Deja Letov

With all the insanity going on about the Marketplace I thought this might actually be an appropriate time to cough up some word vomit on my attempt to cut back on making the Marketplace such an integral part of my business model. I'm not talking about just the isues with the Marketplace from a functionality standpoint, I'm talking about the Marketplace from the point of view that it is killing the inworld aspect of SL and causes too many problems for merchants who rely on it heavily when it's not working properly. Not too long ago I made a post on my blog about this very matter. I won't post the entire message because it's really long but in a nutshell, here is how I feel about things: 1. You can't simply call what is going on "growing pains". I think that would be naive for any of us to accept. This is purely ignorance on their part. Their motto as of late seems to be “It’s working as intended or maybe if we ignore it will go away”. 2. As merchants, by continuing to allow the new Marketplace to be our major source of revenue it is only encouraging this monstrosity (the marketplace) to continue to grow and take over our SL. 3. I’m not going to sit here and try and convince you that the Marketplace isn’t a useful tool to keep revenue going strong. What I do believe, however, is that there is no point in having an online Marketplace to shop and buy products for our Second Life if that inworld aspect of Second Life continues to disappear. Soon enough, there will be nobody left to create for. 4. Nobody is going to stop using the Marketplace completely. A shopper finds it much too convenient to locate products via a web browser versus having to hop from parcel to parcel via a teleporting system and then having to walk around the store looking through items to purchase. And on the flip side, merchants are enjoying the added sales that have come from having an online explosion for their store. Who wants to take that away? So how do we fix it? The answer isn’t simply to stop using the Marketplace. Many of our businesses would go “kerplunk” because we didn’t make up that lost income inworld. THAT my friend is where there answer is! We have to come back INTO Second Life. We have to start shopping inworld again, we have to start marketing inworld again and we have to start supporting our Second Life before our Second Life stops supporting us! This whole ordeal that is going on reminds me of this quote. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” ~Edmund Burke If we do nothing, then we are sure to fail. It may be going a little too far to call the Marketplace evil, but it certainly will be the demise of our Second Life businesses if we don’t do something to make it a little less important. I don't know if this fits everyone but for me personally, in the past I have had sort of antisocial personality in SL. Not because I don't like people, I do! But because I'm always building. I very rarely talked to my customers. And if I needed something, I would go to the Marketplace. My business expenses were close to about 90% purely Marketplace. On any sample random month, my Marketplace sales made up anywhere from 60-70% of my total revenue. Sometimes slightly higher, sometimes slightly lower, so we will call it 65% as an average. So, what's the point of posting this? Well, when I made this blog post I made two goals for myself: As a shopper… I will make every effort I can to visit a store I intend to buy from if one exists. I will support inworld stores with my purchases BEFORE I support a creator who is only selling via the Marketplace. If I find an item on the Marketplace, I will make every effort to find it inworld first and will only buy from the Marketplace after all inworld efforts have been exhausted. I will learn patience and wait for things to rez so that I can once again enjoy the actual experience of an item rather than just a picture. I will explore this world, say hello to new people, meet the owners of the stores I shop in and get to know them and I will be more social with others outside my friends list (who are mainly other creators or customers). As a merchant…I will continue to list my items on the Marketplace and use it for what it should be…a secondary sales method. I will hold more in-store contests and promotions that only inworld shoppers can participate in. I will be better at blogging my events and getting my customers to actually go to my blog. I will contact EVERY person who buys from me on the Marketplace and thank them with a message or notecard and invite them in to come and see me in world. I will give them an incentive to do so as well as an incentive to shop inworld with me in the future instead of my Marketplace store. I will show an extra amount of appreciation to my customer base that has purchased inworld, possibly even set up a shopping rewards system that will only apply to inworld sales. I will come down from my skybox more often, especially when I see green dots on my map, to welcome people and thank them for their purchases. I will network more with other merchants and make more attempts at co-op advertising, satellite locations, supporting RP sims where many of my products are used and will conduct several inworld marketing campaigns on a regular basis. I will continue participating in hunts and make an even larger effort than I already do at creating an out of this world item for the hunt and make a larger attempt at getting them back to the store. I may even host my own hunt to show shoppers the great things that all of Second Life can offer to them. Most importantly, I WILL have higher inworld sales than Marketplace sales no matter what it takes. Now comes the good part. So far for my own personal goals, I am very happy with myself. And to be honest, with all the bullcrap that seems to be going on in the Marketplace right now, I'm thrilled I made this change! Since making some of these changes these are the numbers so far. Sales Last 6 months consistently has had the Marketplace making up around 65% of my total sales. Right now, with some of these changes in place, I am sitting at 44% Marketplace and the rest is all INWORLD BABY! I have had ZERO issues with the new DD system. All sales have made it into my account and all orders have delivered to customers. I know, I'm probably just one of the lucky ones. Expenses Since the beginning of time (or as long as I can remember) I've been almost exclusively a Marketplace shopper for business expenses. There is only ONE animation store I am required to go to in person because it requires a group approval and a group tag to purchase. But even with those in store purchases, my business expenses still sat at around 90% on the Marketplace. With my new found requirement of myself to go inworld...I am sitting at 4% of my purchases made in the Marketplace. Did you hear that? Let me say it again....4%...FOUR. On top of increased inworld sales on my customers end and decreated Marketplace sales on my end, I have met some really awesome people! I have had more of my customers add me to their friends list in the last 2 weeks than I have in the last year. And more and more people are coming back. It's funny because I put the invite out there to stop by just to say hi, and THEY DO. I have people who have just come back to my store to hang out and chat with me. And for me as a shopper, I got to meet some of the creators I buy from and most of them (except one I wished I hadn't met lol) has been wonderful! I also met other creators while in their store who were buying the same things as I was. Overall, I'm glad I am doing this. Will one person make a difference on inworld sales? Maybe not, but with the frustration as of late with the Marketplace, no matter what your reason is, I guess I am hoping to encourage others to try and make more inworld sales over Marketplace sales....besides...there is no commission on in world sales. :) Anyway...that is my experiement so far. I will definitely keep updating every few weeks to see if this is a long term change or a short term fluke.

