Toysoldier Thor

Monti, I feel your pain in that I was at 90% sales in SLM (a majore risk to my SL business) since my business was and still is one stupid LL Commerce Team move away from having my sales collapse. Last fall I made a major promotion push to try to convince my customers on the value of shopping and Buying inworld. That has reduced my ratio to about 70% SLM - still too high. And last month my fears of a dumb LL move hurting my business came true when the LL Commerce Team made some mystery change that damage a lot of SLM Merchants sales - including mine that are still at 50% of my normal sales prior to that change. It has not recovered. AS FOR THE INWORLD ISSUES.... There sure are reasons why a lot of SL residents have started shopping in SLM... a growing Grid LAG issue in SL and security privacy issues like CDS and RedZone dont help encourage shoppers to shop inworld. But, the benefits to the shoppers, merchants, and the SL grid economy is much better served if shoppers BUY inworld. MY bog post on this topic is much more detailed then what I posted here - if you want to read up more of it (find it on my main personal web site)

Zanara Zenovka wrote: 1. Make sure you're logged into SL when you buy - if your offline messages are capped it vanishes into the ether. 2. Some deliveries have been stupidly slow in the last day or so - up to half an hour 3. Dartagan - just don't even try... really... Yeah he is up to his old tricks again... and as you can see... my postings on this thread were deleted for giving 10 reasons why Shoppers should shop inworld rather than on SLM. LOL So exactly how is that an offence to the TOS that one encourages shoppers to buy inworld?? We see whos back in action again... good thing he cannot block my recent Blog entry on the topic.

So I wondered if the LL "hide bad news" moderator police would coome around - specially when I seen a certain forum poster respond to my posting in another thread. So this is a clip of the top 10 reasons why SLM Shoppers should only use SLM to window shop and take their buying inworld to the Merchant's actual stores... (this is a clip from a blog post I have already created and posted on my site and announced on Twitter - which LL cannot censor or moderate to hide their service's weakness. If you want to read the whole story - find my blog (in my profile)) TOP 10 IMPORTANT REASONS WHY SHOPPERS SHOULD WINDOW SHOP IN SLM & BUY INWORLD: When you buy a product from a Merchant’s inworld store, the sales transaction is direct between your Avatar and the product vendor (for basic vendors). This reduces the chance for a delivery delay or failure. It can still happen but far less likely than the frequent delivery failures that are occurring between the SLM website to the Magicbox to your Avatar inworld. Your product delivery will almost always be instant after paying the inworld product vendor. If you have a purchase problem of any nature whereby you are entitled to a Refund, the Merchant is able to provide you 100% of your purchase price back. If you have the same issue from an SLM sale, the Merchant can only offer you 95% of your purchase as a refund. Why? Because LL has the other 5%. So if you are looking for $1000L refund, the Merchant can only offer you $950L of it – he doesn’t have the rest. When you come to the inworld store to buy the product you found on the SLM you often will get to see the product live or in action (i.e. I sell Landscape Sculpt Maps – you see many of them rezzed in my store). You can’t get a good experience of the product from photos on SLM. When you take the time to visit the Merchant’s store inworld, you will often get to see several other products created by this Merchant that you might also like or that might even better work for you than the one you initially found in SLM. I have had countless of my Customers that changed your selection of products after visiting my landscape sculpty store. Often when you visit the store, you might bump into the actual Merchant / Creator. This is a great experience as you can engage him/her and learn valuable tips/tricks of the products or find out deals in the store that were not available on SLM. I have met many inworld customers where I have engaged in great chats and often came to their sim to provide them advice on how to solve their landscaping challenges. When visiting a Merchant’s store, you often get to run into other stores as many of stores are in malls. You might just find an amazing gem of a product you were always looking for or find something that you didn’t even know you wanted! J THIS IS A BIG ONE: When you buy from the Merchant inworld and not on SLM, you are making a powerful contribution to the SL’s general economy! Why? Because 100% of your purchase stayed within the SL economy. When you buy from SLM, you are assured that 5% of all your purchases instantly leave the SL economy. That is because LL takes its 5% and removes it from the SL economy – that is their real life $US profit (a complicated source / sink model but it’s gone from SL). It’s not to say that the Merchants don’t take your $L out of SL – because many of us do. BUT, unlike LL, almost all of us Merchants spends a good portion of the $L they make to pay rent, buy other Merchant goods, donate, pay tips, etc. When you shop inworld you help the Merchant support his/her inworld store. Remember that LL considers their Merchant’s inworld stores as direct competition to their SLM operation. SLM sales are funded risk free by sale’s based commissions. But inworld, the Merchant takes on big risks by renting or buying land that charges tiers to the Merchant – even if the Merchant makes no sales! If the Merchant’s inworld store costs more each month then it generates revenue, the Merchant has no choice but to close its doors. This has ripple effects in the economy since the rent stops at the mall – the mall owner needs to shut because of no rent…. etc.etc. etc. So, buy inworld and support the SL economy. Finally, when Window Shop in SLM and then go inworld to buy your products, you are sending the LL Commerce Team a powerful message – a message we Merchants have not been able to send to LL. You will tell them that they will not be rewarded 5% commissions for running a SL Marketplace with terrible service stability, development priorities that do not have the Shopper & Merchants in mind, and making poor decisions that are often half baked. So all you Shoppers of SLM, please help yourself, help us SL Merchants, and help the SL economy, DO YOUR WINDOW SHOPPING IN SLM - DO YOUR BUYING INWORLD!

