords are repeated in the features section.

It can make sense for Merchants but not for all. I start to change first 25 than 50 Items on this way it the Lists shows not any changes. So this can not be then the golden Goal for all Problems and again, this changes not the Problem in Relevance or other lists in own Store - maybe in MP at all, I don' t know. But what I know is that the Team says over long Weeks now that they are working on the Top Sellers Lists and this a long time to let us sit on this Mess. They say they see good sales in this Link from Wulfie and this may be happen but what is with the other side where Merchants have deep breaks in there sales or near like zero and they changes Keywords and Title too - its not only like me. I have slowy some sales now and be happy that I have my Shop inworld and on this is now my full Option not anylonger at MP.

[Polenth Yue]

18 hours ago, Caren Jewell said:

It can make sense for Merchants but not for all. I start to change first 25 than 50 Items on this way it the Lists shows not any changes. So this can not be then the golden Goal for all Problems and again, this changes not the Problem in Relevance or other lists in own Store - maybe in MP at all, I don' t know. But what I know is that the Team says over long Weeks now that they are working on the Top Sellers Lists and this a long time to let us sit on this Mess. They say they see good sales in this Link from Wulfie and this may be happen but what is with the other side where Merchants have deep breaks in there sales or near like zero and they changes Keywords and Title too - its not only like me. I have slowy some sales now and be happy that I have my Shop inworld and on this is now my full Option not anylonger at MP.

When you change listings, the change in search ranking is pretty much instant. Try different things with one product, figure out what worked, then change the rest. I've seen examples where people made changes that weren't very useful or they were trying to target a search term that nobody would really care about. Change for the sake of change won't work. It's targeted change, based on knowing what keywords are the most important. I understand that this is harder when English is a struggle, because you might be unsure what words people would use to search and what words you need to target. But that doesn't mean my advice is wrong. Just that you have an extra barrier to getting it working.

[Caren Jewell]

7 hours ago, Polenth Yue said:

When you change listings, the change in search ranking is pretty much instant. Try different things with one product, figure out what worked, then change the rest. I've seen examples where people made changes that weren't very useful or they were trying to target a search term that nobody would really care about. Change for the sake of change won't work. It's targeted change, based on knowing what keywords are the most important. I understand that this is harder when English is a struggle, because you might be unsure what words people would use to search and what words you need to target. But that doesn't mean my advice is wrong. Just that you have an extra barrier to getting it working.

Thank you Polenth for trying to help. I will try different things again in 3 Items again. But sorry, Linden changes the Search with an example and who of hell can then think, that we all must change our complete Items then in Store? And what for me is the biggest Problem I see are the crazy mess Lists. Like the Title here on Top for this Posts .. the Lists make no sense and very hard to sell very old stuff they show and this is not only in my Store. I checked yesterday different Stores in MP and wow I can't believe what I saw there .. and MP-Team told us to change this back but over 2 Month is nothing to see and this is hard cause this Problem is clear explain from many Merchants here in this Forum. To watch daily in my Store and see this "Best Selling Lists or Relevance" makes me sick cause over 12 years of Work are delete with one Update and shows Stuff from tons of years ago or out of Seasons. And this is not fixing from me with changing Keywords ... this is another Point and Problem, but there I will try time by time with some Items. Thank you Polenth, very kind of you try to help :)