Toysoldier Thor

Ciaran Laval wrote: Toysoldier Thor wrote: So I type a search phrase like "black shoes" or "disco night"... Thinking if some one had a classified on black shoes or and an event for a "disco night" - it surely would show up in the ALL tab... right? Well glory be... I would be wrong as would the majority of SL Residents.... Did you use quotation marks when you searched for those terms? Quotation marks are back to including the quotation marks as part of the search term when it comes to classifieds by the looks of it. no i didnt. I was just using them in this posting to mention what the phrase was. I know that " " will make the search explicit. Another anomaly I have discovered with my classified ads that I created that are supposed to show up on the side of search IF its relevant. My ads are PG ads - I checked them 3 times... yet the only way I can get my Classified Ad to show up on an inworld search is if I click the MATURE button on search. If I only click PG/GENERAL and do not change anything else... my classified Ad disappears. So, it thinks my Classified is Mature even though its not.

Monalisa Robbiani wrote: Yes. I buy real stuff with my SL money. The PC system I am using for example. But for me, SL doesn't create a steady income and the money I make is well below any tax limits of my country. This means that technically, it is not a "business" at all. I wonder how many people actually make a living off SL. I pretty much fall in line with MonoLisa. Untill the past 3 weeks my revenue and cash flow to RL (i.e. my PayPal "hot money" account) has been a very consistent $100 US a week. This clearly puts me into the class of SL HOBBY MERCHANT in that its real nice that I can enjoy being in SL and do all the fun things that SL has to offer and at the same time actually generate a sweet continual flow of $RL cash to spend on disposable income "toys". But I will also say that I could be making a ton more SL income but I also value my time to follow countless other interests in and around SL. In fact the last time I created a new product for my store was last August. The income I make in SL is on my 6 primary sculpty landscape packs that keep generating a constant weekly sales flow (until 3 weeks ago when Brooke's Team did something to SLM to cut my sales in half). I have used it to feed my recent passion that stemmed from the SL Art Community - SL Photo Art - by purchasing a shiny new $1500 Nikon DSLR and lens. I have also done some major system overhaul of my "SL" PC so that I can more effectively create sculpty/3D content and PS art (2x24" flat screens / i7 CPU / 8GB RAM / SSD hard drive). Now looking at a new top-end laptop so I can hand down my older laptop to other family members... This income I make in SL is a drop in the bucket to the top career merchants that are making $1000's US per week in income (i.e. the breedable merchants) and more power to them. But I make enough that I needed to set up a new RL business structure to report my income. The good part is that I will be operating at a Net $0 income since I am buy a lot of expensive toys that clearly related to my "TOYS VIRTUAL BUSINESS". So there you go. Im happy. But that doesnt mean that I dont take the SL income for granted. If LL takes actions that threatens my income I have worked to create - I will not just shrug it off and say "ohh well it was fun while it lasted"... I will put up a fight as much as the larger merchants would that actually live RL on the income they make here.