If you want to sell fast - just set your price to the highest offered sell rate. If the highest sell rate is packed with like 5,000,000L then just set your offer at $1L higher. Honestly, the amount you will gain to wait for for $2 or 3L more relatively not much extra RL $US cash. $100,000L Sold at $251L = $398.40US $100,000L Sold at $249L = $401.60US You are gaining about $3 or 0.8% savings. But if you are not in any rush... then set at a lower rate and sit back for the days it takes for it to sell.

Ishtara Rothschild wrote: Don't items go to your trash if you decline them? Unless LL changed that, you might find it there. No I believe that Declined inventory arrivals do not enter your inventory if you do not KEEP them. I do that with Notecards and textures I get all the time from friends where I read it and then press decline and it doesnt clutter up my inventory.

Relm Foxdale wrote: If you were to ask me, I'd think "sculpted prims creators tools" was something else--tools for people to make these with, not maps. Like in-world sculpt makers or some sort of map import add-on or some other gadget. I would say that LL Commerce Team has never understood the Sculpty Merchants product line. In the years I have been in Xstreet and now SLM I have mentioned a few times that the product categories have never captured some of our products and building materials for other builders. I do not sell SCULPTED PRIMS.... I sell SCULPT MAPS This is a huge difference to my customers. It is also one of my most asked questions I get from my customers. "Are you selling the sculpted prims of your landscape pack or the Maps?". My customers often want the MAPS! Yet the only category I can put all my landscape Sculpty Map Theme packs into are SCULPTED PRIMS. I have given up asking LL Commerce Team to fix this. They just dont understand / dont listen.

Darrius Gothly wrote: Pamela Galli wrote: I agree -- Pink told us almost a year ago we would be getting enhanced data tools with the wonderful new MP. I would be willing to pay for even more tools above basic level we had at Xstreet -- but a flat fee (or better yet, a perk of the Premium acct. No way would I pay another 5%. Oh .. hmm .. a Perk of being Premium? (grumble grump gripe and groan) ... Well okay, I can see the logic of that. (And stop smirking at me like that. Just cuz you got me to admit that maybe Premium account holders might be deserving of a few extras ... ) LOL I agree with most of the posts on the idea of advanced reporting as well as all Merchant's rights to at least have some form of Reporting stats even up to Xstreet level: Regardless what advanced reporting feature - LL Commerce needs to deliver on exactly what Pink promised us last year - an SLM that would include better stats/reporting than Xstreet was delivering. To date, Pink's promises were just a snakeoil sales pitch since the SLM has reporting that is limited and pales in comparison to the reporting we had in Xstreet. So... we should not now get spun into a new Premium paid service of reporting that would simple give us what we already previously had. IF we had a good fair and flexible level of basic reporting tools, I do actually agree with Dart that this would be a viable LL SLM generating fee-for-service to the Merchant. LL charging those merchants that want ADVANCED reporting on SLM activities would have potential. BUT... big BUT... and this is where I think the idea falls apart, I have a very strong suspicion based on LL's huge resistance in actually fixing current SLM Reporting (something that should be relatively an easy development effort compared to the much more complex SLM hurting efforts they are taking on), I dont think the SLM software architect is as advanced or flexible as the team that selected the SLM foundation thought. As such, I do not think LL Commerce Teams could provide the level of ADVANCED reporting that we would be expecting to pay for from SLM. I would want some pretty powerful flexible and insightful stats/reports if I am going to pay. I dont think LL can deliver. We would likely get over charged and receive nothing more than I could do in Excel. Dart's thoughts on pricing.... NOT! 5% more on sales for advanced reporting. NO WAY. I think based on the reduced level of services that SLM has delivered us, we are getting ripped off at 5%. I think the proper model for an Advanced Reporting value-add service would have to be a monthly flat fee. There are a lot of Merchants in SL. If they provide a powerful set of advanced reporting and keep the monthly fee reasonable so that both startup small Merchants and Enterprise Merchants can effectively access it (lets say $1000L per month subscription), then LL could make some Good Coin and also further stimulate SLM sales by having more informed merchants. As much as I would grumble a bit, I would have to agree that Premium Member Merchants would get the $1000L/Month fee waived as a perk for being a Premium member. I would considered that a fair compensation. But we are all dreaming... because of point #3. Its nice to dreammmmmmmmmmmm sigh

