rather a broken marketplace than no marketplace at all...

[Paula001 Goldschein]

yay \O/  to each marketplace sale.. better than nothing!

not sure how sales would look if all would depend on in world only, marketplace still seems to take a huge percentage of my total sales. a few more IMs to answer too lately but what the hell..

i still do a 100% of my purchases through marketplace.

 

 

[Hollee Dion]

I'd agree that the marketplace provides a net benefit for both buyers & sellers, certainly I've seen an increase in web marketplace sales compared to inworld.  The negativity you read here in the forums I think stems from improvements that don't seem to be happening or coming anytime soon.   I rarely post but I often check the forums and the jira. For me, magicboxes have worked pretty fine as a delivery method so for them to spend well over a year on replacing it the exclusion of everything else is a point of great frustration. 

Some examples.

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-2399  Email filtering.  That feature request is now 20 months old.  It holds no value for me to get an email for every sale but I'd very much like to know when I get a new review.

On reviews.  The system right now really doesn't really incentivise people to review items, it's so rare to get someone to write anything.  And there apparently still bugs.  https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-3471? That bug is a year old. 

An obvious marketplace case.  I have items with multiple colors.  There is no way to group items into one listing so the marketplace is filled with duplicates.   Someone wrote up a really nice feature request for that https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-4299 and they just closed it without even a note, that just comes across as  rude to the user.  And that would be bad enough but to list 9 identical items each in a different color, there is no way to tag them as such so you have to link to each related item seperately.  Which is 3 clicks for each related item, 8 times for each listing across 9 listings.  That's 216 clicks. 

Search logic terms like AND aren't available. https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-4113 which make filtering your shopping a lot easier...particularly with all the extra colors listed. 

 

The new delivery system is fine, I'll migrate over in the next couple of weeks.   It's such a behind the scene feature I imagine most shoppers won't even notice a difference.  And it looks like they're going to be ironing bugs out of it for a while yet so I'm not even sure we'll notice a difference in reliabilty.  Before direct delivery the last feature was a year ago, and that was search within a store.  I understand why the commerce team now locks there own posts and rarely comment,  what could they possibly say about this state of affairs?.

 

[Sassy Romano]

Just to clarify, would that be:-

"rather a broken marketplace that affects others but not me"

or

"rather a broken marketplace that mixes up my listings, sends the wrong item to someone, redelivers gifted items to both recipient and buyer on redelivery, doesn't pay me if I have characters I didn't know I shouldn't have in the listing title and doesn't pay me as a result"?

There's quite a difference!

[Qie Niangao]

If Marketplace simply ceased to exist, those sales would be almost fully replaced by in-world sales.  Not quite, but near enough.  The difference surely wouldn't pay well for the time spent creating Marketplace listings.

Of course, as long as there's a Marketplace, no matter how dreadful, competitors will use it, so there's little choice if one cares about sales (silly, but some take longer to catch on).

[Josh Susanto]

>"rather a broken marketplace that mixes up my listings, sends the wrong item to someone, redelivers gifted items to both recipient and buyer on redelivery, doesn't pay me if I have characters I didn't know I shouldn't have in the listing title and doesn't pay me as a result"?

It's not doing any of that to me.

OTOH, I didn't let Malefactor Linden's box shutdown warning scare me into becoming complicit in his DD scam to scuttle the SLM and drive business back in-world wher he believes he can better compete.

[Josh Susanto]

>If Marketplace simply ceased to exist, those sales would be almost fully replaced by in-world sales.  Not quite, but near enough.  The difference surely wouldn't pay well for the time spent creating Marketplace listings.

Not so.

Much, if not most of the items on the SLM would be cost-prohibitive to sell in-world, and the demand for low-end and component level items would plummet.

With the SLM, you can quickly find thousands of similar items, but if you had to track them down in-world to compare them, it would take so long that a lot of stuff, people just wouldn't even bother to look at, much less buy. 