Madeliefste Oh wrote: Why is it that LL want 50% of your sales? The more I think about it, the less I understand. Since LL owns the 'printpress' of the L$, the Linden dollar has no value to them, like it has to us merchants. They don't need our L$ to sell them for US dollars, since they can print as many of them as they like. So the financial gain of asking 50% of the linden dollar price from the merchants is zero for LL. For everybody else except LL the linden dollar has a value. LL does not win anything with asking 50% of your L$ price. But for you as a merchants this deal will mean a loose 75% per product. Why would LL want this, while this is not going to make them any real money? Do they want to force price devaluation of virtual goods? Is that what is behind this? And why would they want this? The only possible construction to make money from these dash deals I see for LL is when customers don't pay with L$ but with USD. The marketplace already shows USD prices. Those are way too high compared to L$ prices. So customers will only very rarely buy goods from the marketplace for USD. But the only way to profit from this marketplace for LL is when customers do pay in USD. So that might have made LL thinking of strategies how to profit more from this marketplace. They did not buy Xstreet out of charity, their aim is to make profit from this place. How can you seduce customers to spend more USD in stead of L$? Well by offering them better prices. When the USD price of an item is (temporary) lower then the regular L$ price, for example. Now what if these dash deals are only available to customers when they pay in USD? There we have a nice dash deal that does bring in hard dollars for LL. When this would be the case this will means that LL will make 200% more profit on your product then you as a merchant do. Since they will cash in the USD the customer pays for 100%. And after that you are paid half of that amount in (for them worthless) linden dollars. That is my theory so far, it might change as soon as I get different signals. But what do you guys think? Why is it that LL want 50% of our L$ prices? Think of it more of a Source & Sink of the flow of $US Cash entering into LL's account (i.e when a LL Customer pays LL for $L tokens) vs $US Cash leaving LL's account (i.e when a LL Customer/Merchant requests $US payment when selling off $L tokens). In order for LL to make RL $US cashflow, their objective is to generate as much incentive as possible for their SL Customers to require more $Ls to spend within the SL virtual economy as possible (even if it is to pay another SL customer - aka a Merchant)... while at the same time they must do everything they can to be the one to take the $L tokens out of the hands of their SL Customers - which they would just Sink (aka retire). The reason is that once a $L token is transferred back into their hands from any SL Customer, that becomes a net gain is $US for them - because that $L token will never have to be converted back to $US money that leaves LL's real account. So, in the example of the DD promotion. Lets say you are selling a $1000L item which you normally sell 10 in a 24 hour period. During the DD Promotion, you end up selling 100 items. Based on that... On a normal 24 hour period you would normally have taken $9500L from customers & LL would have stopped you from being able to cash out into $US currency = $500L ( ~ $2US). in other words, LL has made $2US Net since they have removed those $L tokens from the outstanding $L currency in the economy. During the 24 hour DD, you will cut your $1000L price in half = $500L and you will sell 100 of these units = $50,000L and LL will be taking half of that as their service which is removed from the outstanding $L currency in the economy = $25,000L. So, just from you alone, LL has made about $99US in profit. They made that $99US in profit because they took it out of the SL Customers hands and now do not have to pay any SL Customer back. Its a sink. I hope I got that generally right.

What I am saying is that - why not fix the basic functions of inworld search. When something as basic as the ALL TAB is broken and only provides results from places, people,groups (and does not even include results from the one tab that SL Residents are paying $50L a week for), then it says all about how bad a shape inworld search is. Since it is clear that over a year after LL made big announcements that they will be focusing on inworld search once and for all and put an expert staffer in place to fix SEARCH (both inworld and xstreet/slm) and that is in fact in worse shape now then it was before they started.... LL should just admit they do not understand search. LL should hire an outside expert that understands search ... maybe they should hire some of us as well as a GUIDANCE COUNCIL to work with this Search Expert and get this fixed. I mean its mind boggling that something as somple as ALL tab doesnt work and that my classified ad cannot be found in classifieds because I didnt type my search to exactly match my Ad title. I just started two ads for my scupty store and my art gallery but with this borked up inworld search.... I am just throwing $100L a week away.

Girlfriend Melody wrote: In my oppinion: 1- Serious content creator usually works around 18 hours/day to develop their products. 2- A product price should take into account: working hours + uploading costs + land fees + comission fees + profit % + advertisement costs and so on. 3- Seems that at the end of the Dash Deal process, the merchant would get just 20% of the item price, and this ammount don't cover the product costs. 4- Dash Deal will atract freebie hunters, so the viral effect will not reach the good content creators' target audience. 5- Freebie resellers, stolen content merchants, less developed content creators will take a big advantage with Dash Deal promotional tool. 6- Instead of Promotion Opportunity, LL is providing SL with unfair competition stimulus. 7- Serious merchants and content creators will be even more demotivated. 8- LL will have a lot of headache with freebies, stolen content and unhappy residents. 9- LL Dash Deal profit will not be enough even to cover the aspirin costs. 10- Dash Deal” is the most stupid idea I have heard from LL. Other than point #5, I would agree with your points. NOW... regarding #5... never say never! In theory, if LL Commerce Team were to see a huge demand for this DD promotion and they are making some big money on this promotion as compared to their other over-priced/under-effective item enhancements tools, then it would not be outside the rhelm of possibility that LL would remove the criteria and make this a wide open tool and promote a deal weekly or multiple time weekly. Revenue Streams can be a blind addiction - even for LL. Short term gains for long term pain. But we have seen countless examples where LL's ideas are extremely knee-jerk short sighted because they dont worry about the longer term impacts of their actions. So.... dont 100% dismiss that #5 would not be the case.

for inworld search .... including profile picks is not the biggest problem.... the critical search on assets inworld is the problem and a search engine and deployment more more stupid than a broken toater.

