Toysoldier Thor

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).

The DASH DEAL sounds interesting as maybe it will boost the lagging sales in SLM. BUT... why does LL need my Legal Full RL name? You already have my PIOF. I submitted my application with my SL Avatar name and reminded you my paypal account on that line of the application.

Inworld search has been and continues to be an utter mess that seems only a small fraction of the inworld merchants seem to know how to manipulate. Even after I got Rachel to help me deploy many of the secret know inworld tricks on how to get my store and my products to become visible on inworld search - i was shocked when I quickly realized that it has ZERO IMPACT TO IMPROVE MY INWORLD SALES. I suspect the reason is that most SL residents have long since established a culture to know that SL Inworld search is an utter mess and provides only an extremely limited level of results compared to the SLM search (which is also not great but 10 fold better than inworld search). Inworld search has never been designed to effectively provide search results for REAL MERCHANT PRODUCTS. It indexes such a garbage dump of rezzed items inworld that real results get completely lost. Not to mention how many of the Merchants in the know of how Inworld search works have been playing games and manipulating inworld search based on the hobbled capabilities of search. The critically bad news for me as a SL Merchant is that until Brooke and the new era of the SLM Commerce Team arrived, my SLM sales were up to 90% of my sales and were relatively stable and good enough that I didnt worry too much about inworld sales not working. BUT, since the current SLM Commerce Teams major thrust to destroy the SLM market by deploying LL butt covering Teenification filters and tinkering with search that is making SLM sales drop further... I was ok. NOW.... my primary source of my sales have declined 50% (as have many other SLM merchants).. and I am not seeing these sales recouped on inworld. So.... like many other fellow merchants have stated... things are getting bad... and we are getting no support from the SLM Commerce Team or the SL Commerce Team (if there even is one). They are all too distracted worrying how to protect their legal butts from their decision on merging teens to the adult grid.

Porky Gorky wrote: My in-world sales have returned to normal over the last 7 days but SLM sales have declined more, last 2 weeks they have been about 50% down overall. MY problem is that for my customer base and products - most of my sales are dependant on Xstreet / SLM. In the past 5 months I have made a major promotional push to get customers to consider buying my products that they only seem to find in SLM - inworld with inworld rebate offers. This has shifted my sales ratio somewhat off of the the SLM that the SL commerce team is continuing to destroy... and moreso into my inworld store... but right now about 70% of my sales are still from SLM. So sadly, Brooke's team is directly hurting my SL Business with their Teenification of the marketplace and their poor tinkering of the SLM search engine. I suspect that Brooke's team his directly hurting my business more because of their further messings with Search. My product's visibility in SLM Search was not too bad (even though many of my primary products were not getting to the top of relevent search sorts compared to completely irrelevent items. BUT... now even my biggest seller is not bubbling up to the top of very relevent search queries. So... they are majorly messing SLM up. At least before Brooke's arrival to the SLM Commerce Team, my sales were not growing BUT they were not collapsing either. Now... her team is making a bad situation even worse. Not insults.... this is based on FACTS on my sales. And I do not have an effective inworld search to get customers to find my products inworld. So my only search lifeline is being destroyed.

WOW!! This is crazy.... Since the last SLM Changes Brooke's team put in place two weeks ago, my sales have ground to almost a complete halt - specially in the last week to 10 days. I have mentioned this before but my normal weekly sales pace for my products has a very consistent steady rate of about $25K to $27K Lindens a week. In other words, I within between 6 to 8 days - I attain my magic $27K of Linden sales which I liquidate to paypal. Last time I liquidated my account of $L to $0L was last Tuesday. As such, based on normal sales pace, I should have reached $27K or very close to it and liquidating today. As of this posting, my account is only at $14.4K. This puts me only pace of sales being 48% down. Today I have not even made a sale! BROOKE! What the heck have you done to SLM !!?? My products are all GENERAL so the known changes you made to SLM should not have even directly impacted me. I also know there might be a small factor of sales drop because of the Japanese customer base that might currently be off the market right now (for obvious reasons of having much more critical RL things to deal with). But, your team has seriously damaged SLM further with your tinkering of the search engine and adding more SLM Maturity filtering. When is the SLM Commerce Team going to make some changes that will actually HELP MERCHANTS!? This is rediculous

Agrona.... I have items that I have tried to delete from my SLM as well - they never leave. The listing is still in my SLM Inventory and marked as unlisted. I would love to have many of them gone - but I just gave up. Just one of many SLM bugs that linger from the inception of SLM but that the commerce team has forgetten all about ... they are too busy putting in TEEN Filters and damaging SLM sales to be worried about actually improving SLM.

