Toysoldier Thor

Sassy and Tara get it. That is what I mean. A simple and universal external interface for an SL user that is not logged in and possibly in a RL environment where by Internet access is highly restricted (like a business office with highly restricted Internet access or computing options). The only part that Sassy mentions which is not a big deal for me is that IF the recipient is not online in SL then there is always the risk that the recipient may not get the IM I send him/her if their IM limit has been reached. That is not a big deal for me as this risk is true for ANYONE that sends an IM to a SL user that is not logged in. I am willing to accept that risk since I do now inworld. If the user is online then this is not a problem. If the user's IM Limit is not capped then this is not an issue. But I dont see this concern as being THE REASON why having offline initiating email-to-IM service should not be persued.

This week I was approached by an individual that was intrigued at my SL Business and how I was able to make it successful and then diversify to an entirely new business sector (Fine Art). He is writing a book for publication in the next few weeks on how to start and operate a successful business in SL. He wanted to use me in his book and he also asked me if I knew of any other successful business owners in SL that might also be considered for his book. He is looking for examples of different business approaches / models and from various product / service categories. I gave hime the slant on SL Building Products to other builders / merchants and starting multiple lines of business. I also gave him a lead for a business in the inworld service sector who had run a Wedding service / sim for almost 4 years. If any of you fellow Merchants are interested in being interviewed regarding how you started your business in SL, your challenges, your marketing approaches, etc. the I would poke at him. If he is interested in including you, you will be interviewed (he sent me a Word Document with the questions that I filled in my answers), you will need to give him a BIO, and a couple photos of you and your productline for the book. Below is his contact info and just tell him Toy mention he was looking for successful business owners in SL: Mark Milton : mmilton01@yahoo.com.au I think you need to move fast though since he plans to finish quickly.

Sassy Romano wrote: Ann, what i t means is this. At present, when a sales occurs on MP, you can configure such that details about that sale will go to one of 3 locations:- A web page, typically for logging to SQL or other scripted process Email An inworld object that can receive the data and process it via LSL scriptj Only the first method is to be kept when DD is used. So in short, anyone who might currently be sending sale data to an inworld object will lose this function. Some people might use this for things such as creation of a licence key or maybe a web download URL or for vendor system logging etc. will be impacted. LL will NOT maintain an "Object DNS" even though in the LL asset system, they already know the detail.. My alert here is just to raise awareness of a subtle change to a behaviour, that some merchants might be using in their processes but which is going to be removed. So at first i really didnt care about the info that DD didnt support ANS until your last posting. I highlighted my concern in RED. So you are saying the ability for Merchants to receive an email notification of an MP sale does not work for DD? Or is this method #2 that you say DD wont support is for some other email output? Since I cannot think of another email output trigger from an MP sale, I suspect you are saying what I am thinking.... the DD method wont send out MP Sales Transaction Emails to Merchants? I sure hope you are wrong about that since it is a critical method of me tracking sales activities daily on MP. I suspect a large number of other merchants also have enabled email notifications of MP sales. Not only do I use it to see if a sale has been made but I also am looking for the followup confirmation that the Buyer has actually received the product he/she bought. I expect this function will continue to exist in DD.

