Spica Inventor

Ill tell you exactly why L.L. wont force their removal. Because the whole point of limited stock merchandise is to jack up prices along with lots of quick sales in a short period of time, (something that L.L. greatly desires thinking they will make more money themselves in the process, and even in the long run). So as a reward for merchants who do that, L.L. is effectively giving these merchants greater exposure through more merchandise listings, and thereby creating an incentive for continuing the annoying, yet in reality money losing practice. :matte-motes-confused:

"You give too much credit. LL didn't do a single thing about demo's to either put them in your face or alleviate them" Sassy you are definitely their best agent. :matte-motes-wink: Nice bit of Orwellian doublethink again. hehe

If the 'goodies' wheren't all 'stuck' in SL, then SL would actually have real competition in the present sense. That would require them to do what the customers want, which would be more profitable for everyone involved in the long run, and then we could stop criticizing L.L. and have a nice Kumbaya. I'm affraid for that to become a reality, an antitrust lawsuit would have to carried out. Something that governments these days are very loathe to do. Particularly in the virtual world.

"Which regions did prove to be good locations for small shops?" - High traffic in small area. Product associated with the area. "What is the price range I have to expect?" - L$200 to L$500 - 0L$-199L$ SL Marketplace only - >501L$ lots of luck

Thanx for the info entity. And yes there is a lot of corruption in S.L. from the top to the bottom. Freebies should always remain quite separate from non freebies if honesty, integrity and wanting SL to survive is a desire. :matte-motes-wink:

L.L. wants the demo's 'IN YOUR FACE' obviously knowing that the the full priced demo version is on average quite a bit higher priced than the average similar thing that has no demo version. (They think they will make more money that way instead of peeps just leaving the game and taking their marbles with them due to the annoyance of it all). A way to remedy the demo/freebie/near freebie mixed up problem to a large extent would be to group all the demos together at the top of the most important relevance search. That way the most popular demos will still be on top for greatest exposure, and it wouldn't be anywhere near as difficult and time consuming to find the page that the non demos start at.

Commenting here on the Merchants Forum about how L.L. should improve things, it reminds me of this Star Trek episode.... :matte-motes-mad:

C'mon Darrius. How much time is being lost (and therefore money being lost as well) on not being able to locate merchandise? Linden Labs should be able to just 'chop off' all keywords after a certain number of commas to greatly help it along for those who felt the rediculous need to have 26 keywords for each of their items. So much paralyzation in this game, untra conservative anti investment attitutes, and some peeps still scratch their heads about why the game is slowly withering away? :matte-motes-crying:

"And I do agree with Ebbe when he stated most of the times the things people suggest are "wrong."" True in the case of L.L. employees in general, but not true in the case of S.L. Merchants in general i've noticed. “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.” :smileywink:

"So every merchant has to redo his old marketplace listings again." Woopdeedo. :matte-motes-agape:

The 3 big ones are.... 1. Limit keywords per item to say 10 maximum 2. Limit keywords per item to say 10 maximum and 3. Limit keywords per item to say 10 maximum Fixing that would be like fixing 90% of the problems, and I could list 30 other things that would be nice, but I'm tired of listing them all everytime this question comes up, so Ill pass on that this time. :matte-motes-confused:

I'm getting bad vibes about the new CEO. I don't think he has the backbone to stand up to any significant degree to the ultra conservative board of directors. ;-)

"I suggest charging 10% commission instead of 5%. I say this because LL has little economic incentive to prioritize the MP". As they creep the 'tax' up on SL Marketplace, at the same time they need to creep the inworld land tier costs down so that far more peeps will have an 'incentive' to come hang out on S.L. in the first place. IMHO.

Of course you've heard nothing from the surveys. They where just implemented to make you believe that L.L. cares about what you think. And how dare you not be indoctrinated! :smileytongue:

So did L.L. retire another server to penny pinch, or is this just another of many prior attempts to try to get peeps shopping inworld again? ;-)

A greatly discounted fat pack is usually an awesome idea along with selling individually. Along with setting perms to copy/mod, as that is by far the permissions customers prefer on things.

Why L.L. doesnt limit keyword amounts or characters to a certain finite and much smaller allowable number is beyond logic. With L.L. I usually chalk up their reasons to being spiteful (as well as penny pinching as they probably don't have even one employee fully committed to policing keyword spam). ;-)

I wish everyone had access to everyone sales data too, but separating S.L. and L.L. from deceptive practices would be like pulling teeth at this stage since it's so ingrained within the system.

I'll give you a straight answer Felicia, because I have no reason to be deceptive not being an LL employee/agent/fanboy. L.L. pumps higher priced stuff further up on relevancy search results thinking that they will make more money that way inflating prices. Of course they end up loosing customers and revenue doing that in reality. I'm not sure what the formula is however. I'm not even sure if it is even linear. Probably some sort of curve upward with price.

