The marketplace has been rigged!!!

[Clem Marques]

18 minutes ago, PheebyKatz said:

I'm such a low-level creator/marketer that it's basically a hobby that pays for itself, but compared to what I'd normally expect under such circumstances, and with everything that seems like it would work against me, I actually do pretty well, on a relative scale. I look at how many people view my stuff, and I'm just like, wow, people actually find my stuff and look at it and buy it.

My experience has been the same as yours, to some extent.

Edited February 8 by Clem Marques

[Katherine Heartsong]

23 minutes ago, PheebyKatz said:

homemade bunny puppet high-LI motorcycle impale yourself on a sharp stick

That was the title of my next painting. Great, already stolen in the MP.

[PheebyKatz]

1 hour ago, Katherine Heartsong said:

That was the title of my next painting. Great, already stolen in the MP.

I do license it officially, for a small fee.

[AmeliaJ08]

16 hours ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

If you search Google, Amazon, or eBay it gives you the shiniest, newest, high quality listings right away without having to do anything else

Have you used Google in the past decade? I find it absolutely useless for many years now, so much so I have mostly given up on it. Bing actually responds to *most* operators still and I find it to be a better search engine which is saying something...

ebay defaults to 'Best match' as well...

 

[Theresa Tennyson]

16 hours ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

That's the right thing to do, but it's unreasonable to expect the average user to do that. If you search Google, Amazon, or eBay it gives you the shiniest, newest, high quality listings right away without having to do anything else.

 

Or at least you think it does, because if you can't see into the black box you don't know any better.

[Flea Yatsenko]

15 hours ago, Sid Nagy said:

 

I agree with that, but SL merchants have to work with what they get offered and make the best out of it , so they use the SEO that works.

LL has very little to gain with a lot of effort to improve the search engine IMHO. The marketplace isn't their big money maker. More a L$ sink. It doesn't really matter to the Lab who buys what from whom, as long as the MP sinks enough L$ through their commissions. So it will not be on their priority list as long as the MP doesn't collapse totally. As long as there is enough buying activity their all good.

  I strongly disagree. SLMP is the only real place to buy content for SL besides events. SLMP and XStreet basically killed in world shopping and stores and it's only now kind of coming back because people (merchants and buyers) are upset with reliability and search quality. Unless you have some sort of source to back up your claims, but I always assumed land was the biggest earner followed by people buying and selling L$ to buy stuff on SLMP.

1 hour ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

Have you used Google in the past decade? I find it absolutely useless for many years now, so much so I have mostly given up on it. Bing actually responds to *most* operators still and I find it to be a better search engine which is saying something...

ebay defaults to 'Best match' as well...

 

Not saying Google is good, I don't use it anymore. But it has the capability to not show you outdated SEO blogspam from 10 years ago when searching. But Google does look at far more than just the content of a web page to rank articles.

[Persephone Emerald]

26 minutes ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

  I strongly disagree. SLMP is the only real place to buy content for SL besides events. SLMP and XStreet basically killed in world shopping and stores and it's only now kind of coming back because people (merchants and buyers) are upset with reliability and search quality. Unless you have some sort of source to back up your claims, but I always assumed land was the biggest earner followed by people buying and selling L$ to buy stuff on SLMP.

Code Blue:  SL is dying!

[Silent Mistwalker]

2 hours ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

Have you used Google in the past decade? I find it absolutely useless for many years now, so much so I have mostly given up on it. Bing actually responds to *most* operators still and I find it to be a better search engine which is saying something...

ebay defaults to 'Best match' as well...

 

I remember when you could type in an actual question and get thousands of results. I was "perfectly pleased" with that. No one needs millions of results to choose from. These days actual questions seem to confuse the search engines. On top of that, now they are trying to force me to use the AI feature. HELL NO! It's not something I need or even want.

[Rowan Amore]

I've never been a big MP shopper.  I've always preferred to go to the inworld store.  I may use the MP to find something but I then take the LM and do the actual buying at the store.  Prices are often a bit cheaper since no one takes a cut from the merchants inworld as they do in the MP.  

