Porky Gorky

Phil Deakins wrote: As time goes by, the marketplace is becoming the normal place to shop for SL goods and inworld stores are becoming the abnormal way. It's LL's doing, and it's intentional. So I think it's a bit rich, to say the least, that a Linden suggests discussiing "Inworld Marketing and Advertising Best Practises" when they are doing their utmost to undermine all of it. I agree Phil, and it makes me wonder exactly what sort of Muppets are running this show? Driving sales to SLM results in less traffic in-world which results in less requirement for commercially used land which results in less tier in LL's pocket. So the question is, does the increased commission from SLM sales offset the loss in tier from in-world merchants? If it doesn't then someone (else) needs to get fired.

Robert Galland Yes I agree. LL efforts to drive the sale of 3D content from a 3D world onto a 2D website does seem to be succeeding. Who'd have thunk it? What's worse, the tactic they have used to achieve this is to seemingly de-value all the search systems in world. This is forcing people to down-tier or give up in world stores entirely. Are LL really sacrificing all this tier just so they can take a 5% commision on more items on SLM? I think we have arrived at this point purely by accident mainly through the poor deveopment of GSA 6 and V2 Re. freebies, I think L$10 is a low enough cut off point. Sure you are still going to have allot of low level products priced at L$11 but I think the volume of overall freebie style products would be greatly reduced from the main marketplace. I think it would be worth LL running some experiments on this. You are right, they were proposing to charge a listing fee on freebies. I found this on Daniel Voyager's blog just to remind is all of what was planned. I think we will see some of these listing fees introduced sometime down the road. http://tinyurl.com/6kae6n5 Date 20th Nov 2009: We will enact the following new controls for the Xstreet SL Marketplace within 90 days, with at least two weeks’ notice, in order to improve the shopping experience: Monthly Listing Fee for Freebies of L$99: Listings for free items will now be treated as a marketing/promotional tool and thus will have a price. L$99 is the price of our least expensive listing enhancement and so we will start there. Depending upon desire for this marketing opportunity and perceived value given such demand, we will adjust the price as necessary to maximize this value and keep the freebie listings from becoming bloated again. Expected Delivery: 30 – 60 days Minimum Commission of L$3 on all items priced L$1 or greater: We will enact a minimum commission of L$3 on all sales of non-freebie listings. Since Freebie listings are now considered marketing and are charged as such, they will not incur this fee. A L$3 commission will raise the commission on all listings under L$50. This was a range suggested by residents, but it turns out that this is the price range where there is a very high transaction volume and low commission income which combine to cover the costs of those transactions. We may adjust this minimum commission as we see its effects on the marketplace. L$3 does not cover the full cost of a transaction, but the goal here is first to manage freebie growth first. Expected Delivery: 30 – 60 days Monthly Listing Fee of L$10 for all items L$1 or greater: All non-freebie listings will now be charged L$10 per month to remain listed in the Xstreet SL Marketplace Currently, less than 20% of Xstreet SL listings make at least one sale per month. This displays just how much clutter of unsold items exists on Xstreet SL. Doing this will provide an incentive for merchants to remove listings which are not selling, while keeping this fee low enough to have a minimal effect on listings which are selling and are desired by shoppers. By reducing the overall number of listings on Xstreet SL, the shopping experience will drastically improve which will please our shoppers and be a boon to the business of all of our merchants. Expected Delivery: 60 – 90 days Separate freebies into their own category: There is already a freebie section on Xstreet SL. This section will become the place to browse for new freebies. We will remove free listings from the browsable categories and keyword search results on Xstreet SL. Expected Delivery: 60 – 90 day

