Spica Inventor

I noticed some intermittent slowness issues on Friday that was probably keeping peeps from easily purchasing things. Again. Relevance search result updates might have been frozen again on Friday and today as one of my products stayed put after good sales this week I noticed.

"I'm still trying to get things together. If it's affecting you, the vast majority of people who sell things should be selling things normally, while you're seemingly getting left behind. The more people that give me input on the situation the better I can draw conclusions. Some people I've talked to thought I was crazy and it was just market fluctuations, b ut I'm starting to find people who have had the same happen to me" Well actually overall I think my sales are about the same. Nothing is obvious, but it just seems to me that there is a bit more erraticism where there are no sales and then alot of sales as if like a day, or a few days in a row of failure to deliver is being pushed forward to days where delivery is more successful for the customers. "Well, looking at amazon, a great way to get people to find what they're looking for is similar items. Amazon has a feature that lets people see what people have viewed after viewing a listing. It crowdsources the problem as relevancy is determined by users instead of an algorithm that needs constant adjustment. I'm not advocating a system like Amazons, but I'm saying that a crowdsourced social solution is probably the best, whether it be similar items, other viewed items, a tagging system by customers, or something I'm not thinking of. It's not an easy problem to fix, nearly 3.5 million items have been listed on XStreet and SLMP and the list grows rapidly." I do appreciate that feature on Amazon, but don't use it religiously as the 'crowdsourced' list just seems to be a repeat of the word search lists (only in a slightly different order perhaps) (that defaults in order of sales volume first and foremost just like in the SL Marketplace by and large.) so it's just stuff I've already looked at anyway. Largely superfluous.

"Magic boxes were far from perfect. I'm not the only one who has had problems with them not selling new products, and then switching to DD and having them sell within a few days. They did have flaws, but merchants didn't know about them, because the flaw in the Magic Boxes had to do with how the website where the customer made the purchase failed to communicate with the magic box, which in tern failed to communicate anything to the merchants.The customer saw a failed purchase while the merchant had absolutely no idea it happened." How common was that flaw? Was it rare, very rare or extremely rare? I can't back it up with data, but right now it seems that DD has 'that' problem to a much greater occurence as sales seem to be more 'erratic' on a daily basis suggesting that its failing on some days much more than others. ;-) "2. It's confusing for customers when you offer a copy/mod version of a builder's kit and a full perm version as they are both returned in search results and they don't understand why one costs signifcantly more some times". That sounds like a newbie problem to me "3. Search relevancy and keyword usage makes it extremely difficult to find what you're looking for." How can it be done differently from the way it is done now where the merchant assigns his own keywords and be an improvement? My thought is to limit the keywords to perhaps a dozen at the maximum. That should keep the keyword spaming to a minimum too. "As for 3, I'm not sure. LL needs a better way to determine if customers are happy with a product as opposed to how well they sell. Lots of people buy several cheap things and are only happy with a few of them and throw the others out because they aren't happy with them. Then, those items the customer wasn't happy with still get treated as a good item with the current relevancy system that weighs things by views and sales". No no no no. Even though I realize that relatively few people do ratings and especially reviews of the products they purchase on The Marketplace, the idea of pushing 'overpriced' products to the top of relevance search lists is abhorrant to me. The truth is that the "cheap things" are more likely to have lower customer ratings as a general tendency anyway. And it seems that LL already push higher priced things further up on the relevance search list to some degree as it stands presently.

hehe. A dogs breakfast? :-D

Nope. My one is still not fixed yet. But it doesn't seem to be hurting anything, so im not worried about that particular problem.

Well you had a big spike in sales around 4/8. Did you just release some new products about that time? I know that when I put new products on the market they usuall;y seem to sell alot more at first, and then drop off not too long after. Probably has to do with the available customers in S.L. being mostly 'old timers' and then you have to rely heavily on noobs for sales afterwords. If you have a fan base, that could have an effect on the new product spikes as well. However, a few of my products seem to be more 'consistent' with sales volume thoughout their existance. My store number is above 200k.