Even with repeat pics on Google I still think you got a good idea and in some cases probably allows you to find what your looking for quicker overall. I'm the type that likes to be 'flooded' with eye candy, but some meticulous 'super organized' types might not like that. :matte-motes-big-grin:

Cost cutting Overhead Short term stock prices Executive salaries Thoughtless desperate reactions to shrinkage and diminishing profits :matte-motes-wink:

Does this mean that SL will become a direct Democracy or will they just replace him with someone with nothing more than a business degree who's even more conservative and less innovative then he was?:smileymad:

:smileyhappy:Hey good idea I do like to be bombarded with a screen full of pics sometimes. You get that happy eye candy effect that you can't get from that sterile SL Marketplace search. :smileysurprised:

"Overpriced is a subjective word. Few people would agree to what is overpriced". Prices should be relative and reflect overhead costs, (5% for the SL Marketplace and substantially higher to feed inworld tier costs) I have found that prices on the SL Marketplace are generally lower and substantially lower in some cases (newer stuff) but not reflective to the reality of almost zero overhead costs in the case of SLM when compared to inworld store costs overhead (tier and rent). This price adjustment shouldn't take more than perhaps a year as 'price stickiness' in SL should only be psychologically based as opposed to having more concrete factors modifying overhead that one would find much more substantially in the real world such as payrolls and energy costs and such). Prices have been 'pumped up' greatly from relevancy search results by heavily correlating merchandise search result placement priority with price in the SLM which didn't allow for any sort of more natural price adjustment that would have otherwise have happened quality still being a large factor. Older and once popular merchandise tends to be much more expensive because they are in effect being artificially inflated price wise due to their total sales history being longer on a time basis, and as more products are added to the market, which makes it more difficult to find any particular item, these factors just intensify to put upward pressure on deflationary trends. "Xstreet was not perfect, but I guarantee you that most made more money on Xstreet, even the owners of it". Xstreet had much less competition due to far fewer products being sold when compared to today's SLM. Such a reality will inflate both prices and sales on an individual merchant basis, and although price deflation in SL was some factor due to Xstreet's existence, price deflation didn't seem to accelerate in earnest until LL bought it and changed the name to SLM. suddenly causing an unavoidable natural promotion of its existence. I remember Xstreet being around for perhaps a half a year before I ever new of its existence. (2009?) Of course LL had no desire to promote it at the time not wanting it to have ever existed in the first place imo. "They listed results from highest to lowest price, and relevant to the search term. It makes sense to promote the most expensive, because you could easily find a cheap version by choosing a few options on the side". Not much of a price pumper since you could just as easily start from the bottom and work up instead. They had to default to something after relevancy. Price seems the best as a sub emphasis imo. "Plus, much like in RL, people who buy the best 1 out there, generally have less complaints than those that buy cheap, and the consumers are getting a much better experience than what they would get from something cheap". Actually I have found that peeps who buy 'cheap' are less likely to complain about a product that cost them relatively little. They expect much more out of the relatively expensive stuff regardless to actual relative quality as is the case in the real world. "Now, maybe just going highest price to lowest is not the best way to do it. I would contend that probably the best way would be for the top results to have the best profits" Well I would agree that that would be better than the way it's done now, but something would need to be done to help the new popular 'quality' stuff get exposure along side the old popular 'quality' stuff, and on the other side of the token drop down the old stuff that no longer sells. Right now the SLM has it if something sells more than once in a few days time it gets boosted up greatly on the relevancy search result pages, and I think that's a pretty good thing to have in existence. Of course old stuff that no longer sells only drops down very slowly. Perhaps the relevancy search results should be more based on what has sold for the last few months or so instead of total sales, not to say that total sales shouldn't be a factor to some degree as well because things do get 'sold out' but still may be 'popular' 'quality' in world items.

I had some success making my store look like 'another world' as opposed to keeping it mundane looking like just another brick and morter you would expect to find in the real world. Making it into a skybox fantasy scene can be done with minimal prim usage using hollowed out prim cubes and such for environmental texturing. The main reasons why the SL Marketplace has grown at the expense of inworld shopping is due to the time factor and price factor, things that inworld shopping could never compete with without outside influence such as Linden Lab creating incentives to influence peeps in the form of economic incentives largely such as 'taxing' more than the 5% currently in place on the Marketplace or lowering land tier costs, (two things that they are frightened to do in the first case and loath to do in the second, but will have to do eventually if they are interested in staying in business past perhaps five years down the road). Improving the inworld search function would help minimally since SL Marketplace is being commonly used now as a convenient way for finding merchandise inworld anyway. You know with L.L. we are dealing with a typically narrow visioned short term thinking right wing company that only sees increased profit in inflating prices which explains why the very expensive stuff gets boosted up enormously on SL Marketplace relevancy search results giving the false impression of extreme popularity and sales volume to help sell many more of the same to feed the L.L. treasury via property costs/ land tiers.