Q for Lindens - Marketplace Update

[Mickey Vandeverre]

Good Morning Lindens  :)

May we please have an update on the status of the Marketplace?

Have yesterday's glitches been resolved across the board?

Was there a rotation of product?  as in, was there a new algorithm applied or a new sort style applied or whatever you call that process, so that a different assortment of items now show up on the first pages?  perhaps a new weight assigned that we are not familiar with yet?

For instance...on our top sellers that have sold every single day several times a day for days on end for like a year...would there be an explanation as to why those stopped selling overnight?

Do your marketplace hits/sales records show a huge slump across the board, so that we have something to go by?

Thank you.

 

[Toysoldier Thor]

---

Mickey Vandeverre wrote:

Good Morning Lindens 

May we please have an update on the status of the Marketplace?

Have yesterday's glitches been resolved across the board?

Was there a rotation of product?  as in, was there a new algorithm applied or a new sort style applied or whatever you call that process, so that a different assortment of items now show up on the first pages?  perhaps a new weight assigned that we are not familiar with yet?

For instance...on our top sellers that have sold every single day several times a day for days on end for like a year...would there be an explanation as to why those stopped selling overnight?

Do your marketplace hits/sales records show a huge slump across the board, so that we have something to go by?

Thank you.

 

---

I completely agree - the LL Commerce Team needs to open up and speak up as to what changes have happened to the Marketplace in the past couple weeks.

As Mickey said - I see the exact same thing happening... My top selling items which have a very very steady daily sales tracking of a few sales a day (on big $L price each) have pretty much stopped selling.  For the past two weeks my top selling items are lucky if I sell 1 a day!

This has not been a 1 or 2 day glitch - this has been going steady now for over a week - my weekly sales are less then 1/2 normal weekly sales.  And my weekly sales are normally VERY VERY steady (fluctuating less than 10% between weeks).

So I am right with Mickey on this request.  Brooke, your team needs to speak up and come out of hiding and explain what has been going on.  Your team has made changes and they have impacted SLM traffic/sales for many Merchants severely.

What did your team do?

[Mickey Vandeverre]

I hate, hate, hate to discuss personal sales publicly, but not aware of any other options in order to get an explanation.

I noticed a very dramatic change on the 1st day of the month.  Chalked it up to people paying tier fees for a few days and not shopping...however never really had to use that explanation in the past.

It carried on through today, and today was the first day ever that I recall since using marketplace, that there was not one single sale overnight...and that was alarming.

I have certain items that are in a moderate price range that sell daily, same items over and over again, consistently since they were listed...DAILY.  Alarm goes off when those stop selling overnight.

eta: 

ok, well I see one problem right off the bat.

when I typed in the search phrase for one particular item that has appeared on page one for months on end...the search phrase simply disappears.  there is no search for it.

Check your keyword searches and see if you are getting an actual search.  I'm not.

ok - typed in 4 other VERY OBSCURE keywords and the search is not working at all.  Same page appears for each term, and it's a mix of shoes and clothes.

That explains a LOT. 

[Toysoldier Thor]

I am totally in synch with you on this.  It was around the 1st of the month for me as well that my top selling items just stopped selling.  I dont mean that they stopped dead to ZERO but daily sales of them significantly dropped to less than half - even had a few days where none of my main items sold - just my small older products.

What has kept selling as much as always has been my FREEBIE DEMO PACK.  They dont seem to be affected - but of course - WHO CARES as they make me no money.

I am exactly like you Mickey in that I know something has changed in SLM when my steady-as-a-rock daily sellers (and my most profiable ones) collapse in sales for more than a few days.

I am glad you noticed it too and other threads have also had many merchants stating that something has changed.

What angers me is that just recently Brooke posted that she has not updated the Mechants because there has been no changes other then their DD efforts.

So Brooke - based on your comments - I guess this major negative impact on SLM sales is from your team's quiet DD efforts??

 

[Mickey Vandeverre]

Suspect that our best sellers which sell daily consistently, sell mainly from being on page one or two of a keyword search.

 A gradual decline over a week would suggest that they are drifting from page one or two to pages three or four and downward.  That's reasonable when people lose interest in a particular product, and you've got to go back to the drawing board and make something new.

However...when that happens to 4 or 5 products all at once...it suggests that there is something else going on. 

If those products start slowing down in sales each day...they will eventually drift so far down that the momentum is lost, and perhaps they will not ever be a best seller again.  This is alarming when it applies to your bread and butter products.

Today's problem seems to be the search not working at all, and the log-ins not working.

But the continual decline on very different products that were best sellers for months,  over the course of the last week suggests that something was done to the sort system.  As it was a broad range of items and not just one particular product that may have reached the end of it's life cycle.

If in fact...it was an adjustment on Pricing sorting...that can't be good for the whole system.  It just can't.

Meanwhile, why waiting for explanation...those will drift and drift and drift downward.

 

[Mickey Vandeverre]

I see that Ralph is doing Math.

I'm doing really fast math too, and willing to adjust and load 100 products in the 5 to 25L range to stay in biz.

But there ain't enough Math to make that work!  when you've lost all your best sellers in mid-range.

[Toysoldier Thor]

My old 59L tapestries have become a better seller in my SLM store than my premium traditional best selling sculpty landscape packs which make over 90% of my total revenue.

Sadly I suspect - based only on Brooke's last posting and LL Development's strong history of how they release new experimental code into production that as of August 1st, the LL Commerce Team has started adding the needed software components of the mystery Direct Delivery into the main production SLM code. And these changes are possibly somehow impacting the SLM.  Also the continued rash of SLM login and access problems that started yesterday and is still happening now could also be symptoms of LL quietly sliding in the DD components.  BTW these problems which Brooke has not updated anyone on since her last posting on this issue was yesterday at 2pm - no news from her as to what the problem is and when they will fix this.

This is a natural guess since when Brooke was challenged last week why she has stopped providing marketplace updates she was clear is telling all of us that her excuse was because the has been nothing to report since her team is totally focused on the DD development and deployment.  SO.... since Brooke stated LL is only working on SLM DD activities, one can only predict that the source of our significant sales drops and failed logins is a result of their queit DD deployment into production.

Its not the first time that the LL Development Team has put Beta code into production without warning anyone.  As much as it would be a appropriate for the LL team to be open and honest as to what they are doing to SLM that is affecting the SLM service - I suspect we wont get any REAL INFO from Brooke, Dakota, or any LL spokesperson as to the source of the problem.  It will just embarass them. 

We will likely get the typical "we have not made any changes that would affect the marketplace and we are still looking into the slm login instability - sorry for the inconvenience".

So frustrating!

[Chronometria]

Well, i cant log into marketplace, so decorating my new office in insilico just isnt going to happen. Customers like me simply cant access your goods it seems. The silence about it all is all the more concerning.

[Josh Susanto]

It's funny that I log off and go to sleep, then, when I log back on, suddenly everyone can see the elephant in the living room that I've been talking about and being told to STFU.

Get your sh## together people; the core problem is not that LL fails at things.

The core problem is that they do not talk straight with you about the failures.

Every time I actually interact with Lindens, I feel like Superintendent Chalmers having dinner at Principal Skinner's house.

Would it kill them to just level with us once in a while?