Ishtara Rothschild wrote: Toysoldier Thor wrote: You can remove this annoying prompt by just going into your IE settings: Under SECURITY SETTINGS - Internet Zone - Customize Submit non-encrypted form data: default is PROMPTED switch to ENABLED This is an annoying IE default setting and it happens to many sites if you dont turn it to enabled. Unfortunately if shoppers dont know this - they will still get hit with this. so it would be best that LL fixes with a site that provides a consistent HTTPS stream (instead of switching to non-HTTPS for some parts of the visit). Are you sure that is the right setting? I think I got rid of this message by switching "Display Mixed Content" to Enabled. I agree that it is a nuisance and can easily be avoided on LL's side. But I've run into the same problem on other sites, so it is a general Internet Explorer issue (and an issue of Avant Browser, Maxthon II, and all the other popular IE shells) as well. You might be right but I currently have the "DISPLAY MIXED CONTENT" set to PROMPTED and in the marketplace I am not getting those messages so I just assumed it was the other setting. Your suggested setting is likely correct. --||-

Pamela Galli wrote: Just because someone has never seen a March decline doesn't mean there isn't one. And yes, I learned my first year in business that if you don't do any Xmas promotions your sales will die. December through February were my highest sales ever, and March was a little less, so I did see a slight decline. That's doesn't say anything about there being a general decline but it comports with my own data. I would be interested in seeing any and all data of this sort. The more sales data -- on sales in general and my own -- I have the better I can market my stuff. I am really flying blind here. Like I said, Show me the proof before you blame the visibly noticed (enough that it created a very active SL Forums Commerce Thread) sharp decline in SLM sales 2 days after a LL SLM change on something as vague as an expected seasonal March decline. I am not one to believe is coincidences and seasonal declines do not often have in a day. What you are talking about Pamela (that your March sales are slightly lower than your hot jan feb sales) is possibly a decline by % but are you telling me that your noticed decline between those two period could be noticed down to a day or two when Good transitioned to bad? I suspect your noticed decline gradually happened over several days if not a couple weeks. The decline in SLM sales that many of us Merchants noticed were 50% and over a couple days. This is not a SEASONAL DECLINE! Sorry. So I do agree with you as I have said and Medhue.... Brooke, show us the proof by comparing this year's sales graph vs last year and the year before. Lets see evidence of this SEASONAL DIP.

You can remove this annoying prompt by just going into your IE settings: Under SECURITY SETTINGS - Internet Zone - Customize Submit non-encrypted form data: default is PROMPTED switch to ENABLED ADDED POINT: As Ishtara pointed out later - it is likely the DISPLAY MIXED CONTENT setting that needs to be changed from Prompted to ENABLED. This is an annoying IE default setting and it happens to many sites if you dont turn it to enabled. Unfortunately if shoppers dont know this - they will still get hit with this. so it would be best that LL fixes with a site that provides a consistent HTTPS stream (instead of switching to non-HTTPS for some parts of the visit).

Arwen Serpente wrote: Agreed. Guess this issue only matters to those merchants silly enough to take on the Dash Deal promo.