In fact.... I just noticed one more thing about how broken and stupid inworld search is.... If you are an SL Resident and you call up Search and you want to get the widest breadth of search or you cant decide which tab to use in search.... like most normal humans.... you would select the "ALL" tab in search. I know I am not the smartest Toy in the Toybox... but I would naively come to the conclusion that if I select ALL.... I would get any search results from any of the other tabs... classifieds, events, showcase, land sales, places, people, groups. (of course there likely are those smarty pants veteran experts that will say... NOOOO but I am one of the normal SL residents).... So I type a search phrase like "black shoes" or "disco night"... Thinking if some one had a classified on black shoes or and an event for a "disco night" - it surely would show up in the ALL tab... right? Well glory be... I would be wrong as would the majority of SL Residents.... The truth is that the ALL Tab to LL only mean "ALL PLACES, PEOPLE, GROUPS". ALL to LL does not mean events or classifieds or land sales or anything else. As such, all I got back was pages and pages of LAND and People and GROUPs. If you happen to be a merchant that does not own land and only rents stores then your chances of being found in inworld search is pretty much ZERO unless you think a shopper will look for you in the CLASSIFIED tab. SO....... this is what the LL Search Experts have been doing all this time ? But as Brooke stated earlier... they need to study SEARCH more since they have no clue whats wrong. I hope when they figure out SLM search problem - they dont fix it with the team that fixed Inworld search.

Medhue Simoni wrote: Ok, it has been almost a year now since LL completely destroyed the inworld search. Currently, the inworld search is about the worst it has ever been. It's been a full year too, with absolutely no improvements at all. Again, A WHOLE F-ing year that LL paid people to do absolutely nothing. Seriously, I want a job as an SL search professional, so that I can sit and do nothing for a year. The search hit rock bottom when PICKS were removed. So, why did LL not spend the past year fixing the problems with PICKs? Or, should we go another year with a BROKEN inworld search? Sorry if I just pissed off a bunch of LL devs, but I evaluate things by the results.:smileymad: And just to dot the eye on how stupid the inworld search is.... Today I created a new CLASSIFIED in my profile for my new Art Gallery. The title of it is "toy's art gallery". I thought that no problem even if someone searches for "toys art gallery" it will still find it?? Right? NOPE! I got zero search results. Same when I types "toy art gallery"... NOPE. I had to literally type "toy's art gallery" for my classified to show up. So LL has downgraded Inworld search to be as dumb as a doorknob! Great work Team... I want a job at LL. Then to add to the absolute stupidity that proves Medhue's point that the LL Search specialists that have been working to improve inworld search have been doing NOTHING but actually making things worse... My classified ad that I pay 50L/week for... does not show up under ALL SEARCH. Doesnt ALL mean uhmmmm ALL ??? So unless someone is in search and actually goes to the CLASSIFIEDS tab and does a search (I know I never do - as I always use ALL or PEOPLE)... they would never find my advertisment. Of course inworld search also does not provide any stats to show if our paid ad is even being hit on. I know exactly what you feel like Medhue. Its totally frustrating how badly LL continues to never execute on the things that need to be fixed yet fully execute on all the things SL residents dread they do.

Darren Oates wrote: So doing the math quickly atleast 50% cheaper that means seller would only recive at the very least 25% of the normal retail price so they inefect would be reciving and appying a 75% discount cut in the dash deal program as they would endup with around 25% profit after LL takes its cut . Do they have to pay a sellers fee aswel ? This will only ever work if sales can be driven but I have my reservations high sales can be achived once every man and his dog signs up for promotion their is only so much add space to use before it could get swamped by other adds. Well wouldnt that be funny if after the participating merchant cuts his product price in 1/2 then is forced to give 1/2 of that 1/2 to LL for their marketing and promotion of the event, that LL would then charge an additional 5% SLM commission on top of that. It would be funny except for the fact that likely its true. Darren, I am sure you know what Midnight Mania is inworld. This is just LL's SLM version of the same approach. The only difference here is that instead of a well organized and pretty effective MM Hunters/Promoters group inworld promoting the merchant MM Boards, with DASH DEAL we now have the all powerful LL becoming the MM Town Cryer / promoter (which in theory might have much more reach and power). I would as MIGHT have since unlike the well organized MM HUNT groups inworlds that are well established with loyal BARGAIN HUNTING Gamers, LL is not plugged into this network of bargain hunters so the effectiveness of this promotion would possibly not be as powerful as these bargain hunters would not exactly have enough time to understand that the deal is or be watchin LL's normal avenues of commnuication. I will say and predict that even with all of LL's communication mediums they have available to them, the vast majority of SL Residents do not follow these communications. Events like this - promoted by LL would likely take a few days or week for word of mouth to get out that LL will be hosting their own MM-like traffic generating event. Then the next issues is how many freebie / bargain hunting residents really use SLM? Chances are not that many as they likely get more than their fill of content from inworld. As such, this event will likely also be less effective because many bargain hunters would not know how to or cant be bothered learning how SLM works. So, my prediction is that unless LL Commerce Team makes this a very regular event and promotes it well in advance, it will only have limited actual shopper traffic. Then... the participating Merchants has to sell 4 times normal volumes of that product just to break even. And hope that maybe some of the lured in bargain hunters will actually buy more products from the merchant than was was given away as a firesale. Most dont. I know this from a lot of MM past experience.... 90%+ of the MM culture of bargain hunters during these events do not buy more and do not come back. And... in the meantime... the merchant has lowered the perceived value of his/her product in the eyes of the market. Really.... its too bad that Brooke and her LL Commerce Team does not know the SL Merchant/Shoppers market and economy and how it really operates. If they did, they would not have listened to whomever convinced them that this was a good idea. But we will see which merchants end up participating - and we can ask them what they thought of the results.

