Deja Letov

Ya I'm with Madeliefste...you aren't going to sell to merchants unless your mesh are full perm and you have them listed on the marketplace as copy/mod. Change that to full perm and you might get some merchants.

I would say use your best judgement and don't do it for a MINOR amount. The difference between 5 and 6% is practically nothing. On a 100L item we're talking 1L. Do you really feel the need to complain over 1l? Id look for more major violations, like a minimum of a 10% increase is what I would look for. That's even IF you really feel like policing it. Personally I could care less if someone charges less in world, it doesn't affect me, it only affects LL and their 5% commission.

I agree with Sassy. I don't know how anyone could possibly say that the MP reporting and record keeping is even remotely helpful to merchants. You can see your sales data sure, but not much else. The only thing you can get with MP is top selling searches and top selling products and transaction history. Top selling search is pretty useless for any sales that don't happen in the MP so what's the point other than to see how well your search is doing. The "vendors" you mention are not what report your sales data. Most vendor systems have very intricate reporting features such as top customers for any given time period, top products, which regions had the most sales (useful for satelite locations), sales by time of day (so I know when to run sales), sales by day of week, etc. There are TONS of reporting to be done in a vendor system versus MP.

Kampu Oyen wrote: >'inflating prices on the SL Marketplace, in comparison to in-world or other e-commerce sites' is Anti Competive and abusive behaviour. There's no real logic behind it. When LL uses the term "anti-competitive" they actually tend to mean "demand-driven"; that is: "competitive". By contrast, price-fixing would seem to be just fine. In fact, by LL's standard, price fixing would seem to be the very model of "competition". What they really mean is "inflating prices on the SL Marketplace,in comparison to in-world or other e-commerce websites could make your customer purchase from your store instead of the Marketplace and that means we wouldn't make money off of you...so don't do it!"

Sassy Romano wrote: provides the product hosting environment (at no cost to you) and the only thing they ask for is a small percentage if the item sells. Well, this sentence right there...saying it's free but then saying they ask for a small percentage. It's contradictory. You are still paying. I think we will just have to agree to disagree on affiliate vs. another store cause I don't see the relation to an affiliate at all. But oh well, enough for this poor horse.

Why? To try to pay tier. LOL In all seriousness, I agree with you 100%. And it's why I don't try anymore. I focus on my inworld sales instead and I RARELY shop on the MP anymore, instead opting to do all my shopping in world. But the fact of reality is some people prefer to shop online, so you can't completely ignore the marketplace. All you can do is try to handle issues the best you can when they come up and focus on the inworld aspect to make shopping more appealing inside SL instead of out of it.

I agree Lasher, it's legitimate to add it...IF your business chooses to do so, some will and some won't, but there is nothing wrong if they do, since it's allowed. I think the main question here since the original poster made the thread is should you report the listings for being between 5%-6% since 5% is the limit. Do we punish someone for being slightly bad at math? lol

Well I look at it like this. The prices I set are based off my in world fees. So my tier, cost of employees, etc. Those are all in consideration when I set my prices and are already included in the in world price. It's just like if you were to open another store location, if you doubled your tier, etc you would most likely up your prices to compensate. MP is like another store in my eyes, not an affiliate because affiliates do all the work, do the advertising for it and pay the tier that the affiliate vendor sits on, the Marketplace is all you. My store was in place and selling long before I made a Marketplace store. So when I created a Marketplace store, that is a new fee that was never worked into the cost of goods. And since the fee only applies to marketplace sales I see nothing wrong with it. Now, I admit, I don't mark my items up to cover the 5% commission fee, it's negligible to me, but it would be considered an expense that wouldn't need to be there if it were an in world sale. I get what you're saying, and some people, myself included, do run business just based on one price, but the point I was making was the difference between a 5% marketup and a 6% markup seems a little rediculous to go through the trouble to flag every item.

I'm not sure I would report listings that are just over 5%. Ok if something was say 10% over then maybe, but most likely they are just covering the cost of the MP fee. Reporting for it being just barely over the threshold just seems...I don't know, pointless and causing unecessary grief for the merchant. It's not exactly what I would call abuse.

I rent in RP sims and Ill just tell you what I look for. 1. A circular layout or one single row from landing point to the teleporter down to the sim. If you have rows and rows that people actually have to explore around to find instead of just walking by on their way to the teleporter, I won't rent there. Why? Because NOBODY actually explores a market like that. You have to catch them on their way walking by. 2. Dots on the map. If I land to check out your place and nobody is there in the middle of the day or early evening, then your traffic is probably nothing and I wouldn't bother. 3. Ability to do more than just put out some products. I want to be able to work with the sims I advertise in. I want to sponsor your events, be mentioned in your newsletters, etc. Give me more than just space. 4. I like to see what you are doing to market your rp sim. Usually calendar of events at the landing zone listing your RP events, or club events or whatever, shows me that at least you are more than just a pretty sim for people to randomly stop by.

I think it's more of an issue with people not using the Marketplace not necessarily LL messing with anything. I hear in a lot of the group chats I'm in that people are not using the Marketplace right now. Everyone is scared to use it so they have been buying in world instead. If it's not that it could just be normal fluctuation, which happens a lot.