The "SEASONAL DECLINE" statement had to be the biggest SPIN from LL to explain how the SLM sales tanked right after their March changes to the SLM. Then Brooke follows up with an "ohh btw we also found a bug that we will be fixing". I have never seen a MARCH seasonal decline in my products - not one that hits me and takes hold in a couple days. There is no MARCH Seasonal decline I know of. I could have given her some credit if it was summer or even just before or after christmas (before christmas is where I do see a seasonal decline for my products). But MARCH?? Come on Brooke. As medhue said, if there really is a seasonal decline lets see the facts? Show us a graph that shows the same March collapse of Xstreet sales in 2010 and 2009 and 2008 that would correspond with 2011. I just hope this bug that the LL Commerce Team found will restore my sales in SLM back to normal pace - I am still at 50% of normal weekly sales since the LL Commerce changes in early march.

Catwise Yoshikawa wrote: Darrius Gothly wrote: Arwen Serpente wrote: Thanks for the update Brooke. Just a quick comment/reminder on the "Dash Deal" - before it gets implemented, the issue of shopping carts not being cleared needs to be addressed. I had one lonely free item offered last October for one month only. It was deactivated and no longer visible on the marketplace since November 1st. However, I've still got shoppers who put it in their cart during the promo period but never actually "ordered" it/completed the transaction at that time - even now, if they still have it in the shopping cart, it will deliver to them. For an item that is a regular priced item, marked down to whatever level of discount, if the promotion ends, it needs to be cleared out of all carts. Otherwise, people will be able to get it at the reduced price long after the promo is done. Ohhh ... damn. VERY good point Arwen. If the Dash Deal has the Merchant price a regular item at a lower price for the one-day sale, that flaw in the Cart system will allow anyone to buy it at virtually any future time for that same low price. OUCH! Yo Brooke! That bug needs to be fixed STAT anyway. I strongly suggest you fix it before you roll out the Dash Deal or it's gonna detonate in a very bad way. O_O didn't think about this. Hope they fix this bug as soon as possible. Again as I posted above.... this is not an issue for the few Merchants that will participate in the Dash Deal. The item offered to the deal is a seperate duplicated lowered price item to the main regular priced one. it is the one used for sale.

Darrius Gothly wrote: Arwen Serpente wrote: Thanks for the update Brooke. Just a quick comment/reminder on the "Dash Deal" - before it gets implemented, the issue of shopping carts not being cleared needs to be addressed. I had one lonely free item offered last October for one month only. It was deactivated and no longer visible on the marketplace since November 1st. However, I've still got shoppers who put it in their cart during the promo period but never actually "ordered" it/completed the transaction at that time - even now, if they still have it in the shopping cart, it will deliver to them. For an item that is a regular priced item, marked down to whatever level of discount, if the promotion ends, it needs to be cleared out of all carts. Otherwise, people will be able to get it at the reduced price long after the promo is done. Ohhh ... damn. VERY good point Arwen. If the Dash Deal has the Merchant price a regular item at a lower price for the one-day sale, that flaw in the Cart system will allow anyone to buy it at virtually any future time for that same low price. OUCH! Yo Brooke! That bug needs to be fixed STAT anyway. I strongly suggest you fix it before you roll out the Dash Deal or it's gonna detonate in a very bad way. Actually I don think its a bug if you read the DEAL DASH wiki fine details. I believe LL will require the participating Marchant's firesale item to be made as a seperate duplicate item that will be exclusively used for the 24 hour sale. When the sale is over the item would just be delisted. The regular priced item is not participating in the sale.

Rya Nitely wrote: I'm starting to get the feeling it isn't so much a case of what they won't do, it's more a case of not having the ability or capacity to do it. I donwnload to a spreadsheet every couple of days and do my own sorting. In many ways SLM is not as good as SLX (Xstreet) was,and I think the main reasons are this - SLX had more technical brains developing it, and these people were users of SL. That makes a huge difference. They didn't need to be told what we needed, they knew. SLX started in 2004, or at least that's when the magic box was created. So they had many years to get it right. It is also the constant LL staff changes that have held things up. I do agree. I really think that the previous LL Commerce Team bought into a very weak online eCommerce development engine that we are all now paying for. The current LL Dev team likely is dealing with a SLM ecoomerce engine that is not flexible and far less capable then even the aged xstreet was. Brooke is likely putting on a brave face and making excuses why the SLM deployment team and now her team both have not been able to deploy something as simple as improved BASIC traffic / sales stats. I just also read Brooke's April update and finally it came out that there was a bug in their March changes that caused the significant drop in all our SLM sales. Brooke has really become a good political spinner like previous generations of LL staff blaming the huge March sales drop on "SEASON DIPS".... ROFL!! yeah right. Sorry but I have never had a MARCH seasonal dip before - not one that hits me right after a LL SLM change. At least they finally found the bug and will soon fix it and we can regain our normal SLM sales. My confidence is dropping on expectations that SLM will get better. And with this AIS coming.... I am sure we are in for another major set of transitional hurdles and lost sales and the risk of not having isolated inventories or ALT MERCHANT ACCOUNTS. So hang on folks!