[Katherine Heartsong]

2 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

I've never been a big MP shopper.  I've always preferred to go to the inworld store.  I may use the MP to find something but I then take the LM and do the actual buying at the store.  Prices are often a bit cheaper since no one takes a cut from the merchants inworld as they do in the MP.  

Me too. I'm also considering shutting down my MP store entirely since I can't sync my one-off inventory (only 1) in the MP with the one on the wall of my gallery. If I could find a script that changed the texture showing on a face of the piece hanging on my gallery wall in world to a sold version when an in world buyer bought the one on my wall, I'd give up on the MP store because of the effort to update it, sync in world and MP, and get 35L more per sale to boot.

[Silent Mistwalker]

35 minutes ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

  I strongly disagree. SLMP is the only real place to buy content for SL besides events. SLMP and XStreet basically killed in world shopping and stores and it's only now kind of coming back because people (merchants and buyers) are upset with reliability and search quality. Unless you have some sort of source to back up your claims, but I always assumed land was the biggest earner followed by people buying and selling L$ to buy stuff on SLMP.

Must be why I have always preferred inworld shopping to the MP. For me, both XStreet and the MP were never anything more than a catalog to find what I'm looking for while purchases are always made inworld. 

If there is no inworld store than I have to decide if I want to purchase on the MP. If I don't find something comparable elsewhere. If the MP item is not marked for redelivery, I won't buy. Oddly enough that is a deciding factor for me.

[Love Zhaoying]

15 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

I've never been a big MP shopper.  I've always preferred to go to the inworld store.  I may use the MP to find something but I then take the LM and do the actual buying at the store. 

Now that I'm shopping more (most recently for hair, or "hurrs"), if I know exactly what I am looking for, I still would prefer using MP rather than finding the inworld store, then finding the item in the store, making sure I am buying the right color / fatpack, etc.

OTOH - in my recent shopping spree, I figured out that some of my "old favorite brands" (prim/flexi-hair!!) no longer have an in-world presence (if they ever did).  So just the fact there was "no inworld store" should have made me more cautious in purchases, since the creator probably isn't in-world if I made a double-purchase etc.  If I could go back in time, possibly I'd have bought "demos" if they existed for some that did not "make the cut".

16 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

Prices are often a bit cheaper since no one takes a cut from the merchants inworld as they do in the MP.  

I thought that wasn't allowed (having cheaper prices in-world)?

Edited February 8 by Love Zhaoying

[Clem Marques]

Not everyone is able to shop inworld with ease, unfortunately.

For those of us who have crappy computers, shopping inworld is too much of a hassle: Items taking forever to rez, then the textures taking a long time to load, short draw distances preventing the "Area Search" from working correctly, low frame rates making it hard to explore the store properly.

Depending on the store, there might also be accessibility issues for some users if everything is white and full bright, as discussed in this thread: 

So I personally stick to the MP as much as possible.

However, going to inworld stores comes with 2 major perks as described by others above, the possibility to see things inworld before spending your money and the discounted prices, which is why I understand why so many people love to actually go to shops and take a look around.

15 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

I thought that wasn't allowed (having cheaper prices in-world)?

I'm not sure whether it's allowed or not, but it's such a common practice nowadays. Most stores seem to do it, and I've never heard of one of them being punished for it. So it's probably fine. 

[Clem Marques]

41 minutes ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

If the MP item is not marked for redelivery, I won't buy. Oddly enough that is a deciding factor for me.

I agree. It's crucial to have the ability to get a redelivery easily if it's on the MP. I always check, and if the seller doesn't allow that, I don't buy the item. Understandable if the product is no copy, but otherwise, I really don't get why anyone would disable the automatic redeliveries.

At least by shopping inworld using Caspervend, you know that you can easily get redeliveries whenever you feel like it.

Edited February 8 by Clem Marques

[Love Zhaoying]

7 minutes ago, Clem Marques said:

Not everyone is able to shop inworld with ease, unfortunately.

For those of us who have crappy computers, shopping inworld is too much of a hassle: Items taking forever to rez, then the textures taking a long time to load, short draw distances preventing the "Area Search" from working correctly, low frame rates making it hard to explore the store properly.

Depending on the store, there might also be accessibility issues for some users if everything is white and full bright, as discussed in this thread: 

So I personally stick to the MP as much as possible.