EndoPlasmic wrote: Toysoldier Thor wrote: AKA - her team does not want to fix the problem. Then the question is.... WHY? We'll never get a straight answer to that question, you can be sure of that much. Look, when people search by "relevance", then that should be all the criteria that particular search uses to find what the customer is looking for. If I type in "black shirt", I should only get back results that have "black shirt" listed in the title and keywords. Period. This is not happening right now, and it doesn't take a brain surgeon to see that. The ONLY time there should be added search "criteria" is when the customer is trying to narrow what they've searched for in the "relevant" field. In other words, I search "black shirt" and get a ton of results. I then have the choice of narrowing it down further by price, sales volume, whatever. But there should NEVER be any weighted "criteria" added to the basic "relevant" search UNLESS THE CUSTOMER CHOOSES TO SORT IT THAT WAY. Clearly, the Commerce team HAS put extra weight on things such as sales volume in the "relevant" search function. It's inexcusable. A "relevant" search should be just that, a search which brings back "relevant" results from titles and keywords (Titles and Keywords ONLY!). There is no need for added "criteria" in the initial search, as that should be up to the customer whether or not they want to narrow it down further. This isn't rocket science, but the Commerece Team sure is having one heck of a time trying to figure it all out. Of course, this is Linden "Lab" we are all talking about here, so the experimenting and further weakening of search can't be all that unexpected. Endo... I cannot agree with you enough. You are DEAD ON RIGHT!. This is what I have said in jira's, forum posts, LL Commerce mass meetings, IMs to Lindens, etc.etc.etc. sadly... no progress.

We have beaten the dead SLM SEARCH BY RELEVANCE issue over the Commerce Teams head so many times that I am sure they are replaying it in their dreams. And yet we still get statements from Brooke ina recent marketplace update that they need to put in tools to better track and assess what is wrong with search. I know for a fact that one of the biggest issues is that they put a high weighting on the popularity of the item is sales... # of sales... not $value of sales even. THEY SHOULD NOT BE PUTTING ANY WEIGHTING ON THE PRODUCT's SALES HISTORY OR $VOLUME. Not that Brooke's team is reading... but here is a perfect example that I can see so clearly - over and over - on my own line of products and how they show up in Search/Sort by Relevance... I sell Landscape Scuply packs... 6 of them to be exact. They all range around $900L. I also have an item on SLM that is a DEMO KIT of samples of all these packs that I sell for $0L. Before I tell you what happens on SLM Search, I will tell you that - By Far in an order of magnitude of like 5 times the sales of my next best seller, my $0L DEMO Pack is my top seller. Far behind in sales but clearly my best seller (over two times the sales of the next pack) is my oldest pack called rocky terrain. I personally dont think it is too much different a pack then any of my others - except it is my oldest. I will also tell you that with the few exceptions of keywords that uniquely describe each pack, almost all the packs use pretty much the same set of keywords, title words, order and structure of words in the teo critical keywords/title. So... when I do search by relevance for query phrases that would likely be used by a shopper to find my packs - even phrases that I know would be pretty much bang on in synch with my keywords to any of my lesser selling packs ... Guess which of my listings shows up first almost ALL THE TIME? My Demoo pack.... and somewhere around the same place in order... my Rocky Terrains pack. Even though I was looking for my volcano pack or hoodoo pack... these other two show up around and often before the pack that I targetted. As such, its telling me that the SLM Search By Relevance has a strong weighting on the popularity / sales frequency of the item - and even a higher sort weighting/priority than the two critical fields of KEYWORDS and TITLE. I suspect that the LL Commerce Team is using the TITLE and KEYWORDS fields to "search" for relevant listings... but they drop the ball when they stop using the relevance of the phrases to these fields in the SORTING of the results. They search filter by TITLE & KEYWORDS then sort by item sales volumes and other fields. THIS IS WHERE SLM SEARCH IS BROKEN! But supposedly Brooke states that (like all our beloved governments love to do on thorny issues they dont want to deal with) her team needs to study the problem more. AKA - her team does not want to fix the problem. Then the question is.... WHY?