VonGklugelstein Alter wrote: Its been like 6 months since the SLM site went live and a merchant still cannot sort line items inside the reports. I had to redeliver a slew of product and ended up having to scour through hundreds of pages of sales history trying to identify a specific product. Can we Pahaaaleeese have sorting in the reports ..sooon? Schank You! ROFL.... Join the club of the rest of us Merchants that have begged and pleaded and asked and yelled at LL Commerce Team to actually get off their butts and focus on SLM improvements that will actually benefit the Merchants. FIXING SLM REPORTING has been one of the biggest and most frustrating requests from the Merchants to LL... and constantly ignored. I will even give you more bad news... Brooke has already recently stated - and at least she is being honest about it - that her team does not have any plans to improve SLM reporting. Her plans are to just figure out a way to dump all the raw data to us Merchants and then wash her hands of the whole SLM traffic/sales reporting. What we have now is what we will all have a year from now. Where as so many competing online commerce sites provide you either much more effective and useful reports (heck even xstreet was better than SLM) or they provide you the ability to integrate very powerful traffic analysis tools like Google Analytics, Brooke's team feels this is not important for SLM. LL Commerce Team's top priorities are to deply all the LL CYA technologies to protect them from their TEEN Grid Merger (hence all the over stiffling maturity filters that have been crushing our sales and making our management of SLM inventory a nightmare). They do not really care about fixing SLM Search or Inworld Search, or improving reporting tools, etc. This only benefits Merchants and not LL. So... welcome to the chior of those asking LL to fix REPORTING.... too bad LL is not at the concert.

Im my lil personal quest for finding the oldest sim in the SL grid and even the old existing build still rezzed ... this is what I found. (I talked to a friend of mine that sorta helped me sort some of my initial facts out as she is one of the oldest beta users in sl). The oldest sim in SL is the sim of NATOMA (although it might have been co-rezzed about the same time as a couple others). It was supposedly a welcome sim way back when. It would make sense that it is the oldest sim in the grid as it has a lot of historical REAL OLD builds still rezzed, including the oldest prims still rezzed and which has been put up as a monument by the Lindens. Its a statue called "THE MAN" - real simple build but still...it was created by OldJohn Lindenon July 19th, 2002 at 2:08pm. It stand on a hill called Phillips Hill. http://slurl.com/secondlife/Natoma/61/205/41 The hill stand behind the famous mecca for Noon Builders - The Ivory Tower Library of Primatives. Also on this ancient sim are many other still rezzed oldddd builds. I am sure most of you know this stuff but in case u didnt.

Blot Brickworks wrote: I have a bad feeling about this new change over. I just know it,s going to be more work and sorting,isn't it always. My inventory is 25K and is unsorted,I am too lazy , can't stand "paper work". My biggest fears are wrong deliveries and keeping up with version changes,How will that work?. I suspect we will have a sale folder in our inventory to use as an internal magic box. I suppose the plus side is that you will no longer need to own land to sell stuff...Is that a plus? Or another step on the slippery slope to an empty world. One hand hovers over the abandon tab LOL:smileywink: Blot, You never have ever needed to own land to sell something in SL. Surely not because of the MAGICBOX. Prove is me. I have been in SL for over 3 years. I have never owned land to this day. I am not a premium account holder. In fact, when I first started selling my first products in XSTREET in the summer of 2008, I didnt even have a store nor a rented land for personal use. All I did was get a MagicBox and asked a friend that owned a sim if I could bury my MagicBox somewhere in a forest on her land where no one would see it. I ran that way for almost 8 months before I finally decided to rent a store and start selling inworld. As for your bad feelings about this AIS migration... I think they are justified. I think there will be a lot of casual merchant or even serious large scale merchants that will look at the hassles of migrating all their SLM inventory from their magic box back into their inventory and having to properly organize it and not to mention the likely added issue of LL not properly testing AIS on a much larger scale (didnt think of things fully) that they will just throw up their hands and give up being a merchant. I am more fearful of the risk of LL developing an automated process that interfaces with my personal SL Account's inventory on a daily basis to withdraw assets and send it to another account. TOO MANY UNKNOWN PROBLEMS where they resulting impact is my entire inventory. I LOVE THAT THE MAGICBOX KEEPS MY SLM TRANSACTIONS SEPARATE FROM MY MAIN INVENTORY. I want LL to provide that same protection with AIS. If not via a 2nd Inventory on my Avatar (which currently does not exist) then by letting me create a new MERCHANT ALT that I can then instruct AIS to take transactions from. This is not a nice to have - this is a MUST HAVE in my opinion.