However, going to inworld stores comes with 2 major perks as described by others above, the possibility to see things inworld before spending your money and the discounted prices, which is why I understand why so many people love to actually go to shops and take a look around.

I'm not sure whether it's allowed or not, but it's such a common practice nowadays. Most stores seem to do it, and I've never heard of one of them being punished for it. So it's probably fine. 

Some details you posted reminded me of the "bad old days", when if you went to a "Mall" you could expect it to take forever to load, for your avatar to freeze in place, etc.  Things have gotten better! Or, "Malls" have just died (like in RL).

[Clem Marques]

6 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Some details you posted reminded me of the "bad old days", when if you went to a "Mall" you could expect it to take forever to load, for your avatar to freeze in place, etc.  Things have gotten better! Or, "Malls" have just died (like in RL).

Yeah, it's definitely much better nowadays. I also love how most stores are in skyboxes now, high up in the sky instead of being on/close to the ground. That really helps to reduce lag when the shop uses a Mainland parcel. It's good, and improves the experience for the customers.

"Malls" are mostly dead in SL now... thankfully  I do miss the RL ones though. R.I.P.

Edited February 8 by Clem Marques

[Silent Mistwalker]

13 minutes ago, Clem Marques said:

I'm not sure whether it's allowed or not, but it's such a common practice nowadays. Most stores seem to do it, and I've never heard of one of them being punished for it. So it's probably fine. 

LL has never dictated MP or inworld prices. 

[Rowan Amore]

54 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

I thought that wasn't allowed (having cheaper prices in-world)?

It's allowed AFAIK unless they recently changed it.  A lot of stores offer a 10% inworld or just say it's cheaper inworld.  

[Flea Yatsenko]

45 minutes ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

I remember when you could type in an actual question and get thousands of results. I was "perfectly pleased" with that. No one needs millions of results to choose from. These days actual questions seem to confuse the search engines. On top of that, now they are trying to force me to use the AI feature. HELL NO! It's not something I need or even want.

The number of results in Google are faked. You can not go back that many pages and it ends.

1. Search for Second Life, says 8.5 billion results

2. Turn off javascript

3. Edit the "start" param in the url to 1000

4. 1000 * 10 per page, 10,000 results, right? Should be tons left to reach 8.5 billion

5. No results

I don't want to get too off topic but any chance to talk smack about Google, I won't pass up.

[Love Zhaoying]

5 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

It's allowed AFAIK unless they recently changed it.  A lot of stores offer a 10% inworld or just say it's cheaper inworld.  

When I went searching, the first reference I found was your post answering someone's question about it 🙂

 

[Love Zhaoying]

9 minutes ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

The number of results in Google are faked. You can not go back that many pages and it ends.

1. Search for Second Life, says 8.5 billion results

2. Turn off javascript

3. Edit the "start" param in the url to 1000

4. 1000 * 10 per page, 10,000 results, right? Should be tons left to reach 8.5 billion

5. No results

I don't want to get too off topic but any chance to talk smack about Google, I won't pass up.

Do you recommend we use "Duck Duck Go", or "Bing"?

 

[Silent Mistwalker]

17 minutes ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

The number of results in Google are faked. You can not go back that many pages and it ends.

1. Search for Second Life, says 8.5 billion results

2. Turn off javascript

3. Edit the "start" param in the url to 1000

4. 1000 * 10 per page, 10,000 results, right? Should be tons left to reach 8.5 billion

5. No results

I don't want to get too off topic but any chance to talk smack about Google, I won't pass up.

I said Millions, not Billions.

This is one chance you should have passed up because I really don't care. As I said in my post (rephrased) I don't need millions of results, much less billions. Over the decades I have watched it go from a few hundred/thousand to millions to billions. That growth coincided with the growth of the amount of information available "online".

Chrome isn't the only browser I use/have used. What other people think has no influence on my choices.

[Rowan Amore]

37 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

When I went searching, the first reference I found was your post answering someone's question about it 🙂

 

This was actually address years ago here...

On 4/16/2018 at 6:36 PM, Alexa Linden said:

Greetings all!