Pamela Galli wrote: I think you can still pay for Picks if you want, but since they don't count for search, there is no point. I don't see any way for LL to monitor this system's use. The only way I see to neutralize it is for everyone to use it, so everyone has a billion stars and cancels one another out. When people started paying for picks I was sick of watching my search rank get relegated on a daily basis, everyone above me in search was paying for picks. In the end I gave up and started paying for picks myself. I could comfortably out-pay the people above me in the rankings and very quickly rose to the top of search again. If LL refuse to police gaming then in my opinion I was left with no other option than to beat the gamers at their own game(ing). I was pleased when picks were removed as a search factor as it rendered paying for picks pointless. The same applies with paying for ratings. I have already started tracking and AR'ing those people paying for ratings and will continue to do so. I'll give it a few weeks to see if LL takes action and if they don't then they leave me no other recourse than to start gaming ratings myself. I am happy to play by the rules when the rules are enforced. I am also willing to fight dirty in order to compete and overshadow the gamers. If LL do not take action against those people I have AR'ed then I see no other choice but to out-game them again. LL's history of inaction against gamers leaves us with 2 options. Either lower ourselves to the gamers level to restore an even playing field or to take the moral high ground and reject all forms of gaming to our own determinant. I've spent years living on the moral high ground in SL. It's not an advantageous place to be. It's allot less profitable and there is a distinct smell of crap in the air.

Tara Chester wrote: Sort freebies and cheaper items at the end of "relevance" and "best selling" search results. ty I don't think freebies and anything under L$10 should even be on the marketplace. If LL insist on leaving them there then they should be treated completely separately from all other items and not be listed in standard search results. Given them their own category and search field. Keep them separate.

I've never even heard of this so thanks for posting. I shall reserve comment until after further investigation. I look forward to your 3rd and 4th beefs. I find your posts very interesting.

Argus Collingwood wrote: BTW.. what does AIS stand for? Asset Inventory Server? According to Sea Linden at the last office hour, AIS stands for Agent Inventory Service I remember reading Toy's guess in the transcript which was AIS = Anti Implementable System. That cracked me up.

Charlie Sheen

Persephone Emerald wrote: Porky Gorky said: "Remove peoples ability to vote and they will make their views known in more extreme ways." - I can see it now. In-world rallies with residents burning Lindens in effigy & reporters filming it all for the 6 o'clock news. LOL well I guess that is never beyond the realm of possibility. I was eluding more to people spamming with allot of duplicate JIRA's, derailing user groups/office hours to express their opinions on JIRA's or just allot more moaning and bitching on the forums and blog comments about issues they are passionate about. I guess we will see for ourselves soon enough as the removal of JIRA voting is going to happen.

The only time I ever notice listing enhancements is when I am scrolling through hundreds of them trying to spot my own. When I go on SLM to shop I am oblivious to them. I think nearly 20 years of being online has trained my brain to auto filter all advertising out.

Ah I see. 750 x 66 equals the same aspect ratio as 800 x 70 which is why I didn't notice any resizing I guess. Thanks for proving me wrong :smileytongue:

I did tests on this when I made mine. Biggest Image I could get in was 800 x 70 pixels. So that's how big mine is. Whether or not everyone can see it all I know not. I can see it all and it hasn't been squished or re-sized, so I am happy enough.

Madeliefste Oh wrote: Haha I just noticed you've turned your rank icon into a mouse, or is it a strange looking cat?. Thats great :smileyhappy:

If there was one single thing that the new forums should have tackled then that is stopping the L$ spam. It's just the same old BS on a different coloured background.

It's funny that the spammer is ranked as "honored". Another fine example of how pointless rankings are. Just a useless automated system without any human intervention. I bet he/she had a good chuckle to themselves when they received a message from Lexie Linden telling them "As the result of your contributions to the community, you have earned a new rank."

Totally agree with you Med. What would be helpful is if the moderators could inform us of why threads are deleted. At least then we could avoid making the same "mistakes" or at the very least try and make sense of their moderation. At the moment it is all guesswork.

Medhue Simoni wrote: Well, I just noticed that my Woohoo! thread was removed from the Roundtable. Did we/I do something wrong? Is the merchant roundtable just for business talk? I thought it was a playful thread. None of it was derogatory. I'm still scratching my head.:smileysurprised: I was a bit critical of LL and the new rankings in that thread, and we were posting vid files that weren't really relevant , and Suella went on one of her cheese related tangents :smileyhappy:. I can see why they deleted it based on the recent level of moderation.

Get a free shape, free skin, free clothes, shove a paper bag on your head. Job done.

Maybe it's a male thing. Even in RL I want to get in the shop and get out ASAP. Oblivious to everything around me. Unlike my wife who seems to have a rule that involves her spending at least a minimum of 20 minutes in every shop she enters.

