Marketplace spring cleaning - an alternate approach

[CrystalShard Foo]

As described in this blog post, LL is planning to remove products that no longer sell and close the stores of creators who no longer log into the grid.

Rather than completely closing stores and removing products can these be moved to a filtered category so that people who want to buy these retired items would be still able to find them if they want to?

Marking the "retired items" filter checkbox would mean the resident understands and agrees that these products may come with no support.

This would be good because sometimes Marketplace is the only way to find items that are no longer available in-world from creators who are no longer with us for whatever reason.

In practice, it already helped me a couple of times - and it would be a shame to lose this ability.

[Peter Stindberg]

Good point!

[Jayla Menizah]

A very good point!

[Penny Patton]

Agreed 100%.

[Emma Krokus]

excellent suggestion

[Keen Voxel]

+1 for me too, I can think of a number of products that would fit this scenario, and having an archive or a "retired" filter to go off of would benefit both use cases.

[Chalice Yao]

19 minutes ago, CrystalShard Foo said:

This would be good because sometimes Marketplace is the only way to find items that are no longer available in-world from creators who are no longer with us for whatever reason.

Very much this!

[LittleMe Jewell]

25 minutes ago, CrystalShard Foo said:

As described in this blog post, LL is planning to remove products that no longer sell and close the stores of creators who no longer log into the grid.

Rather than completely closing stores and removing products can these be moved to a filtered category so that people who want to buy these retired items would be still able to find them if they want to?

Marking the "retired items" filter checkbox would mean the resident understands and agrees that these products may come with no support.

This would be good because sometimes Marketplace is the only way to find items that are no longer available in-world from creators who are no longer with us for whatever reason.

In practice, it already helped me a couple of times - and it would be a shame to lose this ability.

Opening a JIRA is the best way to request new ideas:  https://jira.secondlife.com

[Katherine Heartsong]

Great idea. PS. The default state is not checked, you have to opt in to see the older stuff.

Edited May 7, 2023 by Katherine Heartsong

[Love Zhaoying]

A warning would be nice, "this seller is no longer in Second Life / has not logged in for more than 2 years, you will not be able to contact the creator / get help with the item(s)". Sumpin' like dat.

[Kadah Coba]

I too would prefer the old stuff be flagged as such instead of nuked.

[Oded Fahid]

This is a brilliant and wise suggestion. Is there a Jira?

[Alwin Alcott]

not against something like this, but there is a time to say goodbye to old stuff.

Not selling for a year means nobody is really interested. Lost it?.. buy something more relevant to this time of development.
If it's only for a redelivery .. keep your box in your inventory, no need to keep it listed in all eternity.
no copy no trans aren't or weren't available for redelivery ever.
To get rid off all clutter... start a new MP, empty, and let the creators fill it with their current selling items. Give it a year, and close the old one. Make that last one a delivery on request by ticket only, at a good cost. ..  

And of course... a active role for LL to keep the spam and bad listings out. Not by report, it doesn't work if there aren't real penalties for the ones listing their items that way. This alone would already make MP a lot better.

[Emma Krokus]

I am for an "archive" of old stuff. Especially prim builds.

Taking prim builds apart taught me so much. The MP is a wonderful source for old modifiable prim builds. It's much harder than it was back when I started to search inworld for stores now. 

I love places like Builders Brewery that teach prim building still and have learned a lot there. My own learning preference is to be able to tinker / play, and have fun, rather than copy and follow instructions.

If prim builds were to disappear / become harder to access, I fear that an important aspect of Second Life could be endangered: the inworld sandbox to play and build. What I dislike about mesh building is that it largely takes you out of this world.

 

 

[Emma Krokus]

2 hours ago, Alwin Alcott said:

And of course... a active role for LL to keep the spam and bad listings out. Not by report, it doesn't work if there aren't real penalties for the ones listing their items that way. This alone would already make MP a lot better.

Second this.

Often I feel embarrassed when searching the MP at the rubbish thrown in through people abusing keywords and DEMO items. These make it so much harder to find what is wanted. I do flag some of this but often find these listings continue for quite a while regardless of reports. And that discourages me from reporting...