Sassy Romano wrote: General consensus from the last meeting was that the value in attending was low. Typed excruciatingly slowly, no time for questions (only a rare hand picked easy to answer set were chosen). Save everyone the time and frustration, "JUST BLOG IT". I agree whole heartedly Sassy. Brooke's typing speed at the last meeting I was able to attend was so slow that it effectively reduced a 60 minute meeting to 30 minutes. And so few actual questions were asked and answered - thanks to Brooke's Question Filtration System (Colossus) that it just ended up being Brooke typing out a blogged status update. Since I am unable to attend anyway (as are likely most merchants), I would totally agree that Brooke should just collect the survey responses of the top issues, develop a blog of the topics she is willing to post about, and then just let the larger audience of Merchants ask questions on the blog. Then she should take some time out of her schedule and answer some of the responses / questions.

The next meeting is again in mid-day N.A. time so again out of range for me. I noticed the survey does not have an item that covered "technical problems / issue / bugs" as a main item. Considering how many of us have all reported an average of a 50% drop in sales since LL Commerce Team's changes to SLM two weeks ago, I hope many of you are going to select OTHER and demand Brooke explain what the heck the team did to destroy without any current recovering about 50% of SLM sales. and demand that she come up with an action plan on how LL Commerce will restore the lost service / sales flow that these changes seem to have clear impacted.

Madeliefste Oh wrote: When it is caused by changes in the marketplace, then there must be merchants who gain more sales where others loose sales. Since everybody is reporting they made less sales, to me it seems that changes in the marketplaces is not the cause. I tend to think there was less money spend on buying from SL merchants. Madel, I would have to disagree with that theory as a change to the SLM service could as much and even moreso initiate an impact in SLM sales in a "rising/falling water raises and sinks all boats" model as opposed to a "rob peter to pay paul" impact. Example, if Brooke's team initiate a change where shoppers ability to login to SLM has been affected, they all merchants would feel a negative effect. Or if they borked the order processing or if their servers have been brought to their knees .... these all would affect all merchants. I would agree that the known change where Brooke's team has applied strict maturity filters on non-logged in browsing shoppers would moreso directly and most dramatically affect any merchants with MODERATE or ADULT filtered content (that is not me), but maybe the change caused some as yet unknown residual effect to all browsing shoppers. This would not increase sales to uneffected merchants - it would just keep them steady. So far we are not seeing this from all merchants reporting this significant and noticable change. The sudden and significant drop in SLM sales on almost the day after their change two weeks ago seems to point fingers to a LL Commerce Team change. The problem we all have is that only Brooke's team know best what it could be and so far she has been completely silent on this issue and has only provided some "sorry to hear" private IMs to those merchants that have directly challenged her on what her team has done and to FIX IT. She has said they will throw up a pretyt little banner on the SLM for non logged in shoppers to remind them they cannot see any content that has been TEENIFIED unless the shopper logs in... but I havent seen it and I really dont think this will have little impact to a browsing shopper. What really bothers me is that LL is so hard and **bleep** on covering their legal butts from their stupid TEENIFICATION OF THE ADULT GRID that they they are CYA'ing at all costs. If you go to the ebay website and make sure you are not logged into ebay... do a search for SEX TOYS. Tell me if you get any results of what LL would clearly categorize as ADULT content? I tested it already... you do. So if ebay is not being taken to court for displaying adult sold content when a shopper is not logged in, why does LL feel they must do this - which is clearly a factor to further drop SLM sales.

