Josh Susanto

Yes. We were warned. And that enabled us to take action by ... doing nothing.

(fnord)

When it happens to me, it's often a hint that I'm almost out of vodka again.

One possibility is that it was not included as way of elimintating one moving part from the machine, which should mean fewer spurious reports of email failure by people who don't remember shutting it off. Another possibility is that it was intended to deter people from offering too many free or cheap items. If you offer stuff for 9L or less, LL doesn't tend to get a piece of the action, so sending you a useless notification every time someone buys something is a subtle hint to try to make the same amount of money with fewer sales by raising prices. My email service can handle basically any volume of sales notifications, but I've upped the prices on my more popular items to 9L. 9. Not 10.

Thanks, that helps me a little, at least until I've adjusted the listings on my almost 500 items, at which point the system will be adjusted to make that also not work, I guess. BTW... Just a reminder to everyone to get alts with the first name "Mesh".

The secret message is that you competitor does not welcome the product in any category. After you've rotated it through every possible category and had it reflagged, that will be clearer. By why wait for that?

The most important thing is just to stand up to the flaggers. One thing that has worked in my case has been to remove all keywords and put a message in the item description daring my competitors to flag it again for keywords, knowing both that there are no keywords and that the spurious flag will be immediately reported to LL. People who compete by flagging are not, by nature, industrious. If you make it extra mental effort for them to figure out how to keep getting away with it, they'll either start leaving you alone, or they'll be invited to do so by LL later on.

I'm not convinced that the recent dip in sales has been due to anything that merchants have done or not done. The number of sale per number of views on my items remains about the same, but there is less and less correlation betweeen the number of views and the number of times the item appears in search. The implication is that the few people who are still finding my items are not much finding them by searching for items they don't already know to exist.

It's just a theory. OTOH, I haven't hear a better theory yet, nor have I seen any denial by LL. I don't think it qualifies as fraud as long as there is some kind of searchability to satisfy the claim that the market is searchable. That is: it's not a question of searchable or not searchable, but a question of HOW searchable... and one could argue that it is always possible for it to be more searchable than it is.

Stitch type issues can be reduced by providing the sculpt as a completed prim with the sculpt map on the contents tab, which also helps suggest dimensions and orientation. There's no extra cost to doing this, except for the time you might otherwise use to read complaints to which you don't intend to respond. That AND you can pull the frame of a lot of sculpts (while designing the sculpt map, that is) to a position where stitching will not matter to 99% of people using the map anyway. For example, I use a spherical template for rocks in which the frame has been pulled to a single pucker, thusly: 1) ELIMINATING a second pucker on the other end, which otherwise makes puckers difficult to hide on most rocks 2) ELIMINATING a seam which otherwise leaves questions of stitching 3) ELIMINATING the need for a seamless surface texture Aminom Marvin gave me a free copy of said template after I suggested he make one for his own use. If you want one, ask me.

I just send the stuff and figure that's the cost of using a monopolistic distribution system.

I routinely reset my box after it doesn't synch for more than 5 minutes, and that usually makes the new products pop up on the market inventory page, allowing me to list them. MORE IMPORTANT: When I can't get new product to appear, it usually also means that many of my products are UNAVAILABLE (check for yourself next time). I have almost 500 products and they are fast movers at my prices, so this basically means I'm throwing away money and customer relationships by not resetting my box, so I figure I'm being pretty lazy by even letting the system jerk me around for a full 5 minutes... no?

I reiterate: 1) products are not the business; customers are the business. 2) even cost-intensive products are cheap when compared to the value of a good reputation... or the negative value of a bad reputation. "Take care of the customers and the business will take care of itself." -Ray Kroc

But if they fix the search function, that could actually result in a loss of LL revenue from listing enhancements. Need I explain how?

My sales have mysteriously picked up again today. I still have to ask, though... If the keyword search function suddenly didn´t work at all, would the increase in demand and effectiveness of listing enhancements produce enough LL revenue to offset the sales commissions lost due to futile searches? If not, where should we expect to find a dysfunctional sweet spot? How badly would the search function have to work in order to sell the maximum number of listing enhancements?

My sales have taken a massive nose-dive in the last week. They were up for 48 hours after the earthquake, though, so I don't think the earthquake explains it (please forgive me for complaining about my own little problem; I know the earthquake is more important, and I have treated it as more important everywhere but here). Looking at what is selling and what is not selling, the only hypothesis that's working for me so far is that LL changed ("fixed") the search function so that keywords now have to be separated by both a comma and a space after the comma. Or I could be wrong. What else would produce the exact same effects, though? Was this change announced? What level of Illuminati memebership do I have to attain before I shall be made privy to such "announcements"?

>That's not what this thread is about. Looking again, I see that you're correct - almost. The thread is about taking away from merchants the power to incorrectly indicate object permissions so that LL can, instead, make the same mistake automatically in a way that makes merchants unable to correct the mistake... ... a problem that will ultimately be fixed by eliminating the permissions listing altogether, but not before some new and worse problem has been cooked up to take its place.

My business isn't my products. My business is my customers.

My own sculpted plants don't have this problem, and you'll see why when you see them; from no angle do they appear either flat or made from flat things; they look like plants from the top, and even from inside the limits of the prim. I already offer some for free, and I'll give more to those who ask niceley. If anyone cares, I'll be improving and expanding my sculpted alpha plant line in the near future; the stems portions will be better.

Permissions are what sell my items. Without being able to indicate permissions, I'd have to compete with people who do not offer permissions. That's just silly. OTOH, it would sort of seem to explain who wants the permissions searches done-away-with, and why.

My own sculpts are full perms and people are still happy to pay for them, but I guess the money doesn't make me a serious sculptor, eh. Reselling a noisy ripped sculpt is lame, and I do not condone it. But I like to look at and play with sculpts anaytically, and just don't feel like paying for that. If you see a stolen sculpt for sale, absolutely do report it, please.

"You don't want the Teleporter anyway, there's a bug in it." -Seth Brundle

The fact that Xstreet had graphs that could be used to demonstrate whether marketing efforts were effective; graphs that have not been continued here, very strongly supports my hypothesis that LL knows that product enhancements can generally be demonstrated not to work efficiently in terms of their cost.

My spam item is still the best. OTOH, you may have to actually search for it.

If I expect not to be around for a while; I like to leave some indication of that. It's just the courteous thing to do.