Mickey Vandeverre wrote: Toysoldier Thor wrote: I guess Mickey doesnt read the thread and picks convenient sentences out for comment. I explained why... I will let you read to figure out why most SL Humans might want this. I read this: "I want a simple and universal RL access to any SL Avatar. The easiest way is for me to be able to SMTP Email the avatar @ secondlife.com" That kinda defeats the purpose of an escape. What do you mean by "SL Human?" as opposed to what? Where did you get the "most" concept? First of all ... IF this enhancement was available, you Mikey can enter into SL and escape all you want. You dont have to use the feature from the outside RL of sending and email to the inworld since you are already inworld. If you are not logged into SL and you find this feature is so crazy - the solution is easy - dont use it. Dont ever send an email into the SL grid to a specific Avatar. Secondly... if some other SL user wanted to IM you via this email sending IM solution, what would the difference be if it were me IMing you from inworld or me sending an email to Mickey.Vandeverre@secondlife.com that coverts it to an IM and you get my IM this way? At the end of the day you are still escaped inworld and got my IM. How did this disturb you any more or less during your "ESCAPE" into SL? So you are telling my when you are in SL , you shut off all other RL interfaces to you? Your PC's email is off? Your Skype, Yahoo, MSN, Facebook, Twitter services are all turned off in order to ensure your ESCAPE? Do you enter a dark room in your home and lock the door and instruct all others in your home to never enter your ZEN SL Room while you are ESCAPING? If so.... I am impressed you escape the RL to such a level. Most of the rest of us do not require an escape with such purity. My RL email is still running and if one shows up - EEEK - I even open it up and read it while in SL. My family yells and bugs me. I read twitter as I am in SL. I dont seem to need this escape to such an extreme as you. I am as shocked as Tara on the level of instant knee-jerk "sky is falling" theoretical "the sanctity of SL will be disturbed from the evils of RL" postings that has come out from this thread and concept. But Mikey - you and some other can rest your pretty lil heads since its an idea that Sassy siad is technically not feasible in the limited technical world of SL and even if it were possible you know very well that LL would never have developed a CUSTOMER IDEA anyway.

Sassy Romano wrote: Toysoldier Thor wrote: It would be nice if this advanced service were on Android or iphone devices as an app. But if this app were created, it would also be nice to have the ability to not only originate an IM to any resident, it would be nice to transfer $L money to this account (often my customers need a refund or rebate transaction executed by me). Well... I use Mobile Grid Client on Android for text/teleport/payment/group chat and other stuff when I am out and about and don't need a UI. If I do need a UI, then I can use Splashtop on my phone too. Toy, I agree with you that there's a need but I feel it will not work for the following reasons:- If the recipients IM's are capped, the message is lost if they don't forward to email and instead of a message being returned to sender, it's a blind send. Far too many merchants themselves are utterly convinced that their IM's cap daily and in many cases haven't realised they can forward IM's to email and so insist on the equivalent of a postcard for communications. If merchants can't get even work this, what chance do you expect of customers? Some are adament that even when IM's to email is enabled they still lose plenty (though it's hard to determine that you've not received something that you didn't know you were going to receive). If LL had a clue and were able to define their target market and understand what they needed to build, they would have already brought out a mobile client by now. Instead of making one method of communications robust, reliable and scaleable, LL continue to fragment communications such that we have the following:- The profile wall IM's Notecards That profile thing that emails or IM's depending on logged in status but does nothing sensible So until LL focus on one of them and make it the defacto method of all round communications, an enhancement as you propose just won't work. You know that i'm all for IM's to email and as I said, I do agree that email to IM's would be nice too, if only you knew that it got there! By the way, the email reply is valid for 5 days, not 2. Ohh well if its technically not possible to IM from an external source then so be it. Just ticks me off. I can see the resident I need to talk to is online but I cant send him / her an IM to tell them something possibly urgent or conveniently. Just shows how ass backwards the SL communications is. Gotta resort to sending an email to a known trusted SL friend that I know is online and that I can email them to tell them a specific message via IM to another resident on SL that I cannot contact effectively. YES I know full well that SL's inworld communications of IMs is as reliable as convict on the stand telling the truth, but its the only IM that SL offers that all residents use and understand. Still also not sure why LL has this rediculously low 25 stored IM's limit when all kinds of notifications also come to a resident via IMs. Why not 100? Shrugs.... well good thing you said it was useless Sassy - now I dont have to waste my time writing a JIRA which would have died unseen of old age in the JIRA system. --||-

I guess Mickey doesnt read the thread and picks convenient sentences out for comment. I explained why... I will let you read to figure out why most SL Humans might want this.