Ok so I guess a more relevant question to ask now is.... As a shopped do you always use the sub category filtering when looking at larger merchants stores? Or like me do you forget or overlook the feature or simply didn't realise it was there? Thanks.

Josh Susanto wrote: the more new items I add, the more demand there is for the old items if your products are good, more products are more presence dividing products between 2 accounts divides your presence and weakens brand recognition I tend to agree Josh. Brand recognition has been key for me over the years as my stuff has a distinctive style and look. I am not keen on splitting my items between 2 accounts. Yanni Hinterland wrote: As a shopper, I hate going to a persons market place store and seeing hundreds of items not related to what I am searching for. If I search for prefab and get a hit on your items I will then want to look at all your prefab listings all together. If when I get there I see I have to wade thru tons of other stuff ....... I just leave and look elsewhere. Of course that is just me. Not sure what most others preferences are. LL either needs to create a way merchants can categorize within their market place stores. that way we could see your items listed by category. but since that is not the case I would recommend you create a separate market place store. Thanks for posting Yanni. So as a shopper did you know that you could view sub-categories within someone's store on the left hand side of the screen? If so, do you use this feature regularly? I have to admit that I hardly ever use the sub-category filters feature. I rarely ever shop, but on the few occasions that I do, I want to get my shopping done ASAP so I can get on with other things. So even though I am aware of the feature I forget about it, and it often gets over-looked by me when shopping. I see a store with hundreds of items, I may look through a page or 2 and if I am not impressed I quickly move on. I will also admit that I had not taken the sub-category filtering into account whilst thinking about changing my SLM store over the last few days. The fact that people can easily filter out my commercial and residential prefabs from my store listings kind of makes up my mind for me, I will keep all my content on one account and will do some selective housekeeping on older and poorly selling items.

Ai Velde: Thank you Ai, It's always great to get feedback from customers, whether it be positive or negative. Allot of my business processes and the store set up in world have been developed and changed a few times over the years purely based on customer surveying and general feedback. I've never really had any feedback about my SLM set-up, basically because I have never bothered to ask, so it's really useful to hear the thoughts from someone who has actually searched through my items on SLM, and also very much appreciated that you took time out to write such a long post. :smileyhappy:

I've looked at some other Lithium based forums on the net and it would seem that we are not the only ones that are apposed to being ranked and rewarded like children. I have to wonder how much research LL actually did before adopting this system as the ranking of users has historically been apposed by other Lithium forum participants.

Pamela Galli wrote: If it's all good stuff that sells, I don't see a problem. I weeded out a lot of stuff before the switch to MP, and I think it helped overall sales but only because the stuff I deactivated was garbage. I have some stuff on there that is up to 4 years old and only sells occasionally. Maybe I just need to do some selective filtering out of crap.

Catwise Yoshikawa wrote: I sell lot of different things cause like to make almost everything in SL, and sometimes I feel customers could be lost in my Marketplace store, but if you have items that are in a specific category I guess they can just go to your store and on the left side click on the category they want and just look for your items on that category. Hmm yes that is true. I rarely shop myself so over look these things :smileyhappy:

Howdy, My bread and butter sales is prefabs. I have about 70 listed on SLM and sell a reasonable amount on there, but only a small percentage compared to what I sell in-world. Obviously allot of people like to tour a prefab in world before purchase. I want to sell more on SLM. I also have another 550 or so 'other items' on SLM, items that are not prefabs, such as landscaping stuff, furniture and wot not. So I am wondering, if having all these non prefab related items on SLM is detrimental to my sale of prefabs. If people click the "visit the store" link and they are looking for prefabs, then they need to wade through all this other stuff to find the prefabs. I don't have enough control over how my items are displayed in my SLM store and this bugs me. So I am considering removing all non prefab items to another SLM account and only selling prefabs via my Porky Av. This is allot of work though. On the other hand, all my non prefab items are designed to go with my prefabs and are generally built in a similar style, so maybe separating them will harm the sales of my non prefab products. I'm completely undecided on what would be the best course of action. Does anyone have any experience or practical feedback that would help me make up my mind? Do you sell different types of content on seperate accounts? If you are a customer looking for prefabs on SLM would you be put off by having to scroll through hundreds of items to find the prefabs? Thanks.