So in case anyone doesnt know the thread that had the full discussion as to why Merchants need the AIS to support drawing SLM slaes from a seperate INVENTORY or AVATAR.... here it is: http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Merchants/Marketplace-Update-March-2011/td-p/740185 As well as my initial post of reason to Brooke... Hey Brooke, Thanks for the answers and being straight about them (even though I dont like the answers). So my feedback to some of your Answers: >> Question: Has something changed recently with Magic Boxes? I never asked that as I didnt think nor notice there was a change yet to the current magicbox system, but it was interesting to confirm the answer to that. I must be one of the rare merchants that generally does not have a big issue with Magicboxes or part of the silent majority. I also like the model of SLM Sales Transaction Isolation from my personal inventory (more details later). >> Question: Will merchants be able to opt-out of AIS delivery? ... There will be no explicit opt-out. Sadly I didnt think there would be an opt-out. >> Let's table the rest of this for the User Group, as I'd like to understand why a new account is desirable. #1 - Tabling any 2-way conversations at the User Group meetings is simply not viable as you know. The crowd is too large and is just suited for you to post commerce updates to the crowd and answer a couple select questions. So..... to answer yoru question... #2 - Since your team have no plans to allow us Merchants having serious concerns on LL performing automated sales transaction from our personal main inventory (that contains 10's of 1000's of non-SLM non-Merchant related content), we would like to have an "out-of-AIS-solution" alternative. By creating a new SLM-Merchant Account exclusively for being the source for the new AIS, it will re-establish the SLM Sales Transaction isolation from my #1 priority main personal SL inventory. So Brooke, I am sure you are wanting to say to me: "aww come on Toy you are being so paranoid. LL has a history of developing perfect software where nothing has ever gone wrong. As such, LL has developed a perfect coded AIS software solution and I can personally assure you Toy that the new AIS service will never encounter a bug that could in some way damage or affect your main personal inventory. The AIS service will never accidently corrupt my inventory or expose a secruity weakness that would compromise your inventory. Therefore, you dont need a seperate Merchant Account that only contains SLM sale Items. Trust Us - You have no reasons from our past history of software deployment for you not to trust us!" Sorry Brooke, but I want to maintain a clear seperation between the content I make available / accessible for SLM to process and my main SL personal account. If other Merchants want to put their full trust in LL's software development and deployment, more power to them. They either have no knowledge of LL's past software development Ooopsies or they do not have enough I.S. experience to know the risks of your AIS solution that performs direct automated asset transfers from their personal inventory. So all I am asking is for your AIS/SLM service to provide the flexibility to allow Merchants the ability to select which SL Account your AIS will execute upon. We will figure out how to tranfer our SLM Items to our SLM Avatar. >> Since the user experience and beta test plans are still in progress, I cannot give a hard date for communicating either piece of information. The goal for getting the Beta plan completed is mid April. There is no current private Beta group. That is interesting since there have been merchants that have mentioned in the inworld merchant group that have known what you just said and it was understood they had already been trying this AIS service as a beta. Were they in the pre-beta beta or are you saying there was a beta group but its closed now? >> Question: When will reporting match what we had on XStreet? Answer: This is currently not planned. We are aware that there is much that can be done with reports, and we would like to address it. The “when” will be based upon company priorities and feedback from merchants. It will definitely not happen before Q3. Well at least you are being honest. Many Merchants have been screaming for the SLM to fix reporting since the day that SLM's reporting showed its lame ugly face and until this posting there has been no response from the Commerce team that it will be fixed. Its utterly useless. but based on the priority of the company needing to plug all the holes from the TEENIFICATION of the Grid strategy, I guess it makes sense that most Merchant priorities will not be seen on SLM till Q3. >> Answer: We are working on getting better logging in place for anlalysis of search results. We have identified a couple of small fixes that we would like to address over the next couple to a few months (as we can fit in with AIS work) that may help with problems (new item ranking, keyword stemming analysis). Additional issues we'll be addressing as we gather data and prioritize within the backlog of items we are working on. It is so shocking that all us Merchants can see the problem with the SLM SEARCH/SORT BY RELEVANCE issue. Brooke, your statement that more study and research will be needed sounds just like a common strategy used by governments when they want to constantly push off addressing the problem. The scary part is every time your team slaps in another tweek to the search engines, my sales get hurt more. Please think twice before you implement these changes.... your team has already done enough major damage to the SLM market with all the Company's priorities on the TEENIFICATION maturity filters. We dont need anymore half baked solutions.