PeterCanessa Oh wrote: Give them the benefit of the doubt - maybe they don't want to because it would be a spammers paradise. Imagine the s&^$%t we'd all suffer if anyone could bombard SL and our avatars with all the emails they wanted. [However, having said that, it's still not too hard to set up using a free web-hosting service] Again.... as I already mentioned above.... even the dumbest of SMTP email / spam filtering tools can be configured to block most of this spam you refer to. And if LL really was not deploying this solution because of fears of email Spammers... maybe they should take away the IM function inworld so that spamming of an account is not technically possible there. As Tara said, to be afraid of a solution because of the potential abuse of the solution is just wrong - specially when a little bit more solution thinking could mitigate the problem. But to be honest - I cannot give LL the benefit of the doubt on this one as I am 99% sure that LL didnt do this because they just couldnt be bothered. They want to use their development resources to develop new fun exciting functions like Mesh. So what benefit of the doubt should I give LL for this JIRA that has been an un-worked problem in the grid since 2008? https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-4018 This Jira was created December 24, 2007 (before I even joined SL 4 years ago). Other than Torley Linden quickly looking at it once at the beginning, it was never looked at or touched by a Linden until I publicly embarassed Rod and Oz Linden on Twitter to even look at this JIRA on May of 2011. Oz asked a couple questions and when we all came to answer his questions and help him... that was the last we saw of Oz Linden. This is an extremely annoying bug and over 4 years later... still not resolved. So what is the benefit of the doubt for this one?

Not surprisingly, LL can get email responded offline IMs back to the inworld recipient with the offline avatar's actual avatar name being used to respond back to the destination.

Well it surely is far from perfect as MySL requires that the external user needs to go to the SL.com website and most users dont know about their own profile, what it is, how its used. BUT, since chances are LL (SL's Virtual God) will likely never act upon this... its a clunky solution that might get the message noticed by the avatar.

Sadly that is what is so frustrating being a Customer of LL. It is just sooooooo annoying. Past sr management and now even Rod Humble keep harping how they will do a better job listening to their customers and to improve the value of being in SL and adding the functions and features that their customers need. But instead of spending even a little time making several smaller improvements to the existing service that ALL residents would use and notice and make them happy, they spend all their efforts on the next big major deployed shiny killer feature to SL... Mesh, Direct Delivery, some whole new SL Realms, etc. They dont fix the countless bugs listed in JIRA that sit for years not being fixed (like the JIRA the has been asking LL to fixed the texture repeat bug on animated textures). They dont deploy several of the small simple to deploy missing features in MP that xstreet had. They dont work on enhancements to features that are weak, old, limited, outdated like what this thread is all about. As is normal for LL.... they completely ignore any ideas and suggestion from their customers and keep coming up with their own list of ideas and priorities. Even if we saw 3 or 4 of our ideas ever see the light of day... it would at least give us false hopes that LL sometimes listens to us. But I know this idea will not go anywhere... like all the rest. (I will create a JIRA anyway just so there is proof 2 years from now that I was right and LL didnt do anything about this idea).

Another idea to get this solution into SL and not have to beg LL to deliver it... Maybe one of you SMART SCRIPTERS can develop a system with an external SMTP Email service to SL Avatar IM delivery service.... Create a new domain.... SLAVATAR-EMAIL.com All SL Avatars would have a corresponding email toysoldier.thor@SLAVATAR-EMIL.com Alternatively a generic email ID like AVATARIM@SLAVATAR-EMAIL.com then the inworld avatar's name in the subject line. (the external code can parse the destination name from the subject) deploy an SMTP email gateway (one with email spam filtering would be awesome) Write an external code that can extract out the destination Avatar's name that needs to be IMed and packages up the details of the message into a transaction (like an xml record or 1 line CSV). The transaction would include the SENDING AVATAR's name, the DESTINATION AVATAR's name, the IM Message, other option details like urgency status, etc. The external code would send the transaction into the SL Grid where a receiving inworld app would parse the message package and create / send an IM to the destination avatar inworld. It might look like this to the receiver: SLAVATAR-EMAIL RESIDENT: <External IM On behalf of Toysoldier Thor> Hi there John Doe, I need to confirm that you received your order for the product you bought from me an hour ago as the Marketplace was having serious delivery errors. Please IM me with your answer Finally, upon the IM being successfully sent to the recipient, the sender would be charged a $2L fee for executing the transaction. This payment process could be handled different ways like an already established account with the Service customer where a pre-paid credit exists and it is removed. Or more simple, the customer pays a nominal monthly fee like $50L/month for 10 IMs, $100L/month for 50 IMs.... The receiver knows the message came from a 3rd party IM delivery proxy. He/she knows who the real Avatar was that sent them the message. The code would also confirm that the Send and the Receiver are valid accounts prior to sending it. If its not, then an error message would be sent back up the pipe to the sender via email. There is a solution... Come on Darrius or Sassy. This would be a service either of you could develop between lunch and dinner. Just give me 5% royalty for all revenue from monthly fees