 

[Red2Blaze]

I come to post the same thing

I do understand that if something was not sold for a very long time, maybe its not all that useful, but having history of things is good I think for most

Maybe in years to come someone will want to get something really old to show off and say "Back in the days" and that may become impossible

I know for one we lost some stuff when XStreet closed and become Marketplace, a lot of items that never moved, and are now impossible to find, some of them real pices of art with prims alone, that when I personally got to see them I was always amazed by what someone was able to make back in the day, like a car that if I did not check it box by box I would have 100% be sure was mesh with its angels and all, and a viacle that was able to transform to many other types

 

I really believe allowing people to dig into history is good, even if not that many want or will do it in a years time, and an option to find this stuff regardless of how popular it is, as a opt-in option in search will be great

[Wulfie Reanimator]

Practical question, can you get a redelivery for a product whose listing is removed? Should be easy to test.

I'm 98% sure that an unlisted product can still be redelivered.

Edited May 8, 2023 by Wulfie Reanimator

[Wulfie Reanimator]

2 hours ago, Emma Krokus said:

If prim builds were to disappear / become harder to access, I fear that an important aspect of Second Life could be endangered: the inworld sandbox to play and build. What I dislike about mesh building is that it largely takes you out of this world.

I agree that building/editing is dying, but I don't think that's because prim builds are getting removed from Marketplace.

[Arwen Serpente]

15 minutes ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

Practical question, can you get a redelivery for a product whose listing is removed? Should be easy to test.

I'm 98% sure that an unlisted product can still be redelivered.

It's that other 2% that's a kicker - unlisted products cannot be redelivered. Just tested.

[Flea Yatsenko]

Basically, if they've logged in OR sold something in the last year, their store is untouched. I think they should go further, disable those stores AND then make a checkbox that's on by default to only search active stores where the user has logged on in the last year and created new listings. With the last marketplace update and only the top 50k items being given preferential treatment, people who make more niche stuff than avatar apparel are going to have a massive disadvantage. And FYI 50k items isn't all that much when you consider how many color variations and versions the huge avatar clothing/shape/skin/etc stores have.

I don't think people realize the scale of marketplace. My store has been around for a long time, over 10 years, and my store ID is 28761. Meaning like 14 years ago when I started there were already 28,760 stores created on XStreetSL, this was before SLMP was even a thing. Actually, just typing in random IDs and the end of https://marketplace.secondlife.com/stores/, I made it a little more than 250,000 before I ran out of stores. Meaning there's over 250,000 stores ever created (not active).

After SLMP going through a phase of "we're going to sell your 12 year old stuff and bury your new stuff at the back of search", I'm all for giving people filters to find newer stuff.

I don't want to see it nuked though, SL has a huge history in the internet, they were doing metaverses before they were the trendy startup buzzword. That old content should be archived or kept around just for history's sake.

SLMP has a serious problem with pushing outdated products over newer ones. It hurts creators, and it hurts customers because they're seeing outdated stuff.

[Victorian Magic]

Linden is pushing the Victorian theme in Bellisseria  and this new rule will remove many items from a classic  period shop of that era  that starts with a N ......where the owner last logged in  in October 2020 [unknown why] ........ sad .....

edited to add "Basically, if they've logged in OR sold something in the last year, their store is untouched." No - items will be removed -- and many items are in collections - so you may want to finish or expand a room later but the matching sideboard or whatever is gone by then  .....

Edited May 8, 2023 by Victorian Magic
added quote from prior post

[Wulfie Reanimator]

3 hours ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

I think they should go further, disable those stores AND then make a checkbox that's on by default to only search active stores where the user has logged on in the last year and created new listings.

Disabling stores that aren't constantly putting out new products seems like a very bad idea. Not all stores list all their products on MP, or operate on a release schedule.

Last thing Maitreya listed on MP was a BOM applier... isn't it over a year old? Edit: Oh god. I checked, the listing was made in 2019. I feel old.

Some stores sell service-level products that are bought/supported for years, so they don't even need/plan to keep releasing new stuff. I wonder how long gaps CasperTech has had... Edit: I checked, the most recent product listing is from 2018.