I already went into great detail in a previous thread regarding my biggest concerns about AIS that I hope Brooke read and took back into your Development team. In that thread she ask me (3rd person) that she wanted to understand why some Merchants would want to be about to have the flexibility to have this AIS (whatever / however it will work as still not details published) execute SLM Sales from another Avatar Account then the Merchant's main SL account. I think between my responding reasons and the several added value add reasons from you and a few others.... as well as the legit concerns we Merchants have on the impact of an AIS that goes wrong/rogue etc... that it would be a major design benefit to either have LL come up with a 2ndary Inventory OR from a MERCHANT Avatar. For me, if LL does not want to consider designing a solution that creates a new SLM Inventory (one that an avatar could fully and freely transfer assets from their main inventory), then at least LL Development allow a Merchant like me instruct AIS to take my SLM products from : ToysoldierThor-Merchant In fact, what would be a good idea if this is the direction LL would offer Merchants is for them to create a new avatar LASTNAME of "MERCHANT" I still think the best option with the largest number of additional benefits would be for SL Avatar Accounts to be able to create multiple Inventory with full perms inter-inventory transfer be the avatar account.

Couldbe Yue wrote: here's some food for thought, although it does come with a warning that the figures may be out of date because LL no longer publish the stats (and haven't since oct 2010), so these figures are approximate based on the last 18 months worth of stats (and heavily rounded so they may be a couple of percentage points out, I can't be bothered doing a proper calculation) So assuming nothing has changed since oct 2010 (har,har)... There's around 70,000 accounts that have a positive monthly cashflow (ie they receive at least 1l during the month) around 83% of these make less than 50usd pm around 89% made 100usd or less per month so, if you make 50+usd pm you are certainly well within the top 20% of income earners in sl if you make more than 100usd you're in the top 10% if you make more than 500usd pm you're in the top 3% around 1.75% of people make more than 1000 usd per month (that's around 1200 people) - that's minimum wage remember and also remember this is before tier etc - so a 4 sim estate owner with rents may make over 1k but after tier etc may be only making a couple of hundred a month. and as an added aside, you've got more chance of joining the mega rich in the us than you do in sl as there's a greater proportion of mega rich there than there is in sl. (relatively speaking of course). and as a completely spurious aside - my first cashout was many years ago but I still remember it as I bought myself a pair of thigh high laceup boots with 5" heels.. I thought it was an apt way to mark the occasion.. lol WOW on two fronts about those stats..... 1) I thought what I was earning a month was nice for me to buy my toys but if those number are right, you are saying I am in the top 5-6%? Seems almost hard to believe... 2) thinking of you in those real life thigh high boots!

Zanara Zenovka wrote: Paula001 Goldschein wrote: Oh fun, fun .. The old xstreet stats would totally do, like sales per week, per item (would be much needed), etc. I don't really care about the feature stats anymore since I haven't featured anything on the new marketplace. IMO you don't get much for your 2,8k linden/month (like some search help - which was totally neat). Agreed - just the basic logical, useful stuff we had on SLX was awesome - number of views and sales per day/week whatever. Those alone allow you to extrapolate all sorts of other stats, eg you can see the effectiveness of any advertising by the change on a certain day, without needing to see what link was taken, etc Problem is that Brooke actually responded to one of my questions for once and it was on Reporting... and her answer was that LL Commerce Team has no intention to provide us any more advanced reporting on SLM.... They are lazy and all they plan to do is to dump raw data at us for us to create charts ourselves in excel or whatever we do. If they already have Google Analytics - then that really does suck that they are not sharing OUR STORE / PRODUCT SALES with us. At least give us the insert to the page headers so we can enable our own google analytics. But it was said correctly in the title of this thread .... its only a WISH LIST since they have no thoughts of improviing SLM reporting even to the old broken down xstreet level. SLM is such a disaster when its worse than xstreet. It was supposed to be much more flexible and powerful as Pink Linden touted to all of us... with SLM, LL would be able to do so much more.... LOL what a joke. 8 months later and the Development Team cant even create basic web reporting of sales and traffic to xstreet's level. Pink's team sure left a legacy of an advanced code... lol