Chelsea Malibu wrote: Those don't go to IM, they go into a mailbox that is off world on this website and not inworld. The problem with that Thinkerer is that few go to the website and check messages. Exactly what Chelsea said. I could go into my.secondlife.com/Avatar.name and leave a PM but most avatars dont even know they have a web profile and a PM. Low chance of them seeing an urgent message I have for them. I want a simple and universal RL access to any SL Avatar. The easiest way is for me to be able to SMTP Email the avatar @ secondlife.com As for creating a JIRA... I have seen how LL treated my other JIRAs. I believe my last one went to Acknowledge and placed into the LL Black Hole Suggestion Box. i.e. they will consider it for a future feature. That mean "we are not interested since we have our own LL backlog of shiny new features we think our customers need - we dont need your suggestions". But maybe when I get a bored moment I will post it.

I havent received anything from LL about any topic via email. This is normally the case. But strangely if LL is promoting one of their "favored" business partners - they sure seem to find my email address.

Made, there is always that risk for any convenient effective forms of communications like EMAIL. But if you are afraid of this, then the same should hold true about you have a phone number. Do you not want to have a phone service with a phone number because you are afraid that you will get attacked by phone spammers and scammers? And you just said that you are already being attacked by unwanted IMs from spammers inworld. There are many of these tools inworld that can spam you much more effectively than via an email system. So... here is an added feature to the emailing method, the SL email SMTP gateway would watch for spam attacks. i.e. if the SL SMTP gateway receives the same message to more than 5 users on the @secondlife.com domain from the same user, the sender would be blacklisted and blocked. This is not rocket science for most commercial email SMTP gateway systems and email spam filters. I would not want to reject a solution because of its potential ability to be illegally / unethically abused - specially if there are off the shelf solutions to control that.

Ann Otoole wrote: toysoldierthor.com is available. For 5 bucks a month you can have your own email address domain which will not be blocked at companies like secondlife.com is. btw your store name still has the word sculpty in it. I predict you will change your store name in 2012. I was actually thinking of buying the domain for my main website / blogsite. but even if I did have my own domain, how does that solve the problem of getting to the www.secondlife.com site as the best I could do is have a tricked URL redirect that most firewalls would easily catch and block. It still doesnt solve the problem that I cannot initiate an IM to any avatar on the grid (online or offline) from an external RL location or system. As for my store name... well sooner or later I really need to overhaul my store in general. I would like to rebrand it and create a new all encompassing logo (to reflect my Landscape sculpties, future possible mesh packs, and my growing art sales as well as my old legacy products that still sell to this day. right now the name "sculpty" in my store still aids in my store being found easier on MP and inworld - to a certain extent. BUT I digress.

I found this one Avatar's MY.SECONDLIFE.COM profile and while logged into the site there are options like "offer TP" "call" "Pay" which is a start .... IF THEY WORKED from the website. For example when I clicked PAY this resident from the website i got a bogus URL which doesnt work in RL secondlife:///app/agent/e04b68c0-29a7-xd84-bccd-b4d9f64eb978/pay

Although its obscure, I would think there is a way of getting to an Avi's web profile and leaving a PM or a message on their profile like a facebook message. But not many users even know of thier web based profile and these PMs or messages would be completely missed. Heck, I dont even know what the url is to go to the web based profiles of all the SL avatars. If you go to the main logged in www.secondlife.com front status page where you can see all your friends online / offline - there is no way to click it and say "IM this user from the web". Even if you could, its only a list of your friends and not ALL users. And if a RL business blocks www.secondlife.com as a gaming site, this solution is useless anyway. So I am not exactly sure what solution you are suggesting where a person offline can send an IM message to an Avatar in SL. Provide a little more detail please. The most effect and simple solution is to have LL create an email system for RL where easch unique resident's name can be used Firstname.Resident@secondlife.com as a TO address by any email system in the world.