Unusually warm weather and Spring is having an impact. That damn global warming! Combined with L.L. cheapness. hehe ;-)

I suspect L.L. will fix that problem eventually. Just don't hold your breath thinking that it will be soon in the meantime. ;-)

I like the old way where you were notified in the chat box. I considered that yummy spam. :-)

If the stars are substandard such as 3 or below, then the reviews are checked almost certainly by THE BUYERS every time. You may not be all that concerned with how you throw your money around, but the vast majority are. And as I hope we all know, fraud in S.L. is much more commonplace than in R.L. , so it stands to reason. ;-)

Well its probably a teenager thing. Kind of similiar to when those naive peeps who have alot of growing up to do naturally give you basically a good review and at the same time 'reward' you with three stars out of five. hehe ;-O

I totally disagree there. The reviews make a big impact on sales. If they didn't, so many Mercants wouldnt be 'begging' for them all the time or getting their friends to fake a 5 star or two for them. ;-)

Give me mod/copy permissions or give me death! hehe

I want some mesh horns and talons that I can make in large sizes and use with architecture (I hate 'the invisible blob" effect along with those goofy phantom solid prims. I would also like to see some mesh objects that are hollowed out and can be used for building sized living space, mainly rounded/cylindrical stuff that can be used for building tower sections that are open on both top and bottom like a lamp shade but other shapes would be nice too. Perfectly rounded spheres both hollow and solid would also be nice. :-D

Why on Gods green earth would anyone want to control what a person prices their products at on SL? In addition when you increase your prices on the marketplace over what they are in world the only person you are abusing is yourself because you are causing yourself less sales on The Marketplace which will mean lower rankings on the very important relevance search and creating a vicious cycle. I don't even have an in world vendor anymore as I redirect people to my marketplace store instead. I notice that some merchants make you come to their in world store to buy copy versions of their products? How does that help their business? It would be better to sell all the versions on The Marketplace it would seem to me.

R.P. sims will often times charge high rents thinking that that will yield them only the best products by the best and most successful builders out there (who are able to charge high prices for their products to support the costs of rental) and thusly increase their traffic to everyones benefit. An indicator to the success of that method would be if their market is filling up with tenants, otherwise that strategy is certainly being counterproductive for them as lots of empty market stalls has the effect of causing peeple to think there is something wrong with the sim and therefore less likely to even give it a look. Again it comes down to investment and the fact that you have to spend time and money to make money when there is competition as an influencing aggregate.

It might be an indicator that the (one) software guy they have employeed is fiddling with it again at his liesure. hehe ;-)

I wonder if it would work flawlessly if you where to sort by price: High to Low however. Nudge nudge wink wink. hehe ;-)

Right, I guess 'fine tuning' just costs more than L.L. is willing to invest. And if the Marketplace worked too well, then there wouldn't be any good reason at all to go shop in world outside of peeps main stores (just to get a closer look at the products) pumping up land costs. hehe ;-)

Less work for us? I like that idea. ;-D

We should all record those days or group of days that sales drop to zero. If they happen to fall on the same days for all or most of us, then we can pretty much safely assume that it's Linden Labs 'screwing around' causing the problem. ;-)

Yep I saw that same problem in mine yesterday. And it was a duplicate listing of the same product. One was right and the other had someone elses picture on it.

Rental prices have to come down because few will want to take a loss for advertisement purposes. Then using up prims in markets take away from the RP sims so it's a catch 22. Of course L.L. is ultimately to blame because everything needs to support the high tier prices. ;-)

My sales seem to be relatively normal anyway. I think more people might be a bit hesitant to shop on the marketplace until things look safer perhaps. I expect that to be more of an issue the higher priced ones products are naturally. Are your inworld sales taking the same hit or fluctuating the same amount?

Finally they at least tried to update it as my products have moved around where they should be it would seem. (Sorted by popular relevance). So it's looking promising anyway. (crosses fingers). hehe