[Darrius Gothly]

---

Josh Susanto wrote:

>

If Marketplace simply ceased to exist, those sales would be almost fully replaced by in-world sales.  Not quite, but near enough.  The difference surely wouldn't pay well for the time spent creating Marketplace listings.

Not so.

Much, if not most of the items on the SLM would be cost-prohibitive to sell in-world, and the demand for low-end and component level items would plummet.

With the SLM, you can quickly find thousands of similar items, but if you had to track them down in-world to compare them, it would take so long that a lot of stuff, people just wouldn't even bother to look at, much less buy. 

---

Agreed. This is why the very first Virtual Sales Websites survived even when various roadblocks were erected by LL in their starting days. Of course back then LL believed the way to shut them down was to construct various rules and encumbrances to make it time or cost prohibitive to operate.

Now they have realized it's just a lot cheaper to buy them out and then shut them down.

[Sera Lok]

Sorry, I'd much rather have a working marketplace, thank you. 

[Josh Susanto]

>Sorry, I'd much rather have a working marketplace, thank you. 

But dontcha' know? - more options for consumers is bad for the economy - right?

[Clyde Lindman]

This would be THE prime time for some enterprising individual or group to start another SL Exchange (remember that?) To succeed it needs only do 2 things: (1) To Work and (2) Provide actual customer service.

All my stuff on the marketplace is in DD now, but I found nothing wrong with the magic boxes, which BTW are still used successfully on other grids. I would quickly jump to list on a new marketplace. The last time there was some competition to the then XStreet, brought about by the anouncement of listing fees, my sales on one of the other markets actually exceeded XStreet for a month.

SO where are the new entrepeneurs who are ready to seize the moment? I would if I had the skills .....and time.

After shining that ray of hope, I would feel it necessary to point out that if a new market based on magic boxes turned out to be successful, LL more likely than not would break the magic box scripts as they did a certain feature of TPVs so nobody knows what viewer anyone is using, or more to the point, not using..

[Darrius Gothly]

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Clyde Lindman wrote:

[..] SO where are the new entrepeneurs who are ready to seize the moment? I would if I had the skills .....and time.

---

I worked for one of the (now defunct) competitors to XStreet SL after LL bought it out. I can tell you that it's not an overnight development exercise, and the one feature that MP has that no other virtual goods sales site will ever have is ... Direct Transfer of In-World Funds for Purchases.

Any competitor must still employ an Escrow Account type arrangement that provides methods for both depositing and withdrawing L$ funds. LL does not have that restriction because they can tap directly into the current balance and transfer funds directly as well.

In my mind, that boondoggle of transferring funds to/from an Escrow account is the death knell for anyone attempting to start a competitive site. When you toss in the lack of trust people have in ALL those type sites now, it would be a delightfully tiring exercise in waste ... waste of time, waste of effort and eventually waste of a good idea.

IMHO

[Sassy Romano]

---

Darrius Gothly wrote:

Any competitor must still employ an Escrow Account type arrangement that provides methods for both depositing and withdrawing L$ funds. LL does not have that restriction because they can tap directly into the current balance and transfer funds directly as well.

In my mind, that boondoggle of transferring funds to/from an Escrow account is the death knell for anyone attempting to start a competitive site. When you toss in the lack of trust people have in ALL those type sites now, it would be a delightfully tiring exercise in waste ... waste of time, waste of effort and eventually waste of a good idea.

IMHO

---

I agree although at present, LL have EXACTLY THIS TOO.

There is no need for an escrow account anymore and what we have is LL holding onto funds from the unicode issue, merely stating "we'll pay you when we fix the bug".  Frankly, that's not an appropriate response given that it's only poor architecture that requires that they maintain "Commerce Linden" as a transaction breaking intermediary.