So I will start this thread here to express my desire for LL to improve upon an existing SL feature that is critical for myself and many of my fellow Merchants. I know that with LL so backlogged with developing their own pet project list of SL functions and with Marketplace missing features over a year old and still not being looked at by LL and with Jira of broken inworld functions that go untouched for 3 years and counting, this request I am posting here is just to make me feel better but it sure would be nice if on the rare chance a bored LL Developer might want to run with this enhancement. What would be really awesome is if there was an easy convenient way for anyone (including us Merchants) to be able to initiate an IM to any SL Resident as an email. For example, I should be able to send an email with the TO: address of Toysoldier.Thor@secondlife.com and it would send this email message into SL and convert it into an IM to that user. Currently, while I am at my RL work at my desk I can open up my web based email service and I will often receive emails from my customers as OFFLINE IMs. The good news is that I can reply to that originating email address and the customer will get it as an IM back from me. But this email address that is generated is a hashed time-sensitive address. You cant keep it for later use to that customer as it expires in about 2 days. Also, all I can do is respond to an IM originated by that user. I cannot originate the IM to any resident in SL. There might already be some 3rd party app that can be run to allow me to IM to any inworld resident BUT..... many large RL corporations have highly restrictive firewalls and most non-standard ports are blocked that would let these apps work. Using an offline IM service from the www.secondlife.com site is a possible option but a lot of RL corporations block access to sites that are deemed Gaming sites and often secondlife.com is in that category. It would be nice if this advanced service were on Android or iphone devices as an app. But if this app were created, it would also be nice to have the ability to not only originate an IM to any resident, it would be nice to transfer $L money to this account (often my customers need a refund or rebate transaction executed by me). BUT... lets start with the basics.... LL please develop an SL Grid email system to IM generation service so that anyone in RL can send an email to the resident's official name @ secondlife.com.

LL's merchant email list / process of sending email to all their merchants is spotty at best. I know several times that fellow merchants got email announcements from LL and I havent... and then on the rare time I will get an email. I know several other Merchants that also dont get some of the emails that LL sends out. Whatever their emailing system is... it shotty. So it does not surprise me that they have a 30% failure rate... likely my email address to them is considered no good.

That being said Made, I know one fashion designer that in 2006 2007 was earning about $70K US a year and in 2010 her SL business has eroded to under $20K US. So being in early to the market as a leading fashion designer and gripping a large portion of the market for word of mouth to keep the success going is not the magic bullet. She pushed out fashions and advertised heavily but new factors came into the fashion world of SL that devastated many of these early top fashion designers. Commoditization of the critical fashion / clothing template dramatically reduced the technical barriers to entry as a new up and coming fashion designer. Fashion industry experts and trainers / creators provided excellent skills development to further excellerate the entry of countless new designers with awesome creative new fashions. The industry has become cut throat competitive. The new designer merchants are leveraging new distribution methods that some of the older designs find hard to adopt. Also, with the flood of new and wider options of designs and clothing (because of the commoditization of the underlying creation technology), the natural law of economics kicks in.... prices drop. Finally, the market that we all exist in has not increased (i.e. the population growth of SL has not significantly increased and the number of hours spend inworld per month by the average SL resident has dropped). Plus the RL economy has impacted SL spending too. So the older designers have been attacked from many main pressures... reduced marketshare and reduce margins on all their sales, reduced customer base, poor RL economy. As such, its not a bed of roses for the older Merchants that had a grasp of the market.