Darrius Gothly wrote: VonGklugelstein Alter wrote: Did any of you consider that a large set of customers, namely the people in Japan have a lot more important things to do and worry about than buying cartoon world merchandise? Yes, I did. However in the past year of sales, I have had two customers from Japan. If I quadruple that number and subtract it from my usual sales, that still leaves a massive gap that is unexplained. I can however point to other events and changes that had an immediate and pronounced effect on my sales, some plus and some minus. The catastrophe that befell Japan has surely impacted the world economy in drastic ways, no question there. But a 50% drop in overall sales does not equate to the lost customers from Japan. I agree Darrius. I cant see that the Japan disaster would impact sales by most reporting SLM Merchants by 50%. Also, to indicate and point fingers to changes made by Brooke's team two weeks ago, many of you mechants that have a good consistent inworld sales have reported that you have not noticed this 50% drop inworld - only in SLM. My update as of today is that my sales are still crippled. I am still tracking my sales to be about 50% down from normal. As of today, my SL account shoul dbe almost 50% to its next liquidation threshold but I have not even met last week's threshold. I have almost 0 sales volume yesterday and only a couple sales the day before. COME ON BROOKE! ENGAGE HERE! Your team two weeks ago screwed something up royally in SLM ! Undo it! I suspect the SLM CRUSHER that LL COMMERCE TEAM did was adding the maturity filter for non-logged in browsing shoppers to GENERAL. even though I have only general items, I think the changes they did might have inadvertently affected a critical shopping habbit. Sadly I dont think Brooke is concerned about what changes that were put in will be reviewed and fixed. We merchants should just tough it out. Right?

So thanks to Luna's posting turning on a lightbulb in my mind about how LL Commerce Team has created they own SLM version of the MM traffic generating tools inworld and the horrid damage it did and continues to do to the content $L pricing, last night I wrote up a blog on the topic of the DASH DEAL program. I gave you credit Luna for turning on my lightbulb Blog Posting of how DASH DEAL is a bad idea

Since we cant get the important fixes worked on... here is a simple one that I have mentioned a few times and would be so easy to fix... Fix the link to SecondLife's HOME on the upper left corner of the SLM site so that a shopper can get to the www.secondlife.com home page. There is no way from the SLM website for a shopping to click on a link to the main SL.com site. I strongly suspect it should be the HOME icon on the top left corner but it has never been updated since SLM was in beta to link back to the main site. I have had a need for that button to work countless times from SLM to main SL - but the only way I know how to link is to click on the bottom right icon on downloading the SL viewer - then from there I click on the home link.

Luna Bliss wrote: I'm very concerned when I see RL business concepts applied to SL and its unique features, because more often than not it just doesn't work. When individual businesses decide to make one of their products a 'loss leader' it is for ONE item and not their entire line of products, but the effect of management determining the 'loss leaders' means that as more and more creators participate the entire market will become valued at the 'loss leader' price. Why would any shopper pay a decent price for anything when the market is flooded with an abundance of 'loss leaders' just one click away? I'm afraid this will just cheapen our content even further, and in a way that lines LL's pocket even more. If there are few merchants participating in this type of advertising I'm sure they will have an increase in sales, but the more who participate the effect will be, in the end, that they earn far less. Luna... you bring up an excellent point... to put this in perspective base on actual proven history within Inworld SL... LL Commerce Team could be on the verge of actually being the creators of the SLM verion of the inworld "MIDNIGHT MANIA" promotion tool. I strong believe we all can all safely say and agree with little debate that MIDNIGHT MANIA (and all its explosion of similar inworld traffic generating concepts) became the #1 most economy damagin fad (that still continues actively today inworld) to impact the Inworld SL economy. If one could wave a magic wand and to a correlation study that super-imposed the Inworld Average $L price for content being sold before during and after the MM craze... I would be very confident is sayin we would see a massive drop in the average price of ALL PRODUCT CATEGORIES inworld. Why? Because, in a naive or desperate effort to get traffic to merchant stores (since even back then search was as uselss as it still is now), giving away valued products for free or for a firesale price was initially a highly effective way to get bargain hunters and shoppers to visit your store. In the early days of MM, the strategy worked because it was new and the HUNTERS actually felt obliged to look around at MM stores and even shop. But, it didnt take long for the MM usage to flood to almost every second merchant who then have to offer more and more valuable items to give away just to get HUNTERS to show up. The Hunders also evolved to making it an actual GAME. They have zero intent to buy anything. This evolution didnt take long. In the meantime, the MM craze already damaged the inworld economy because it fundamentally transformed the general customer culture to EXPECT TO GET GREAT PRODUCTS SOMEWHERE IN SL GRID FOR FREE OR CHEAP. Most merchants that didnt even participate in the MM craze or stopped using the tool, were still being impacted because even if they great products were available at $900L, their 10 competitors already offered competing products at lower and lower prices or even free. This continued to drag down the inworld content price point to where it is now. I will even admit I was one of MM's most early adopters back in early 2009 but I quickly got out of it about 3 months later when the early damaging impacts were becoming aparent and that I noticed no one was showing up at my store's MM announcements - AND I refused to play the game of giving away more valueable lost leaders. But, a good example of the impact of MM... just before the MM craze (Feb 2009) I was selling a pack of 7 animated sculpted raging rivers prims for $5000L - and they were selling !! In the fall of 2009 my revised/updated pack of 15 sculpted river maps was and continues to sell for around $900L and at a pace that I previously could sell them at $5000L. HOW DOES THIS ALL RELATE TO LL's RECENT SLM PROMOTION... This is exactly what LL Commerce Team is introducing into the SLM market that devastated the inworld economy. Luna is dead on right with this. But also... the reasons behind why the MM craze was so popular was significantly driven by the weak support from LL in providing more effective ways to generate traffic to a mall or store - primarily a completely horrid search for inworld content. And well I guess history is repeating itself - because LL Commerce Team continually refuses to solve the problems in SLM that would fairly generated SLM shopper traffic to the SLM Merchant items - Merchants are new or cannot get visible on SLM search and cannot rely upon the over-priced / under effective SLM item advertising tools will get desperate to establish or regain traffic and sales. With Brooke's team focusing completely on SLM initiatives that do nothing but reduce traffic and sales (i.e. the maturity filtering fiasco), Brooke's team is naively falling for the same tricks of MM to regain SLM sales that happened in 2009. Ohh well... I guess if LL is going to do it anyway - there will be no stopping it. the only ones that benefit from this damaging strategy will be the early adopters that are also the early exiters of the program. hmmmm thanks Luna... this might make for a great new blog for my new site.