[Paula001 Goldschein]

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Qie Niangao wrote:

If Marketplace simply ceased to exist, those sales would be almost fully replaced by in-world sales.  Not quite, but near enough.  The difference surely wouldn't pay well for the time spent creating Marketplace listings.

Of course, as long as there's a Marketplace, no matter how dreadful, competitors will use it, so there's little choice if one cares about sales (silly, but some take longer to catch on).

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hm, but i think too many marketplace purchases are impulse purchases and in world sales wouldn't match up at all... with the effort, time and lag that you have to deal with in world.

sales would go down overall IMO. at least i wouldn't buy a quarter of what i do with marketplace, probably even less than a quarter and i know i am not that unique..

not sure how it would effect the linden market, more people would probably rent land again ...

 

 

[Paula001 Goldschein]

---

Darrius Gothly wrote:

---

Clyde Lindman wrote:

[..] SO where are the new entrepeneurs who are ready to seize the moment? I would if I had the skills .....and time.

---

I worked for one of the (now defunct) competitors to XStreet SL after LL bought it out. I can tell you that it's not an overnight development exercise, and the one feature that MP has that no other virtual goods sales site will ever have is ... Direct Transfer of In-World Funds for Purchases.

Any competitor must still employ an Escrow Account type arrangement that provides methods for both depositing and withdrawing L$ funds. LL does not have that restriction because they can tap directly into the current balance and transfer funds directly as well.

In my mind, that boondoggle of transferring funds to/from an Escrow account is the death knell for anyone attempting to start a competitive site. When you toss in the lack of trust people have in ALL those type sites now, it would be a delightfully tiring exercise in waste ... waste of time, waste of effort and eventually waste of a good idea.

IMHO

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i agree

[Paula001 Goldschein]

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Josh Susanto wrote:

>

If Marketplace simply ceased to exist, those sales would be almost fully replaced by in-world sales.  Not quite, but near enough.  The difference surely wouldn't pay well for the time spent creating Marketplace listings.

Not so.

Much, if not most of the items on the SLM would be cost-prohibitive to sell in-world, and the demand for low-end and component level items would plummet.

With the SLM, you can quickly find thousands of similar items, but if you had to track them down in-world to compare them, it would take so long that a lot of stuff, people just wouldn't even bother to look at, much less buy. 

---

yup

[Argus Collingwood]

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Paula001 Goldschein wrote:

---

Josh Susanto wrote:

>

If Marketplace simply ceased to exist, those sales would be almost fully replaced by in-world sales.  Not quite, but near enough.  The difference surely wouldn't pay well for the time spent creating Marketplace listings.

Not so.

Much, if not most of the items on the SLM would be cost-prohibitive to sell in-world, and the demand for low-end and component level items would plummet.

With the SLM, you can quickly find thousands of similar items, but if you had to track them down in-world to compare them, it would take so long that a lot of stuff, people just wouldn't even bother to look at, much less buy. 

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yup

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Mising image? https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Couple-Raft-91-animations-Special-Price/1406470

 

Might want to check your store and file a ticket.

[Josh Susanto]

> Direct Transfer of In-World Funds for Purchases.

Yes.

That's a bone they threw you because it was the one bone no competitor could throw.

OTOH, it is also part of the LL metrics eradication program.

Having only one balance to scrutinize causes in-world and off-world funds and transactions to be automatically co-mingled, producing an additional layter of accounting ambiguity.

That is, if (for example) you're getting paid for stuff in-world, but the SLM starts simply recording sales without actually paying you anything, having only one balance between SL and the SLM will make this fact harder to spot, harder to account for, and certainly harder to prove. 

[Paula001 Goldschein]

oh yes, i am affected as well. i am sitting it out ..

but what brings us back to the subject, rather a broken marketplace than no marketplace at all - still glad for the items that are working.

[Josh Susanto]

I can't completely disagree with that, since I'm still dleivering and getting paid.

But it seems sort of irresponsible for me not to speak up for people who are being cheated in various ways, just because I might not be.