I agree that whatever the solution is on confirming Merchants on MP are still active, it must be a very simple and non-annoying process. BUT, for the reasons mentioned on what some of us thought the old FREEBIE ROADMAP was going to do, there has to be some nominal (and I mean real nominal) fee to pay for listing on MP. If there is ZERO skin in it for a Merchant to dump 100's or 1000's of freebies and 10L items onto MP, they will simply log in and press RELIST ALL. Some cost - even the smallest - will likely have a huge impact on removing not only the abandoned Merchants that left MP (since they wont be there to renew) but also remove many of the freebies that the respective Merchant feels is not even worth spending 10L / year to keep listed. TOY's Proposed Solution to resolve FREEBIES & CLUTTER (abandoned listings) So here is my suggestion (and sounds similar to what was suggested to Colossus back in the fall of 2009). A TWO PRONG APPROACH: The MP commission on all sales of ANY MP Listing would be changed from 5% to 5% or 1L - whichever is the greater. The benefit to this is that if a Merchant believes that a FREEBIE has intrinsic value to him or her (i.e. its apromotional Demo tool like my demo pack is OR they just want to be supportive to the SL community and they want to use the MP site to distribute their generosity), he/she would be willing to pay this minimum fee. If they do not see this listing is worth paying $1L to distribute via MP then they will decide for themselves to remove it. The only complication to this model that LL would have to address with this solution (which was their issue with their own solution back in 2009) is that LL would have to be able to draw funds from the Merchant's account for any of the Merchant's Freebie sales since LL could not take the commission from the buyer's funds - it was 0L. Another coding rule to this solution is that the Merchant's account has insufficient funds to pay the commission for these Freebie Sales, the listing would be automatically unlisted and the Merchant would be sent a warning that it was unlisted. Benefit is.... ignored / abandoned freebie listings will auto-delist. A Merchant offering a Freebie Listing can contact support to force the $1L fee be paid by the BUYER if the transaction log shows clear evidence that a single buyer is abusing the buying of a freebie (i.e. as a griefer - buying 100's of freebies from a merchant in order to purposely incur a cost to the Merchant) The second part to the solution is that ALL avatars of SL that are or want to be a MP Merchant would need to register as a SL Registered MP Merchant on the www.secondlife.com website. This will authorize you to open up and run an MP store. On an annual basis (anniversary of when you registered) and 1 month before the anniversary date, LL will send you a notice that you must perform your annual Merchant Registration renewal within 4 weeks. The Merchant would go to this webpage on www.secondlife.com and click on annual renewal. The Merchant would be shown the current total number of listings in his/her store and the renewal fee would be $10L / active listing. Within these critical 4 weeks, the Merchant can clean up and delist any listing he/she feels are not worth listing. These delistings would not be allowed to relist for a minimum of 6 months (to stop Merchants from trying to game the annual relisting fee). The Merchant can go back to the Merchant registration site to check the updated annual fee. When he/she is happy with the number of store listings that he/she will be charged for, he would simply press the PAY ANNUAL RENEWAL FEE NOW button. The funds would be removed from the account and the Merchant is now active for another year. If the Merchant - for whatever reason does not want to renew... then the Merchant's store and all his/her listings gets suspended. The merchant can open up a support ticket to renew his/her Merchant status and store with all the listings if he/she pays the annual fee (not pro rated - as it would be a minimal penalty for letting your registration lapse). This is my proposed solution. I think it would be fair for all merchants. Simple for active merchants to renew. It would resolve all abandoned merchant listings. And it would force large Freebie Merchants to "valuate" their freebies. Freebies have an intrinsic value. This very small fees would force all listings to be at minimum be evaluated since there is skin on each listing existing on MP - as small as this skin is.

Madeliefste Oh wrote: Toysoldier Thor wrote: So... as you can see.... agressive advertising and formal marketing have not be any factor in my success. Your strategy works for your target group. I have about the same experience as you, that's logic, we have the same target group. The more you know about your target group, the more you can fine tune your marketing. For example when you know that the builders and creators spent 90% of their time in their own workshop and hardly travel in SL, you also know that in world advertising won't help your sales. Neither won't participation in hunts, fairs, x dollar mondays-tuesdays-etc and so on help you any further. We have an easy target group, in several ways. It is easy to find out about the characteristics of your target group. It's a relatively small group, still big, but small compared to general shopping audience. But when you have a more general product it is not always easy to find out who you targetgroup is and how to approach them. For example when you make ladies clothes you tend to think 'all female avatars' are my targetgroup, or maybe: I make what I like, and people who like what I make are my targetgroup. I think that often people find out what works for their brand after they started marketing. For one brand it might work to advertise in in world fashion magazines, while that is only throwing away money for another brand. While for one brand participating in hunts seems the only way to get some sales, others do better not to disburb their existing customer base with freebie hunters all over the place. While finding out what works for your brand, you are in the same time learning about your target group. You are right Made.... Each merchant should spend at least some time trying to figure out who their primary target market is. Then assess how they think, what they do, where do they normally hang out, who influences them, what do they read.... If you are into fashions, then I would thing Advertising and public in-your-face visual model promotion on MP, Flickr streams, Fashion magazines, and even inworld ad posters at popular clubs would sound like good ideas. Also, fashion sales is also influenced by WORD OF SIGHT / MOUTH. As such, the more that your fashions are seen in pulbic - the better chance another fashion addicted avatar will find out who made that outfit. If that is the cae, you should be creative. I would get my fashions on the DJ's and HOSTESSES of some of SL's most popular clubs. Incent them somehow to wear your clothes during their 1 - 2+ hour gigs. (free outfit if they wear it and a PICK that says "I'm wearing a fashion by John Doe". Since I sell rocks and water landscape terrains, none of these advertising techniques are of much value. As you said Made, my/our customers dont typically do hunts and often they rarely leaving their sim unless they are out to buy content for building. That is why I have often come to their lands and rezzed sample sculpted prims right into where they plan to landscape (i.e. a customer wanted to have a rocky shoreline to the edge of a large lagoon - so I rezzed a few sample for them to play with). KNOW YOUR TARGET MARKET - then - CATER TO THEM.