3 hours ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

With the last marketplace update and only the top 50k items being given preferential treatment, people who make more niche stuff than avatar apparel are going to have a massive disadvantage. And FYI 50k items isn't all that much when you consider how many color variations and versions the huge avatar clothing/shape/skin/etc stores have.

The top 50k thing isn't preferential treatment. If your sales volume isn't in the top 50k, you can't be a best seller, so you don't get a best seller score (which now breaks sorting in single-store view after the update).

It's been just a performance thing, and they are working on fixing it so stores will sort best selling products properly.

Edited May 8, 2023 by Wulfie Reanimator

[Victorian Magic]

Between this and slamming the fee  to buy Lindens into real world money exchange range I wonder why  killing commerce is a good way forward.

P.S. having a Linden click the THANKS button on an official Lab post seems  kinda weird, but that's me , maybe add a "hey don't blame me I argued against this   during meetings" button so we know who to bail out of jail next Fantasy Faire , and who to leave in ......

[Flea Yatsenko]

1 minute ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

Disabling stores that aren't constantly putting out new products seems like a very bad idea. Not all stores list all their products on MP, or operate on a release schedule.

Last thing Maitreya listed on MP was a BOM applier... isn't it over a year old?

Some stores create service-level products that are bought/supported for years, so they don't even need/plan to keep releasing new stuff.

The top 50k thing isn't preferential treatment. If your sales volume isn't in the top 50k, you can't be a best seller, so you don't get a best seller score (which now breaks sorting in single-store view after the update).

It's been just a performance thing, and they are working on fixing it so stores will sort best selling products properly.

Oh no, the store itself would just have to release one item in the last year for all items to be in a higher status. I.E. if you have something that's 10 years old and it hasn't sold in the last year, if you released anything on SLMP in the last year all of your products maintain status. SLMP just needs checks to see who is active and who isn't. If Maitreya hasn't released anything in over a year and they were going to be penalized, they'd be active creators and they'd just post something to stay active. But mesh body stores don't usually sell their bodies on SLMP either. I really don't think that's unreasonable to ask for anything to be listed in one year if you're still an active creator and around in SL.

Right now SLMP is 13+ years of products and SLMP team has to sort through all of that to show customers relevant stuff. Their job is gonna be a lot easier to get people good stuff that they're looking for if they can find it. 50k limit exists because there's simply so much stuff they're trying to sort. It needs to be filtered in some way to make it easier to sort. My point about 50k is that low quality avatar components will sell better than high quality niche things simply because there's more demand for avatar components.

I don't think people understand how massive SLMP sorting and search is and how cutting out older stuff (and making it optional) would help active content creators and customers.

They also need to implement the single listing for multiple variants thing, because having one search document for 15 different colors is a lot easier to search through than 15 different very similar Elasticsearch documents. I mean I'm usually a pretty humble guy but my other project is a web thing based on elasticsearch with 1.5m requests a month. No way you can ever have a reliable search engine with so much old and nearly duplicate stuff listed.

That said I think deleting is a horrible idea. They do spring cleaning to reduce the overhead and stuff they have to sort through and try and make sense of when someone searches. I'm just proposing instead of deleting stuff, to make their job a little less impossible, is they move stuff to legacy status on SLMP and they do so more aggressively than they are currently deleting things in spring clean up.

Dates and stuff I'm suggesting could obviously be changed. But I think there's a better way to reduce what they have to search through than deleting old stuff forever.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

16 minutes ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

My point about 50k is that low quality avatar components will sell better than high quality niche things simply because there's more demand for avatar components.

Oh, that I can see for sure.

It becomes a kind of separate conversation, but maybe something like indexing 10K products of every category in addition to the overall 50K could help in that case. You may not be the best seller of Marketplace, but maybe you are the best seller of Residential Structures or Ground Vehicles. (The amount of products in a category quickly drops as you go to deeper levels, many don't even have 10K products and you don't want to recalculate the same product for every parent category. I work on a very big web store as my IRL job so I can imagine the work. 🙂)

Edited May 8, 2023 by Wulfie Reanimator