I would concur with Relm that generally satelite stores from your main inworld store are generally a wash - not money makers. In theory it would make sense that if you can get your product into the stream of many different traffic flows that are generated by mall owners throughout SL that you should make a lot of additional sales. And that these additional sales should more than make up for the weekly rent the mall owners charge. I believed that theory.... for quite a while.... I tried placing my products in about 8 different themed malls - many of them pretty high traffic. General theme, Gor theme, builder theme, kiosks, stores, ad banners... I just recently closed the doors on my most recent satelite store in what was supposed to be a promising builders mall connected to a heavy traffic main store run by the mall owner (after running there for 3 months). at the end of the 3 months I was only a little ahead after paying rent - but the trending was that there were no more sales happening. The reasons I belive that satelite stores do not generally work (at least from all my experience) are: Many Mall owners promise you that they are active in generating the mall traffic with all these events (afterall that is the only value you are getting from renting a store from a mall - TRAFFIC). But most mall owners break their promise or they have no effective means / talents on getting and growing traffic to their mall. So, your pretty little store sits in this pretty designed mall and it may see 3 or 5 ppl walk by your door. Many of my customer for my products (and I would think for many categories of SL products) do not WINDOW SHOP / BROWSE random malls to find something to buy. I would think the exception might be clothing - but I make landscape terrains sculpty packs. My customers are master builders, merchant reselling builders, sim designers. They cannot be bothered randomly browsing around laggy inworld malls in search for landscape terrains... they are efficient and often use the best search tool available right now for SL products (SLM - even though its broken and LL broken it further recently). So, for me to put any effort and money toward setting up and running a store in a mall has proven to be breakeven at best - a money loser normally. Somewhat related to the last point - most merchants that have inworld MAIN STORES will focus all their advertising, promotion, search, PR, LMs, Notecard handouts, SLM content, etc. on promoting only their main store. Which is the right thing to do. As such... the satelite stores will not get any of the sales generated from these sources of customers - nor should it. Remember, your ONLY OBJECTIVE for satelite stores is to hopefully get sales from some of the traffic that the MALL GENERATES. That is what you are paying for - NOTHING ELSE! So, advise for you... once you are convinced that you want to continue to be a merchant (after testing your sales in a rented store), make a commitment and find a store that you are very confident will be around a long time (best option for this - although most costly is to buy your own land - as no one can take it out from under you) and set up your MAIN and ONLY store. For the first while until you are well established and sales are steady and are not bored - dont waste any time with satelite stores. Its a distraction of your efforts/money where you should be putting everything in place to point ALL YOUR PROMOTIONS TO THIS STORE INWORLD. Also.... really really really spend some time understanding your potential target market. Then put plans in place how to best be in-stream with these customers. I know mine. I know my customers are very busy ppl working heads down on projects and making their own money. As such, they are also very efficient when they are looking for landscaping terrains for a build that they are missing and need. Most of them gravitate to the SLM search and look for exactly what they are looking for. That is why - no matter how much effort I have done to try to get my customers to shop in my inworld store - most still buy from me via SLM. Finally, having a store filled with amazing products might seem like the #1 way to be successful.... I can tell you that this is not the #1 way to be economically successful... it is MARKETING MARKETING MARKETING!! (btw - awesome customer service with new and existing customers is considered highly effective marketing) If you dont think this is the case - my SL business is a perfect example. Over the pas 2 years I have ended up creating many weird and wonderful lilttle products (most I have taken off the market). But during these same 2 years I have ended up creating 6 Landscaping Terrain packs that I am proud of. Only 6 right now. Last time I built something new for my store was last August. One would think my business would be going down the tubes since I dont put out a new product every week or month. Well, NOPE. I have generally a steady healthy weekly sales flow every week - 98% sales on these 6 packs. Why? because I spend all my time to make sure any of my customers that I do get are given the best service they have ever got. If they have questions, I will happily give them answers. I will often go the extra mile and go to their land to show them samples of my different terrains if a customer is curious or concern which of my packs to buy. I have often spent 1 or 2 hours with a customer. If any of my customers have had problems in their sales because LL's SLM sales process screwed up, I will fix the problem as soon as i can. I will even monitor my sales and if a customer wrongly bought two products that they didnt need to - I will get back to them and rebate them on the unessesary buy. Why do I do all this for one sale? Not just to ensure I get that one sale. If it was just because of that reason, I would be losing money. I cater to my customers because my best advertising and marketing is my own customers! When they are totally happy and satisfied after buying one of my packs, most come back to buy the others. Many will remember me and my products and will tell their fellow builder friends. I get their sales too. I have no figures but I bet that about 40% of my sales are from referrrals. Then there is marketing to get your name out... do everything you can to get your products and your store brand name noticed. That includes what Luna laready said - get a forum signature banner. Participate in forums - the SL ones and the more busy 3rd party ones like SLuniverse and others. Be in twitter, be inworld groups, put your store and products on your inworld profile. ANYWHERE YOU CAN GET YOUR PRODUCT AND NAME OUT - do it. Building incredible products that you know ppl will want is very important - but MARKETING THEM IS YOUR #1 focus for success.