Phil Deakins wrote: I find it utterly astonishing that LL can find time to create something like this in the MP but they can't find the time to fix the myriad of problems that I read about. Well, it's not really astonishing considering that LL is never about making things work properly or looking after their customers. This is the shocking thing Phil.... Brooke continues to plead and fling around the same excuse on why critical Merchant issues cannot be a priority to be worked on because they are so limited in staff and have so many higher priorities like Teenification of the SLM site (i.e. damaging the sales of SLM with all these maturity filters). So issues like SLM utterly useless sales/traffic reporting and SLM search canitnue to be ignored BUT her team has all the time in the world to come up with a new promotion tool/solution that is questionable in its pricing strategy and that most merchants posting in the threads see as a tool for "the desperate SLM merchant". It really makes you understand where this new SLM Commerce Team's priorities are. Not with helping the Merchants.

Madeliefste Oh wrote: Suella Ember wrote: Interesting idea. While I agree with the comments saying that this could potentially result in the merchant making an overall loss on the item during the deal, I think the point is that you need to treat it as a loss leader. If this promotion works well it should, in theory, promote more interest in your business and generate more overall sales and profit. So I'm going to watch with interest to see how this trial works in practice. There have been deals similar to this run inworld before by other residents (with varying success). There are also a number of similar, regular programs where multiple merchants can apply and have an item set at a specified discount price on a particular day each week. I've always been in two minds about these programs - They have their pros because they can act as a useful loss leader to generate more sales but they also have their cons - the main one being that because they have become so widely used and so frequent, they encourage shoppers to simply only ever shop for items at these deals. For that reason, I think there is logic to LL running this deal on a less regular basis. Having said that, I think it would be nice to do somethng perhaps monthly with a few merchants (by application) if the tiral is successful. I think the main issue, in the long run, is going to be the nature on which the item has to be setup. If this trial is successful, I'd hope that LL would try to develop a more structured way to take part. A simple way to flag an existing item to take part, for example, rather than having to list it separately at the new price then relist it at the normal price once the deal is over. I would be interested to hear from merchants who participate in those inworld discount programs: is the theory that bargains bring in new customers valid? I don't participate in those programs, I tend to think it mainly brings in bargain buyers. That still might be interesting for some. When you can sell for example 100 items for 50 by participating in the program, in stead of 20 for 150 while not participating. Anybody out there who has figures about how many bargain buyers become regular costumers of your brand? My impression of these programs so far is that they generate more bargain hunters then regulair customers. I think the effect might be that less people are willing to pay the full price for items, while there are many attractive bargains out there. The power of these programs is that they can reach a bigger group of people then you can do on your own as a merchant. That will count even stronger for the LL program, after all LL has the power to reach the whole resident base, no inworld group can beat them on this. But you can only hope that this strategy brings in new customers to your brand. The effect might as well be that the program takes away customers from existing brands, customers might change their buying habbits because of the attractive discounts promoted by LL. Well like I said, even though I agree with all that say LL is raping the participating merchants on this promotion experiment, I did put in my application and under the coditions I mentioned earlier. All my landscape sculpty packs are definately premium priced and have sold very well considering the limited formal marketing (near zero paid advertising for any of LL's services). BUT, because it is only 24 hours and I looked at my sales history and selected my slowest seller of the 6 primary packs I sell to be the victim of this LL promotion, I still think its worth the risk to see if LL could actually deliver this time and properly market this promo event. If they do then even though my 900L item will be slashed to 1/4 of its income to me - $225L, since I only sell about 1-2 of these a week, I cant see a pent up demand of Bargain Hunters after my products that will jump on this deal - even at $450L. The "bargain hunters" we are all fearing are the MM "I want it free or for $10L" bargain hunters. $450L will be out of this shopping group's league. The biggest issue for me and why I will likely not be able to report back to any of you how the experiment worked is.... 1) I refused to give my full RL legal name in the application - didnt see a need for LL to know it so I just reminded them of my PIOF they already have for me, 2) LL Commerce Team - even the new generation - pretty much has excluded me from most communications... smaller user groups that I have asked to be involved in, no merchant surveys that other Merchants seem to get, no response to my questions in the larger group meetings, no response to my forum posts unless I basically harass and downright threaten to bring it up with Rodvik, etc. So I suspect my application for this experiment will be rejected - unless of course most of the favored LL Merchants refuse to go into the experiment. We will see.

