Lasher Oh

Hi Bruno - using the name in meta keyword tags is also a no no. Many moons ago I made the mistake of using a personalities name in the keywords of a few outfits because they reflected that performers style. They were removed and I got the same note as you received. The problem with that sort of removal by the commerce team is that the items can't be simply ammended and relisted as they can when flagged. On this occasion it's quite simply one strike and your out! ^L^

Sassy Romano wrote: Or how about not interfering with commerce and just provide the tools that permit effective advertising and promotion without someone at LL deciding what does and what doesn't qualify to be boosted? +1 for that sugestion! ^L^

Commerce Team Lin Wrote.. Next Banner Promotion The next banner promotion is for the theme “Masquerade”, which could be the following: Costumes/masks for avatarsAvatars that may be considered “dress up” avatarsDecorations to support a Masquerade themed eventOther items related to a Masquerade themed eventIf you would like to add listings to this promotion, please move them to the Celebrations/Masquerade category. We plan to launch the banner the week of May 21 (my bold) Following the unprecedented flagging festival that accompanied the vaquely explained Madstyle promotion I feel CTL should make a move towards earning themselves some TLC by being more specific about what is and what isn't considered suitable for this 'masquerade' banner promotion of theirs. For instance is the Commerce Team Manager aware that a google search on the word Masquerade returns mainly hits that are categorised as fancy dress costumes and Halloween Costumes - thus in the world according google a Masquerade costume could be anything from a full blown Venetian gown and mask with accompanying Cinderella coach with horses mice and fairies right through to a Naughty Nurse with a stethoscope drooping over her chest. How about drilling down a bit for us and communicating what is and is not included in the Masquerade theme rather than couching it with opened ended weasel words such as 'could be' and 'may be'

Quote of the week .... 'we fixed a couple of JIRAs and order processing sped up, which led to some orders getting stuck' The Commerce Team But at least the Commerce team haven't lost their skill in using the dreaful and meaningless "going forward' catch phrase. ^L^

"They should remove the commerce section of it and change it so that all products have SLURLs to purchase the product in world" Surely that would cripple quite a few sims belonging to or rented by high selling merchants. With Sims barely able to carry more than 30 people at a time shopping in world would more than likely become a real nightmare at some places. Law of unintended consequences would no doubt kick in. The problems started when LL got greedy and bought out Xstreet and On Rez both 3rd party very well run operations, and then decided to try and integrate the shopping experience with their unbelieveably bad viewer. They functioned very well relied on drop boxes that hardly ever failed and did not dramatically hurt in world shopping the way the current marketplace has. I'd love to see the marketplace sold back to a third party operator but I also agree with what Pam said earlier, another round of relisting and migratiions would do me in. But who knows what other nasty surprises the commerce team are dreaming up for us right now. ^L^

Or perhaps sell it back to the original owners who knew how to run a marketplace facility ! ^L^

Hey guys are you aware that your website is not Pininterest friendly? ^L^

search indexing has been borked for a while. I have committed allocated items to test for unique keywords none of them show up unless they also have the same keyword included in the features section. It's asumed that there is a daily index run but If it is it misses a beat whenever it comes around to my part of the database. Just like the rest of the marketplace - it looks good on the surface but when you look under the bonnet ......... ^L^

> As for Brooke and Dakota actually chiming on on this issue..... WHERE WHEN? Maybe at all those exclusive by invite only secret merchants meetings that CLT hold from time to time - we'll never know unless we suddenly find ourselves on the 'teachers pet' list ^L^

LOL - Snap! - I took the the same opportunity to get some home truths off my ches. It feels good to vent from time time. ^L^

Thx for bringing this to our attention. I just had a look and saw that I also have about 15 transactions that were aborted on 13th. Something happened on Sunday that CLT are not fessing up to. That might relate to the none delivery notes I got yesterday - yes I still get them even though I've been 100% DD since Mid April ^L^

That's interesting I'll need to create a new item and watch how long that takes to appear. I haven't tested my unique words with a new product yet. For this test the items already exist. I was curious about how long it takes a unique search word to appear when I type it in and click the search button. More then 48 hours later I am still waiting to see a result for the words returned when that word is exclusively placed in the keywords panel. However when I placed the same gobblygook word in the 'Features' panel as well - the test item came through within 10 minutes. Interesting eh? Gets me thinking, if keywords placed in the keywords panel don't actually rank so highly in the search factors or algorithms or whatever terminology is correct - why on earth are the CLT police slapping people for keyword spam? ^L^

LOL your probably right, something does seem to be frozen - it's been more than 24 hours now since I placed the unique keywords and none of them are yielding a result yet other than "No matching items found.'. I can see this is an exercise which is designed to test my patience. I find it odd because there never seemed to be a crawler delay of any kind with 'madstyle' applied to a listing. Roll on tomorrow for the next test. ^L^