As a landscape sculpt map creator/merchant, I know stitch type is critical. As such, the end of ALL my sculpt maps has the stitch type. No need for a notecard reference - as it isl right on the map itself. CHECK!

Brooke already stated in her response to my questions in the other thread that they have a couple more slm search changes in the works. They REALLY DONT GET IT... they need to remove item popularity and sales rank and and price and all that other fluff from the SEARCH SORT BY RELEVANCE. It should strictly be based on which items most tightly fit in title, keywords, and features to the query phrase

What is being suggested is that LL will take "shut down" actions on a DCMA that has no justification / validation? i.e. what is being suggested is that anyone - even with malicious intent - can go through the process of filing a legal DCMA and that this legal filing can go far enough with no validation to have LL execute on the actions of the filed DCMA? So, LL does not receive the DCMA and validate the credibility of the filing before taking action? I find that surprising and scry if this is true.

PS... to help me answer those in Twitter that are asking me what AIS stands for and that I actually dont really know as she didnt clarify what AIS means: Ideas of what AIS could mean: : Automated Inventory System/Servce Automated Inventory Sales Another Impending Screwup Application Interface Service Arthur Ingrid Samual (possible names of the 3 linden developers) Anyone else have ideas?

OK, so Brooke put out the question to me basically asking to help her understand... (paraphrased) "why one would want to have a new / separate Merchant Alt Account to use with AIS as opposed to just having AIS interact with a new AIS folder in the Merchant's main inventory" I believe my explanation on some of the critical reasons why a separate inventory entity for AIS was important. Currently we have that with MagicBoxes and AIS's plans have not taken this critical system / business requirement into account. Then, my reasons for this need were followed up by some excellent followup / additional reasons for the benefits of a MERCHANT ALT ACCOUNT for AIS to process transactions upon. So I think we have provided Brooke enough reasons and explanations to help her understand the importance for LL's up-coming AIS to incorporate this critical function. I have also followed up our reasons for this need with an viable solution alternative of Mutiple Inventory Instances managed within a single SL ACCOUNT. Although I will admit that this would not address the excellent business reasons brought up by Darrius for having a SLM MERCHANT ALT that services AIS and all of the Merchant's SL/SLM business. The ultimate solution would be the combination of Multiple-Inventory Capabilities and the funtion that Dart coined as "Account-Wide Inventories". Both would be needed in order to address all the benefits mentioned in this thread regarding this topic. Multiple Inventories are needed for AIS Transaction Isolation from personal inventory and Account-Wide Inventories would address the ability to easily establish and manage a MERCHANT ALT that much more effectively ties into the branding of the Merchant's Store Branding and busines activities. The AIS solution development would have to tie in its development with both these excellent needed features - if they were deployed. The AIS would need to be coded to provide the flexibility to allow the Merchant to configure which ALT Account AND which Inventory it uses as a source for SLM Sales Delivery. So...... here is the $million question..... How do we get Brooke and the LL Commerce/Development Team to take this critical function/service serious and make it a part of the AIS solution that gets deployed? As we all know all to well about LL history of software development and deployment, by the time us end users even get a wiff of an upcoming new LL solution (like AIS), LL is so blindly committed to they plan to deploy that they almost NEVER consider changing their solution to accomodate for corrections / improvements in their plans. This could be the best idea in the world and we could all agree that AIS would be so much better if LL would have thought of this issue/solution themselves and/or they would stop and add this capability. But I suspect this will be how it will be played out in the weeks/months to come... Brooke will sooner or later come out with a brief statement that will say something like this: "Our team has reviewed the reasons why Merchants would have a need for creating Alt Merchant accounts which they would want the new AIS to be able to tie into. These are excellent reasons. BUT we have already gone too far in our development and deployment/testing path to incorporate these features. We feel that there is little risk in our AIS processing SLM sales transactions from a special folder in the Merchants' existing inventory - and so we will proceed with our current plans. We will consider a future release of AIS that allows merchants the ability to point to alternate SL accounts or to the idea of AIS processing to a separate account inventory if this capability in the future is available." Feel free to use this quote Brooke In the meantime, how does the Merchant community convince Brooke and her team to stop AIS testing and planned deployment until this feature is integrated into AIS?