Zhoie Zimermann wrote: Vahn, check out the thread "Sales...dead", then you can get a very good idea why your sales have died, along with all of ours which have also dropped. As Zhoie has said... read the other thread. Tons of SLM merchants have noticed a significsant drop in sales since about 3 weeks ago when the LL Commerce Team implement a set of changes into the SLM code. Since then many merchants have been reporting a ~ 50% drop. Mine fell 50% right after LL's change and to date have not recovered. And sadly... Brooke or anyone else from the Commerce Team has said one word about this. They are completely ignoring this significant impact to SLM sales. I know for fact that she has been getting IMs too and her reponses have been between NO RESPONSE to "we will put up a warning banner to non-logged in shoppers some time in the future". Thing is that the #1 change 3 weeks ago - adding a PG ONLY filter for all non-logged in shoppers should not even affect me since all my products are PG. So we are not even getting any answers what they did to screw up all our SLM sales. And we have no effective SLM reporting to validate the trend to prove our sales have been killed since their March change.

Sassy Dirval wrote: The current marketplace reports and exports are good but there is always room for improvement. If merchants have the stats to better track performance it may enforce their decisions to use things like listing enhancements. You think the current SLM Reporting is GOOD??? Wow I must have been looking at the wrong SL Marketplace all this time. The SLM reporting that I have seen all this time is so far from good that its not even funny. ITS HORRID! Its only a fraction of the capability of the old Xstreet. It only has the most basic of report. The reports are still aggregating in stats since the day that SLM was put into service last summer (example... the slm report shows that my top sculpty pack has been viewed in search 208,934 times since SLM start in august - wow how helpful is that as it doesnt show trends or impacts to my changes in search parameters...). It has no flexibility on changing the view or parameters of the reports. no Graphs or histograms at all none of the raw stats can be downloaded for additional digging by a shopper It does not provide traffic reporting analysis/stats integration from services like GOOGLE ANALYTICS for merchant store/products... My Zazzle online art store and my weebly web/blog sites BOTH provide Google Analytics integration. With LL just releasing SLM - you would think they would have provided this powerful integration. So.... SLM has Good Reporting.... ~~cough~~

Ai Velde wrote: Thank you for responding! ---- Here's to you and your continued success, Toy. I've seen you disgruntled a few times due to the marketplace dev team, so I hope something changes (positively) soon and your sales get back up! But yeah, I can imagine that the people who rely on the competence of LL to sustain their living situations find dips in the economy and screw ups a complete nightmare. :smileyindifferent: Thanks Ai... and sounds like you have a good start too. You will get there very shortly. The key is to focus on the whole picture when trying to remove $50US per week from LL's account.... To attain that number you need to focus on REVENUE & COSTS. I believe I have been successful to the level that satisfies me personally because I have focused heavily on keeping my costs to an absolute minimum.... I dont own lands in SL to run my store or for a place to build (that what sandboxes are for) with heavy Teir costs. And I personally do not own land in SL for personal pleasure and just call me rented store my home. After a few experiments I have stopped putting any money into any of LL's paid SLM item enhancements which are over priced and under deliver. I try to do all my own work and not outsource any creation from others. etc. etc. etc. By keeping my costs down to a minimum, about 90% of my monthly revenue is PROFIT! As for me being frustrated.... Sure it angers me when LL Commerce Team has no focus and has interests that are only to cover their legal butts vs doing whats good for the merchants and coming up with/implementing half-baked knee-jerk solutions with no thought of how this might impact their customers. And when these changes directly impact me profits - no matter how small they are - it gets me motivated to take action. And when people like Brooke and the LL Team ignore the concerns expressed by me and others.... this just gets me more motivated to be heard. What many here on the forums and likely in LL staff and even others in-world (like someone last night expressed to me directly) dont understand... my passion and frustration expressed in the forums and twitter and other back door communications is not a sign of TOY NOT HAVING FUN IN SL.... to the contrary, this is what I love most. This stress for me is Eustress (look it up). LOL... so to LL Commerce Team that thinks I will throw up my hands and give up in frustration.... you could not be more wrong... this is what excites me Im a change agent in RL and n SL.