Today I posted the Web Team Spring Deploy Update.  I want to share with you a change we made.  

It was brought to our attention that within the Marketplace Fee and Listing Guidelines, under Disallowed Actions, it stated:

“The following actions are disallowed. Note that these actions are disallowed by the Second Life Terms of Service, and are restated here for clarification.

• Anti-Competitive or Abusive Behavior. Examples include, but are not limited to:
  • inflating prices on the SL Marketplace, in comparison to in-world or other e-commerce sites,”

We’ve removed the section which applied to inworld stores.  This was contrary to your interests and our interests.  Marketplace is a tool to use in your overall product marketing strategy and if you'd like to differentiate pricing between online and inworld stores, that's your decision to make.
This line now reads:

• Anti-Competitive or Abusive Behavior. Examples include, but are not limited to:
  • inflating prices on the SL Marketplace or other e-commerce sites,”

For more details on what we've been working on, please checkout the post.

 

Thank you for making Second Life great!

 

 

 

 

 

[Katherine Heartsong]

55 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Do you recommend we use "Duck Duck Go", or "Bing"?

I have used "the duck" almost since it was available publicly. I was also an early contributor to the UX/UI design of the product, offering my professional feedback on what was being released when it was just a handful of people working on it. The results are more than "good enough" and since it's a far less invasive product that delivers the results 99.9% of the time with many less privacy concerns, good enough for me.

That's what we "hire" apps and online services to do for us, work. If you don't use or want 90% of the features of A and B offers the same experience minus those, then use B. Why anyone outside of a business environment wants the bloat and spying that comes along with MS Word, for example, why would you bother when there are a half dozen other products that offer a cleaner, more efficient, cheaper UX? Honestly, look at the ribbon, I bet you would personally use less than 10% of what's there outside of it being the defacto corporate standard.

It's why in my professional life I left Adobe behind at something like CS3. Yes, the subscription model have always bothered me, but other products now do the same things I can do in Adobe much much cheaper and better and more stable and no annual fee, and therefore, "good enough". Some of the new products designers now use en masse run rings around the former Adobe products when it comes to speed, stability, features, etc.

Edited February 8 by Katherine Heartsong

[Love Zhaoying]

19 minutes ago, Katherine Heartsong said:

I have used "the duck" almost since it was available publicly. I was also an early contributor to the UX/UI design of the product, offering my professional feedback on what was being released when it was just a handful of people working on it. The results are more than "good enough" and since it's a far less invasive product that delivers the results 99.9% of the time with many less privacy concerns, good enough for me.

That's what we "hire" apps and online services to do for us, work. If you don't use or want 90% of the features of A and B offers the same experience minus those, then use B. Why anyone outside of a business environment wants the bloat and spying that comes along with MS Word, for example, why would you bother when there are a half dozen other products that offer a cleaner, more efficient, cheaper UX? Honestly, look at the ribbon, I bet you would personally use less than 10% of what's there outside of it being the defacto corporate standard.

It's why in my professional life I left Adobe behind at something like CS3. Yes, the subscription model have always bothered me, but other products now do the same things I can do in Adobe much much cheaper and better and more stable and no annual fee, and therefore, "good enough". Some of the new products designers now use en masse run rings around the former Adobe products when it comes to speed, stability, features, etc.

To clarify, I have no issues with Google (at all).  So, my question above was more along the lines of, "what the heck are we SUPPOSED to use, especially those who don't trust Google"? It was only a "semi-serious" question.  

I DO realize that a lot of people take the "issues" with Google seriously, although I mostly first noticed that on the Forum with people in other countries.  I was actually gobsmacked / almost disbelieving when I first saw that people choose DDG.  So DDG I can understand, and I am also a tiny bit curious if people out there actually use Bing because of their distrust / hate for / dislike for Google.  There comes a point where I wonder if people are willing to set their "search result success bar" REALLY low just to avoid Google.

As far as the "subscription model" goes for apps, I was surprised the other day when my new boss said, his team just uses "draw.io" instead of Visio (which we need additional licenses for, even at my Fortune 150 company).  So, yeah. Free stuff, what could go wrong?

But hey, I didn't derail the thread into this direction, they did, over there! >>>

* runs away *