I've placed a couple of unique gobblygook keywords in some listing purely to test the search efficiency but after a few hours they are still not showing up. Hopefully some wag doesn't come over them and decide to flag them for wierd spam. Does anyone out there know how frequently the marketplace search is indexed? ^L^

I've had a spate of flagged items recently for so called keyword spam. Mostly on my best sellers and I suspect that it is with malicious intent rather than a genuine complaint. I am and always have been very careful with my keywords. So when an item which has been on sale for more than 3 years without so much as a peep from anyone is suddenly delisted for keyword spamming then I find that insulting as well as annoying. I'm particularly disturbed that the Commerce team just click the delist button without so much as checking the item or sugesting what particular word is at fault. We are suckered punched each time and have to play guess the baddy. They claim to check every flag - does anyone actually believe that? I agree with Argus when she stated earlier that the Flaggers should be required to name themselves, but I suppose that the current system is a kind of job preservation measure so the backroom button pushers are unlikely to want a more efficient streamlined method when they can tell the boss that they are busy dealing with todays flags. If a team of dimwits had been asked to sit down and come up with the worst review and flagging system possible - they couldn't possible have dreamt up anything worse than the system we are confronted with today! ^L^

"do they charge "a bit more" for each mall, based around that mall cost?' Actually back in the day when I used to rent Mall spots I did actually 'test' different pricing for different Malls and markets. And if I rented in a particularly high priced mall yes I would try bumping up my prices. It was all useful research that helped me to evaluate the best market rate. Every major retail chain I have ever come across has a similar pricing policy it's not uncommon to find certain goods higher priced in more affluent areas and marked down in others. I personally don't actually bump my prices up for marketplace sales I just take the hit and don't pass it on but I'm sure that LL would love to see me increase them. ^L^

Well they nearly hit us with that baby (per Item Fee) a couple of years back and I wouldn't be surprised if they come back with it again before too long. In which case we will be paying a listing fee and commission and we will still not be getting any extra cut from the hugely inflated dollar comparison charge that LL make. I still hold that it is legitimate to add a 5% surcharge to cover the commission charged - it's a normal business practice. As I've discovered many a time I've used my credit card to make a flight booking or buy a bottle of wine. ^L^

A marketplace markup of L35 for a inworld object that costs 600 is just under 6% which would cover the 5% commission charge that LL levy and help towards the cashing out costs they also charge. So in straight marketing terms I don't really consider that an excessive differential and find it odd that folks object, afterall a slightly lower price in world encourages inworld shopping. Many many folks have cussed the marketplace for killing off the inworld shopping experience, so an in world discount at point of sale seems a very reasonable marketing tactic to me. There was a time in the old days when xstreet had a policy that said there could be no more than about 5% differential either way but today the policy is deliberately vaque and states that.... 'inflating prices on the SL Marketplace, in comparison to in-world or other e-commerce sites' is Anti Competive and abusive behaviour. Rather than striking out at the merchant for trying to cover marketing costs I'd have a go at LL lab for inflating the dollar value of all the items we sell - now that almost verges on daylight robbery. ^L^

Wish I could advise but Top Search has never worked for me from the day they introduced the Marketplace it just times out after about 15 minutes each time I try to use it. Top selling does work about 50% of the time but I could almost cook a three course dinner in the time it takes to load. ^L^

All Clear this end - I'm back in again, someone must have made the server burp! ^L^

Is anyone else having difficulty logging into their Marketplace account . Each time I try to access I get this message... 'An error has occurred. Further information is available in the server log' No mention of troubles in Grid Status other than some server trouble yesterday. Wondering if it's a universal problem or just local ^L^

It seems the only people who didn't see this particular flag fest coming were the Commerce Team. Having rushed out a vague and badly defined promo theme they now have to waste valuable time manning the barricades as the flag happy trigger fingers get to work. ^L^

I do agree. When the Marketplace was first introduced a couple of years ago by the now long gone Pink Linden. She quoted Etsy as their inspiration and as an example of best practice for all. The Commerce team then proceeded to ignore all the best points that a professional outfit like Etsy promote. And instead, at the time cobbled together a faint imitation that represented a triumph of style over content and gave us worse marketing tools than we had before. The Etsy model of treasures / favourites is far more sensible than the botched, inefficient, gamed review system that we now have to put up with. ^L^

Such a vague and badly defined promotion was guaranteed to be widely interpreted as there are a huge variety of items that could fall within their 'madstyle' category. At the end of the day it boils down to a personal judgement. Perhaps it is just a little commerce team experiment to determine their comunication effectiveness. The fact that more than 1,000 items have already been key worded as a result of a very low key posting, tells me and most probably the commerce team that a lot more people read and act on the forum announcements than the comments left would indicate. I'd like to be a fly on the wall to see, how many, how often and who most regularly hits the flag button to report an item for what they believe to be 'madstyle' keyword infractions. ^L^

Who needs Persil when you can have Windlight?