In-world sales not doing as good as they did when we first started?

[Dartagan Shepherd]

Oh, didn't know that total, amazing. Glad to see some of the other stats go, like user to user transactions because they weren't indicators of anything but churn. Would love to see real stats, giving dollar amounts. I think it was Chelsea that said something about having to get financials in L$ and how awkward that actually is.

I don't begrudge LL a penny of revenue, but as an adult, I would love to see a breakdown of revenue in USD by LL rather than all this fictional stuff. I think it would make for smarter "partners".

If it's revenue, call it revenue, don't call it a sink, call it a fee.

Just stop handing me this sci-fi novel with financials and give me the bottom lines in real terms. Wouldn't care a bit if they were to disclose that SLM is more profitable than in-world stores, and I think Merchants could work with that more effectively, if they understood the how and the why of it.

[Triple Peccable]

Pamela, the two searches in question are inworld (which indeed is the same as the SL website search with a G maturity rating), and the Marketplace search. Definitely two completely different animals.

Because the Marketplace search results are generally ordered by "best selling", it really hurts merchants like myself who sell only higher priced items. I assume this is because "relevance" or "best selling" is determined mostly by the number of items sold, and of course there will be hundreds of dirt cheap (or even free) items sold for each of the higher quality, more expensive items sold.

The result of this is that LL will likely be losing a lot of tier from me, tier that won't even come close to being made up for by the 5% Marketplace commission. If that is true for me I have to think that many others are in the same boat. I just hope this thread sheds a little light on Lindens who might someday be scratching their heads wondering why total revenues continue to drop, even though Marketplace sales continue to rise.

 

[Pamela Galli]

Triple, Ann is talking about the "new" inworld search, I think. There is some uncertainty whether or not it has been implemented for all viewers or not. 

 

My original understanding was that they would partially disable the inworld search used by v 1 veiwers, thus forcing everyone onto V 2/3. But what I see is the same results on Phoenix as I do on V3.

 

The old inworld search was based on GSA (Google); this new one is not. It is supposedly based on whatever MP search is (something like "Lucerne"), but I would not know much about that.  Ann is saying that v 1 is still GSA based.

[Triple Peccable]

Oh ok. I haven't logged in with a V1.xx viewer in so long I have lost track of the "old" search engine.

 

[ralph Alderton]

The real reason why sales are weak and stagnant is not because of the marketplace or because search is borked.

The real reason why the SL ecconomy and ecosystem is weak and declining is because tier costs are too high.

It's not because the real world is in recession ( my Turbo Squid, Renderosity, Daz3D sales are increasing as I increase my product range ). The RL world recession is not effecting my RL mesh content sales

But in Secondlife my content range is growing but my sales are shrinking

Secondlife ecconomy is in decline because of tier costs

Tier costs effect concurrency

Concurrency effects sales

The equation is very easy to understand, if you stand back and look at the ROOT OF THE PROBLEM

HIGH TIER COSTS are the real problem yet we squabble about search and the marketplace etc, etc

[Josh Susanto]

The sink does help LL support itself.

Every Linden dollar that is not destroyed is one that may have to be paid out at some point, so destroying as many as possible is an important thing to do.

So why do they make more?

It's not just to refill the sink, and they are not just generated by fiat. They have to make more in order to provide some kind of value for RL money that gets paid in, and I believe that that is where all the new money actually comes from. 

The sink is just a way to get people to consent to destroy value provided in exchange for the money they have paid in, so that it doesn't have to be paid out later.

For the record, I both approve of and support this way of doing things.

I think that, in and of itself, it is both fair and reasonable. 

[Anaiya Arnold]

Luckily there appears to be a random or arbitary element involved in calculating "best selling". Your least sold item could be a best seller the way LL calculates these things. 

One of my persistent best sellers according to LL's reckoning has never had a single sale, ever.  Obviously "best seller" does not actually mean "items with most sales volume" or even "items generating most sales revenue" but instead has some other mysterious and undisclosed meaning.

[Luna Bliss]

---

* Obviously "best seller" does not actually mean "items with most sales volume" or even "items generating most sales revenue" but instead has some other mysterious and undisclosed meaning. *

Perhaps it involves a green plant.

[Marcus Hancroft]

---

Nalates Urriah wrote:

<snip>

As best I can tell there is no way to follow developement in the Commerce and Market Place Projects. For instance,

Direct Delivery was rolled out to the Le Tigre release channels today

. One would only know that if they follow the Server Developement projects. Not a peep from the commerce team.

 

---

/me sighs

Wonderful.  Just wonderful. 

In another thread, several of us expressed concern about the DirectDelivery code and asked that the commerce team please hold off deploying that code until after the busy holiday shopping season that's forthcoming.  In other words...wait until the beginning of the new year.  I should have known they would go right on with what they wanted to do.  That absolutely nothing has been said about the roll out to Le Tigre doesn't surprise me at all.  The commerce team seems to like to roll out major changes and only post that they have done so AFTER it is deployed leaving the Merchants to find the bugs and other problems with the code that the team missed.

My Marketplace sales have also dropped.  This week, I have had not one sale on any item.  My last sale was on the 8th.  I don't know what's going on, but I'm tempted to keyword stuff as well.  I have to try SOMETHING. 