I personally haven't had anything done to me in the way of the theft but having read this thread and see that fraud is happening with the taking of money from customers and not distributing to merchants...Glad it hasn't happened to me but ...just wow. I'm surprised they would be quite so open about it. By the way...I'm not really sure I understand how they get away with saying that Linden isn't considered real money and aren't liable for mistakes like that...do they not accept Paypal as an option to pay with marketplace items? Paypal isn't play money as far as I know.

Day 1, 2 and even 3 I was in major witch mode with DD, freaking out probably like most because I hate change. Taking items out of the magic box, copying them all to my inventory and making them folders felt like it was taking forever. It was a pain in the keister to only have a 100 limit on the unassociated item listing as well. I can understand why they did it for future issues but they really should have lifted that during the conversion. I did have MAJOR issue with how slow the system was, when I was trying to delete the old magic box items. But I found a way around that after complaining about it on the forum. However, now that I've migrated all of my listings over, I've spent less than a day getting them all out of the magic boxes and organized neatly into my folder structure in my inventory and of course uploaded to the merchant outbox. Honestly, I'm kinda digging the DD. No more having to create boxes unless I want to sell them on my wall is awesome to me. I also like how quick it is for me to update a product and add new products as well. No more storing of a folder of the items, plus a boxed version of the item. And now that the speed seems to have improved greatly in the marketplace it's even better. I haven't experienced any issues with deliveries since the launch and my sales are about normal as far as I can tell. Who knows if the positive experience will continue but after getting over the initial slowness hump, I can't complain much.

In my own store I have a kiosk that you have to touch to start receiving, and you can stop recieving any time by touching it again. But I have been on the receiving end of a subscription of some sort that I am positive I never signed up for, mainly because I've never been to their store but did buy something from them on the Marketplace. It's highly annoying, only because of the number of notices I get on a daily basis from all the hunts I am in, groups, subscriptions that I did sign up for, etc. But...I don't complain too loudly when it happens, I just mute the object sending me notices. Do I shop from them again? Probably, I don't really pay attention to my "mute" list, I just want the notices to stop, it doesn't mean I don't like their product.

Exactly. Makes me wonder if they don't have things indexed properly or catalogs made. Need some query optimizing perhaps and some views that are optimized for this kind of load.

This is true but it will also filter out some of the old stuff that have creators that aren't around anymore. I don't think you'll see much more in the way of crap than we already do. Having a place to rez 1 prim for a magic box really isn't all that difficult or hard to come by. Besides if it's crap...let them put their crap up,it won't sell.