we have given LL explanations over and over on what to fix on SLM search. I had a complete JIRA on it. TITLES AND KEYWORDS should be the only primary criteria... but its not broken only because they do or dont include fields - its how they are putting priority on the search query phrases. Pamela said it right.... if someone searches for RED SHOES ... then any item with RED & SHOES toegether as a combined phrase should be on the list first (and those with it in title and keywords before those only in one field)... then any listing with both words anywhere in these fields... then one or the other... then one of them... with this approach, you will not need to further sort it by price of item or other secondary sorts because there will likely be enough granularity from the primary method.

Josh Susanto wrote: But if they fix the search function, that could actually result in a loss of LL revenue from listing enhancements. Need I explain how? You might have a good theory there Josh. I mean come on - how hard is it for the LL team to put some focus on fixing SLM search? We all know that inworld search is pretty much a NEVER TO FIX write-off... but SLM search has some hope to fixing it yet month after month after month all we get from Brooke's team and the team before hers is either crickets chirping or "we are studying it". One would have to conclude that they dont have any desire to fix search and a good reason is to hopefully push more sales of their grossly over costed and under valued listing enhancements. If that is the reason Brooke - that technique will never get me to buy the listing enhanvements. They are as ineffective today as they were with xstreet.

so i am going to ask a stupid question - which is something added to the list of bugginess of the new forums.... HOW DO YOU KNOW WHO THREAD POSTER REPLIED TO?? I have not been about to see where. Unless someone quotes the person they are replying to - no one knows who you are talking to / respondnig to.

Madeliefste Oh wrote: Toysoldier Thor wrote: And related to the MERCHANT SURVEY..... why did only a portion of the Merchants get this survey? I did not receive it nor did many other merchants PLEASE DO NOT SAY THAT YOU DID SEND IT AND THAT IT MUST BE A FILTER ON MY SIDE... its not true as I have received an email from LL Commerce (you) in early January). I did not receive it either. I don't receive emails quite while now. The last mail I saw from the lab was the one with the promotion of the bunnies.(By the way: did they pay you 50% of their sales for this promotion?) Made... maybe they dont like us Sculpty Merchants .... we r not good enough for them

I didnt see the 50/50 cut of the sales - but.... I didnt give my RL legal full name so good chance LL will reject my application on that technicality I picked the slowest selling of my 6 main landscape sculpty packs so even if 5 or 6 of the packs sell on that 24 hours - better than what this pack makes now in a giving week - specially over the past 2 weeks since LL Commerce team has devastated SLM sales. Its only for 24 hours - so really - how much will LL Commerce Team even generate interest in? Maybe the faint hope - FAINT - that if any 24 hour customer buys one of of the landscape sculpty pack that I have put up for this prmotion... all my packs are heavily cross branded - so maybe this will bring sales back up to where it was 2 weeks ago. This will be my one experiment - if it fails (like all my experiments on SLM's / XSTREETs hugely overpriced and under performing listing enhancements have), I wont do it a second time. And yes... it seems the LL commerce team has a portion of the merchant population they like to go to for private group meetings and surveys. Merchants like us are along for the ride.