Couldbe Yue wrote: .... it was interesting but not really productive. my only feedback is that I do like the auto create of folders if you dump just a box in but why didn't you make the magic box a dd, since the instructions seem to imply that you need to buy a dd item first? The storefronts seem to have been created a fair while ago as couldbe's email address is an old one which was changed a long time ago on the prod site. I'll give you marks for effort. That is a question a lot of us asked Brooke and company... but of course we go no answer back... her team was in a black hole developing - because they know better than us Merchants what we need and how we use the MP technology. Sooo no use asking why LL did anything - they never answer.

I can say with my own experience that formal marketing & advertising have been of very little value to me. My main factors for the continued success of my products have been: awesome word of mouth leads from several of my well respected customers whom are also amazing merchants in their own rights... like Luna, Marcus Inkpen, Xtasy, and countless others I cant thank enough for their business and promotion of my products they have used. My informal guerilla marketing techniques, the ones that dont cost anything. Many of you might not believe or agree but by me being a highly visible Merchant Forums poster / contributor (even though I have a very strong reputation for being a huge critic of LL strategies, policies, actions, mistakes) has shown clear direct sales results. In fact I think Luna herself can attest to the fact that she generally discovered me and my landscape products because she wanted to know more about who this Toysoldier guy is thats being such a harsh critic of LL (and being attacked by the Dartagans of the world at that time). Dart is much better now The other factor of my success is because my products are targeted toward my fellow merchants and some of SL's top quality sim landscapers (for commercial or personal use) that have a high level of respect and regard for value products. Having products that target this "prime" target market has been a Godsend to my success. My free DEMO Pack on MP. I sell this free demo pack 3 times for any one of my other paid landscape products. I have a sample rezzable sculpty from each of my packs. This has generated a lot of my sales. Finally... and I will toot my own horn... the landscape products I created are high quality artistically sculpted packs and both pre-sales support and my after-sales service is a critical component of my business. I will do what ever it takes to address any potiential customer's questions / concerns and I will be as quick as possible to address the few problems I get from my current customers. As such, I never pay LL for any listing enhancement services. I dont pay for any adboards inworld. I dont put out a penny to advertise my store or products. In fact, I admit I have been very lazy in my SL Merchant life in the past 18 months as I have not created a new pack since August 2010. I put about 5 hours a month to run my SL business. So... as you can see.... agressive advertising and formal marketing have not be any factor in my success.