Just searching through the Marketplace seems to just drag by and editing a single item is insanely slow. Pulling up your inventory listings to view them, OMG takes forever. Half the time I get the nice new error screen saying they have been alerted of the problem. Seriously, how can they expect everyone to be done in 2 months when their website is impossibly slow to navigate? *shopping isn't any better either. I tried purchasing something early this morning and browsing through search results made me want to just close my window and forget the purchase because it was horribly slow. How are they going to impose a 2 month timeline when everything seems to be running slow as mollasses?

I had this same thing happen. When I was done mirgating 238 products over, they all listed as direct delivery, but I had around 37 items that were listed as not associated. I just went through and deleted them via the web page and everything appears to be fine. Must just be some strange things it doesn't catch it.

I had this exact same problem. I don't think it has to do with size because i've uploaded them as a 512x512 file and it looked like crap once uploaded to the marketplace and it stayed the same size. What I have found is that it's the file format. Since they convert to JPG's I am guessing this is why. When I upload a JPG file directly the images look exactly how they should, nice and sharp and clean. So now I've converted to exporting all of my images to JPG rather than PNG for marketplace listings.

You might try reading the articles that Valerie posted. They explain exactly what you need to do including what a magic box is.

Thank you all for your comments. This thread is full of legal questions. Wouldn't it be nice if LL reads this and just decides to add a matrix table to their database hooking up an avatar ID with a store ID and letting us have multiples! Yay! Just FYI...to be on the safe side, I am waiting to hear back from all the creators I have contacted. 1 so far has told me alts are no problem I just had to provide her name. I can't start listing anything quite yet anyway because I just made the alt and it won't let me create a marketplace store yet. So I have time to get it all straight. For those who say no or just don't get back to me, Ill probably go ahead and repurchase on her what items I am missing permission for. Thanks everyone!

Well, no I wouldn't send the textures, but I think what someone earlier had said was that if a creator see's my alt selling an item with their textures on the marketplace and they look up my alt's name, they could file a complaint against me and take that item down thinking I had ripped the textures. I guess in world you can see who the creator is and it might make more sense. But in the case of sculpts, those would be sent full perm and that could pose a bigger issue than textures on an item.

My main created the item because my main has owned this other store for the last 6 months. It's just recently become a problem because I now have 3 stores represented in my marketplace store. I don't really like alts, I've always made my items only on this character. Buying a second set of everything I own could get really pricey. No one set isn't bad, but last year alone, I spent close to 300K in sculpts, textures, scripts and outsourcing. That's not cheap to just buy a second set of everything. I think my first step is I'm going to contact the creators in question and see if they would make an exception. Hell I'm even willing to put in my profile that it's just an alt for the sake of a Marketplace listing and I'm never online on her. I guess if anyone says no, then the number might be small enough to go ahead and buy double. boo on that idea though. lol

If I contacted the few makers in questions and they gave me "text" based permission to do it through IM or email, is that good enough to prove I had permission should it ever come up? I just want to alleviate anyone pointing it out and saying it wasn't in their TOS when they told me I could separately. Obviously I would keep logs of conversations.

I've been trying to come up with my own backwards solution to not being able to have multiple stores yet in the Marketplace and was thinking I could pass the items to an alt full perm, have that alt reset the permissions correctly and drop it in a new magic box, hence creating another store under an alt to separate out products. But I'm a stickler for following TOS and some of textures I own have specific clauses about not Xfering to alts. Not much I can do about it from this point on but I will probably be making a conscious effort to check for that in further full perm purchases and not buy from those that don't allow xfers to alts...for that specific product line anyway. I'm just curious...for full perm content creators, I know some of you allow for xfering the items to alts, but for those that don't, I'm curious as to the reason. Is it simply for tracking?

I subscribe to a few lists through the kiosk method and those I subscribe to, yes I absolutely do read them. Most are for other creators whos products I buy like sculpty or texture makers, but I have a few others as well, but all are ones I subscribed to. I noticed in the last couple of weeks I have gotten a couple from shops I just visited and one from someone I purchased something from the Marketplace. That annoys the heck out of me. If I wanted to hear about your stuff I would have asked for it. I do use them for my own shop and I send out something maybe once a week if that. And I can tell you mine is completely by choice through touching a kiosk and they can remove themselves any time by touching that same kiosk. Do they work? Absolutely. Anytime I send out a notice, for about 4-6 hours my sim is usually populated by many shoppers coming to see whatever it is that I just announced.

iCade what are you talking about? Where can merchants hide reviews? I've never seen that option.