[Marcus Hancroft]

---

Ann Otoole wrote:

Can't tell because

I am not stupid and therefore never enter my SL password into a TPV

. But the haters that despise LL keep swearing the search in TPV password stealer viewers use traffic as the main sort.

 

Whatever.

---

Howdy, Miss Ann

This sentence makes it sound as if you consider any and all users who use Phoenix, Firestorm, CoolVL or any of the other approved third party viewers, stupid.  Let me ASSURE of this...I am NOT stupid.  The Phoenix team did a fantastic job with their viewer and I have used it for a long time.  The build tools in Phoenix are fantastic.  If you are a builder and you haven't ever seen what Phoenix can offer you, you don't know what you are missing!

You may not want to use a third party viewer, but that does NOT mean the rest of us that do are stupid. 

[Ann Otoole]

TBH if the LL viewer is not fixed soon and continues it's rapid decline into unusability then before much longer I will have to eat my words. What is unknown is what this new UI coming out will do and whether or not TPVs will be compatible with direct delivery.

[Toysoldier Thor]

---

Ann Otoole wrote:

TBH if the LL viewer is not fixed soon and continues it's rapid decline into unusability then before much longer I will have to eat my words. What is unknown is what this new UI coming out will do and whether or not TPVs will be compatible with direct delivery.

---

I was told - and its not surprising at all - that the Phoenix team has had the details of the DD for some time (since the summer).  Of course they will support DD as soon as its stable and released.  I would suspect that the Phoenix team is likely even providing input to the LL development team on possible improvements or bug fixes to what ever API or viewer coding.

It is in the best interest for both LL and Phoenix that the Firestorm (and possibly the phoenix version) viewer will support DD.  Since Phoenix viewers dominate the market on the SL grid - there simply is no way for LL to deploy DD onto the  grid without Phoenix's adoption of DD into their viewers.

Ann, have you even tried the new beta Firestorm Viewer?  Even though its a beta and still has a few functional limitations over the current legacy Phoenix Viewer, its an awesome UI that I can more than accept as a transition from the old UI I have loved for so long.

Finally, as Marcus has said, unlike the LL team - the Phoenix development team is ultra-responsive!  They do something that LL has never done.....  THEY LISTEN TO THEIR CUSTOMERS!   I have had many one-on-one IM conversations with their Sr. team and when I bring up a concern on their code or a bug in SL related to the viewers.... they respond within the day (and evne hours).  If if they news is not what I wanna hear - they explain why.  They treat their customers like adults.

This is the #1 reason I have become so loyal to the Phoenix team... unlike LL, the Phoenix team understands and practices CUSTOMER SERVICE!

So Ann, you really need to get off the LL Viewer Loyalty horse and stop criticizing the TPV vendors that have done more for the Viewer market than LL could ever have done.  Try being loyal to a vendor that understand customer service.

[Darrius Gothly]

... and when Toy writes a complimentary post .. you DARN well better take notice. :matte-motes-evil-invert:

[Pamela Galli]

---

Marcus Hancroft wrote:

---

Ann Otoole wrote:

Can't tell because

I am not stupid and therefore never enter my SL password into a TPV

. But the haters that despise LL keep swearing the search in TPV password stealer viewers use traffic as the main sort.

 

Whatever.

---

Howdy, Miss Ann

This sentence makes it sound as if you consider any and all users who use Phoenix, Firestorm, CoolVL or any of the other approved third party viewers, stupid.  Let me ASSURE of this...I am NOT stupid.  The Phoenix team did a fantastic job with their viewer and I have used it for a long time.  The build tools in Phoenix are fantastic.  If you are a builder and you haven't ever seen what Phoenix can offer you, you don't know what you are missing!

You may not want to use a third party viewer, but that does NOT mean the rest of us that do are stupid. 

---

For a merchant, IMO Imprudence is better than Phoenix on a couple of important points -- but recently developed the problem of unticking the IM to email box, and crashing when I ticked it. So I switched to Phoenix, which I will have to do anyway when they implement mesh.

Meanwhile I have to log in with V3 to do mesh (I have found no mesh enabled TPV's for Mac) -- what a POS!  The camera controls don't even work -- other than to make an annoying click sound.

[Ann Otoole]

Yea. The current beta no longer has click to zoom profile pics. Why did someone mess with working code to disable things like that? And it cannot process more than 5 avatars in view without a bogus memory pool low error and shutting off half the functions. What is going on at LL?

[Toysoldier Thor]

---

Ann Otoole wrote:

Yea. The current beta no longer has click to zoom profile pics. Why did someone mess with working code to disable things like that? And it cannot process more than 5 avatars in view without a bogus memory pool low error and shutting off half the functions. What is going on at LL?

---

The Firestorm Beta is missing that "click to zoom on profile pics" as well.  It was one thing I mentioned to the phoenix team that I really like and use a lot and hope they plan to restore that feature.  Firestorm aslo is missing functions in the mini-map that I use a lot like "lock cam to an avatar dot on the map" and the differentiation of a color for friend on list vs stranger is not on the firestorm beta.  Not sure why those features are now gone.