THat was a great post Madelaine. As an adult I agree entirely!

I agree it's most likely competitors. It happens to me a lot when I list new products, usually right after I send out a notice to my group about a new product being listed on the MP. Even if I have the item up for a day or two, it never fails, my new listing gets flagged after I send the notice out to my group. It's gotten to the point where I just wait for it and relist it immediately so my c ustomers don't miss seeing the item.

Innula Zenovka wrote: I'm just completely unclear, though, who the creator of the game and scripts actually is, and what they say their contacts with LL have been. I'm with you. Honestly, I thought it was the original poster who was the creator but after reading the thread I see it is not the case. Maybe the creator could post and shed some light instead of us all guessing what's going on. I don't own the Byngo system myself, but I have played it and it was a lot of fun. I'd love to see it stay.

I think everyone is making a lot of assumptions on the "why" of why this is happing. The fact is nobody but the creator and LL really know what happened or what will happen. To be honest, I feel like we are all missing part of the story here, some things just sound "off" and we won't know anything until LL has contacted the creator and makes an official response and the creator decides to share that response. Unfortunately, as you have pointed out they are refusing to do so in a timely manner. But come on...are you surprised? We've all LL's business practices, this is just another day, nothing special to note about this particular incident. People are leaving SL for many reasons, this reason included. I'm not stupid, I know SL will most likely be gone one day because of the way they run their business but unfortunately it's their business to run how they want and if they want to run it into the ground, I guess that's their perogitive.

I totally agree. Merchants who give no clues or give REALLY vague clues and hide it inside of other things are doing it wrong. I love hunts because I get to be creative with clues and have fun. I use storybooks or lines from famous movies and such as clues, things people would know. But seriously...last month I had a hunt item that was hidden on a horse carriage out in the front of my store. It's the only carriage and was literally within 10 meters of where you landed. The clue was obvious that you needed to find a carriage, yet a lot of people would tp in and then start immediately TPing around the sim to all the decoys, like they never even read the clue. One even sent me a message to ask me where it was hidden and I said, "is the clue really that tough?" and she said she didn't have time to read through all the clues. WHAT! She just spent 15 minutes TPing around my sim instead of spending 10 seconds reading the clue and then looking to the left and seeing a giant carriage! I'm amazed at how entitled some people are during hunts. Luckily...it really doesn't happen too often. I find most people have fun at hunts and really enjoy the hunt.

If they are landing at the landing spot for your sim and walking straight to your house, it's possble that you are looking at bots. Bots will land and walk straight to a coordination. They will then sit there and not say anything for hours. It might be what's going on.

Unfortunately I don't think there is much you can do unless they are using your company name in their description. This happens all the time in real world searches on Google. My business gets copied all the time and it's so frustrating. But they do it for competition. Unfortunately, we've never been able to do anything legally about it and I doubt LL would do anything either. I'd definitely contact them and just politely tell them that you are aware of the copying and would like them to modify their description. Although...I'm curious what sentences are because there are times when someone selling the exact same thing can just about replicate their description on accident just because it's a natural way to speak about their products. Do you know how many website company's out there have "We are the premier website design company" simply because everyone calls themselves that?

Yes it's a form of cheating but people do it all the time. Personally, I don't do it to other merchants because I wouldn't want it done to me. Merchants spend their time making a product to give away for free for the hunts and the least people can do is play the game as it's meant to be played. Merchants don't make these gifts because they want to give away all their stuff for free. They are doing it for traffic and to hopefully gain new customers out of it when people explore their stores. But cheating, you've taken away the reason that merchants choose to do hunts. Many merchants have gotten smart to this tactic however and place decoy boxes all around the sim. When I do hunts, I place out around 100 or so decoy boxes. It's rather comical watching people instantly TP into walls, on top of roofs, in the ground, under water, etc. All because they don't feel they should have to hunt for the item. I once had a guy chew me out on my sim for doing it. ah well.

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Morgue-Autopsy-Examination-Center/3041652

Sorry can't help, none of mine were affected.

This is especially annoying due to the fact that they won't let us have multiple stores. I have three store names in my actual store name listing and it causes all kinds of search issues, but until t hey let us have separate stores, not a whole lot to do about it.

Ya this has been going on for awhile. I was releasing new items, but just this last week decided to hold off on releasing any new items til I see the search update. I will say on a few searches it's worked out in my favor, I've had incredible sales on a couple of products that must have had that unlikely chance of freezing on page 1 when it happened that I normally don't have. Should be interesting to see how these products rank after the search is unfrozen...since you know..the relevance search doesn't actually have ANYTHING to do with relevance and it appears mostly to appear by sales.

I doubt you'll get much here, this is the merchants forum. Try posting that in the wanted forum.

I would report only after verifying their keywords. Just because they come up in a search, doesn't mean they are busing the system, it means the marketplace search is sometimes jacked up. I once had a beef because when I searched for gothic furniture, a dance hud would come up in the #1 position because the word gothic and furniture appeared somewhere within their description. They weren't abusing either, it was legitimate use of the words, it's just that the marketplace search puts more weight on sales and popularity than it does on relevance...kind of ironic when you are searching for relevance but whatever.