I am probably harder on myself as a merchant than I am on others. But then again, I rarely even have a need to talk to many merchants as a customer. I'm like a guy in a mall, get in, get what I need and get out. The rare occassion I have needed to talk to someone due to maybe a failed delivery on the marketplace or something and that has always gone really smoothly as well. But as a merchant I know how it feels to overwhelmed in real life and not able to get on SL as often as you would like, I also know how rude some people can be so I try to be reasonable and understanding as I possibly can be.

Hi there. I have a project I need done. It's actually super easy. There are tons of tea cups out there but I need one that people can sit in. So what I need is a sculpt of a teacup that has a ledge on the inside about half way up...basically something to put their butts on. It needs to be high enough up that when sitting their feet doesn't come out the bottom. I will need this in full perm, but will not sell the sculpt itself just the item I make with it. If you can create this for me, please send me a message in game and let me know your price for this. Thanks!

So who wants to head that up? LOL Great idea...we need a leader for this revolution AKA antimarketplace campaign.

Ya you'd have to find a place with a bunch of mainland open though. Or someone could go in and buy a ton of it and then sell it off to everyone just to ensure we have the plot. But it's not a bad idea at all. I'd be down. I have a premium membership and don't even own a single piece of mainland.

You're right. I remember back in 2008 and even in 2009, I had booths at most of the major clubs and they did at least some sales but my LM was taken all the time so even if I didn't see sales from the booths directly I knew they may have taken a LM to my store and purchased while there. I do love the idea of all of the shopper groups and even the business groups to bring more business to my store. I actually talked with Mauve in world last night and joined up with her group and I think it is a much better idea than the booths. I'm currently doing the 60L weekend thing and I can tell you just that one shopper group brings me quite a few sales so I think these groups may be the best thing at least for now. It's funny how business trends change of the years too. I write a SL business blog, and things I would have wrote years ago for advice don't even hardly apply anymore. Major changes in doing business.

Thanks Latch. I'm pretty much doing all of that already and my MP sales have been fairly steady. My focus is now on the in world aspect which is why I brought that up. But I'm glad you brought up hunts. I am a HUGE advocate of hunts. I do them every chance I can. Every time I'm in a big one, my sales for the month for in world goes up greatly. I love them!

Marcus that's exactly the reason for my inquiry. I am on a HUGE anti marketplace kick right now. I'm pushing to all my customers that the MP is unreliable and should only be used for search. I am actually in the process right now of custom scripting an entire store catalog of all of my products that you can simply click the page in the catalog and TP right to the item. I too was affected by the V-Day masacre and now I guess you can say I'm on a roll to try and leave MP in the dust and really focus on in world sales. I'm even starting a reward system that will only apply to in world sales. My in world store is definitely on game and doing really well. I pull a profit each week and pay my tier...I guess I'm just trying to increase sales of course but also to ensure that my in world sales begin to surpass my marketplace sales. I've got a whole game plan (or I guess you could call it a marketing plan) and booths or stalls were just part of it. And I hear ya about sims closing down all the time. They are probably the reason I have done so well actually...unfortunately for them. I've seen a ton of my type of stores leave the grid for one reason or another, and every time I see a big one closeup shop, I seem to get an influx of sales. I've been going for 3 years now and while I did downgrade to a half a sim for a short period of time last year, I've been at a full sim the rest of that time and haven't closed up yet. I guess I'm trying to keep a positive outlook. But I am on board with you for pushing away from the MP....it's a rebellion woohoo!

I've been testing the waters with renting spaces from other sims to showcase my own store. I see a TON of "new" markets begging for you to rent space but when I do...I never get sales from them and when I stop by for a visit, I rarely see anyone there. I even put faith into a brand new dark themed sim, paid a month ahead, only to have it shut down the first 2 weeks, and didn't even get a refund for it. I've wasted so many lindens trying out various places and none have worked out. Is there anyone out there having success with these? Either as a booth, stall or even a whole other satellite store. I'm fairly specific as catering to the goth community so I feel I am a little limited on where I should go and have it make sense like dark themed RP sims, goth clubs, etc. What can I do to ensure I'm not just getting into someone's new project to have it either fail as a sim or my booth fail due to lack of traffic? What's the best way to succeed with outside advertising? Oh...and if anyone has any suggestions for a place to rent that would be a good fit for a gothic themed store, I'm taking suggestions for that too. :)