Madeliefste Oh wrote: Sassy Romano wrote: Not entirely true. Remember, Pink Linden tried to get a listing fee put into place and the merchants were split over it. Some felt it would be a good idea, others absolutely hated the idea. Pink was a labbie that at least tried to listen to merchants. But because of the way LL communicated with residents (office hours, by that time) she mainly communicated with a small group. The call for listing fees came from this group, and Pink supported it. And indeed that rose a lot of protest. So that brought LL to a point where they had to decide which direction to go with their merchant community. It's clear what they have chosen. Just let it be how it is: same rights for everyone who uses the service. So some of the facts posted here from the 2009 Pink / Colossus Freebies Roadmap fiasco were vague but far from explaining the facts that happened that November of 2009. As I was clearly one of the Forum Leaders of the anti Freebies Roadmap hords and was one of the last ones to be a pitbull on Pink/Colossus's butt to the day in late May when Colossus had to officially announce that the Roadmap had to be shelved... and the one that organized the famous POPCORN PROTEST for the office hour that everyone attacked Pink's team in December after the announced roadmap.... I think I can add to this story. First of all what ticked off a lot of Merchants was that prior to the formal Colossus bombdrop, Pink's team made it known that her team was looking for a solution to address "CLUTTER" in the Xstreet. Clutter to Colossus was the growing amount of listings in Xstreet that were basically orphaned. Outdated, merchants not even around to support them, etc. At that time, there was very little priority or concerns from most merchants that LL had to deal with all the freebies or low priced listings. It was talked about but by far it was not the level of concern and discussion that it has come to be since the FREEBIES Roadmap showed up in Nov 2009. But if a reasonable solution could be created to deal with both, great. At the time I was actually a rare supporter to help Pink / Colossus to promote the idea of potentially coming up with a reasonable solution. I was the founder of the SL Merchants Group and we had many discussions there about the possible options. I was the one promoting that all we needed was a reasonable minimum commission charge for all xstreet sales - i.e. 5% commission or $3L - whichever is more. There was some disagreement of this minum fee but generally I think if this solution would have went forward - it would have been feasible to deploy and agreed to by most. The other idea was to charge a reasonable annual listing anniversary listing fee ($10L) - not much at all but just enough that if a merchant was not around to pay it when the listing came up for renewal, the listing would be suspended. If after a year of being suspended these listings would clearly be considered CLUTTER and the listing would be deleted from Xstreet. The size of the fee was not important - it was that the fee had to be paid. Abandoned listings would not have anyone to pay the $10L fee so it would deal with the clutter. All was looking good and many Merchants like me were even will to support the released Roadmap if it was reasonable and it was targeted to address the primary issue of Clutter and reduce Freebies to those that had VALUE to be a freebie. Then in November Colossus dropped his Freebies Roadmap bombshell. First, it was not primarily targeted to addressing clutter but moreso it was going after the destruction of all freebies. That is why he even called it the FREEBIES ROADMAP. Second, the roadmap was more of an attempt by LL to gouge all the Merchants - even those that didnt have clutter nor a large portion of low value Freebies. My memory is a bit rusty on the details, but LL came up with a MONTHLY Listing fee, minimum charges for listings below $50L, and an fee for promotional listings. Basically LL could have easily released a roadmap with a strategy that had very reasonable minimal fees that would directly target the clutter and abuse of freebies but instead they decided to put in place what was coined (by me) as a huge tax grab and that i referred to as the CLUTTER TAX. Colossus's roadmap with all these complicated charges also had another major issue that many of us technical I.T. Merchants detected.... that LL would not even be able to successfully deploy all these complicated tax rules into the oudated xstreet platform. We all predicted LL's team would ultimately fail. Well after that announcement, Pink's entire team went into complete Black Ops. Her team refused to post on the forums, she cancelled office hours. The few office hours she held - no one was allowed to bring up the progress of the Roadmap or the Clutter tax. After several months of no noticable progress from Pink's team on a roadmap they predicted to deploy into production in 30 to 60 days, and after my hounding Pink's team constantly.... in May of 2010 Colossus had to finally announce on the forums that they had decided to shelf the roadmap. The real reason they backed out of the Clutter Taxes and the roadmap had NOTHING to do with LL listening to the massive outcry from Merchants and the significant noticed exansion of the small micro xstreet sites at the time that saw their listing / merchant counts triple in size right after the roadmap was announced. The reason Pink's team shelved the deployment of the Clutter Taxes was because - as predicted - the LL Development could not figure out how to make xstreet actually execute the complicate rules / taxes that Colossus came up with. So.... that is much more details to the history of the 2009 FREEBIES ROADMAP. Reasonable very low cost fees like a $3L minimum commission on all sales and a very small annual listing anniversary fee was all that was needed and could have got generally good support. LL GOT GREEDY and DESTROYED the idea.