Dartagan Shepherd wrote: Madeliefste Oh wrote: I'm not sure a delivery alt will be usefull to me. But we will surely need an alt for our business when this AIS comes alive. One of my biggest concerns with this new system is inventory loss. I have experienced this before, 6000 items in my inventory were lost for about three weeks. I have heared experiences from others who had lost (a part of) their inventory, that never came back. Since my products were in boxes in my shop and in magic boxes on (by that time) xstreet, my business had no negative influences because of my inventory loss. But once this new sellling system will become the only system, inventory loss will mean a loss of income. That's a good point, what happens in those cases of disappearing inventory. That hasn't happened to me personally in quite a while, but sure, been bitten by that one before. Not sure if I'd create an alt specifically for that reason. A backup folder means less chance of both folders disappearing for a time, and of course I could continue to keep things in boxes with either system as backups. An alt makes as much sense as a box though for organization and backups. First of all, remember that protecting your SL/SLM sellable inventory that is part of the active 7/24 online transaction processing is only one of the issue and reasons for having an SLM MERCHANT ALT. Its not "the" reason. Secondly, if there is an incident or isse that has impacted your main account's inventory, it would include potential any or all of the folders within the inventory. So, having a BACKUP FOLDER to the new AIS folder on the same inventory would be equivilent to making a copy of your "MY DOCUMENTS" folder on your PC's hard drive to another backup folder on your PC Hard drive. If the drive fails or corrupts - there is an excellent chance that both folders will go. Third, since in general the data structure or inventory that has the most activity, volitility, and/or growth would have the highest risk of encountering a corruption, keeping your critical SLM AIS FOLDER on this personal inventory structure would be the highest risk of a failure. Locating the primary active SLM AIS folder or content on a structure / inventory that has low volitility, simple design/structure, limited in its uses, would be the better location option for storing the SLM AIS folder. Forth, sure it is an option to place the SLM AIS in an inworld rezzed box that is considered autonomous to the main personal inventory - hmmm that would be called a.... MAGICBOX. So, if LL ends up saying that even in light of all the benefits listed by myself, Darrius, Made and other on why a SLM MERCHANT ALT would be the best location to store the AIS items, there is another alternative that would be potentially a viable option.... LL introduces the option of MULTIPLE INVENTORY STRUCTURES per ACCOUNT. With this option - if the SL service and the viewers could be ready for this idea technically, the AIS would create a net new INVENTORYstructure that would be directly available to the Merchant along side his/her Main inventory. In this way, he/she can very easily transfer content from his main inventory to his production SLM AIS inventory. Consider this the same as your PC having two hard drives. Then a folder on the main inventory could hold a copy of all the content that is in the SLM AIS inventory. The idea of multiple Inventories could be leveraged for so many more ideas related to organization and bbackup. But I want to stress that - for the points brought up by Darrius - the idea of a SLM MERCHANT ALT has many more benefits than just protection from LL bugs and backup.

I am glad others are seeing the need for this SLM Business Alt. You are correct Mede... The risk plays both ways on LL's current plans for the AIS. With my inworld store having its inventory independantly rezzed inworld from my personal inventory AND with the MAGICBOX currently holding the critical SELLABLE items to service all my SLM products and it being autonomous from my personal inventory, impacts or damage to my store because of a possible loss or corruption or damage to my personal inventory has been negated. As you said, its not rare for someone's inventory to become lost or damaged. Also, I have heard there has been some instances of weird 9000 item limits to the inventory... with the current AIS... these limits or impacts will affect my SLM delivery. I only personally wished that when I decided to start becoming a Xstreet Merchant that I would have created this SL MERCHANT ACCOUNT right there and then. I never thought in 2008 that my SL business would become this well established and grow - and I was totally naive on all the tips and tricks of being a merchant. In hindsight I wished there was advice then to suggest that new merchants should created a separate Merchant Account. But now with the upcoming AIS, I am willing to create this new Merchant Account. BUT... I need Brooke and the Development Team to be willing to think the AIS solution through and develop the AIS so that the SLM config allows me to select which SL ACCOUNT the AIS will establish a link to. It should not assume it is the owner of the SLM Store. This would be good for larger store operations where it is run by business partners. Currently the MAGICBOX acts as the nuetral middleman enitity that holds the inventory. With AIS, this enitity will go away and without AIS allowing for the solection of WHO THE SL ACCOUNT WILL BE that the inventory is interfaced from, this could cause more AIS migration grief. So Brooke, I hope you now have a better understanding why Merchants might want to create a NEW SLM MERCHANT ACCOUNT FOR AIS.

Darrius Gothly wrote: @Brooke - I echo ToySoldier's concerns about AIS "getting it right" at initial rollout. But I also see where having a Central "Delivery Only" Alt can be very beneficial for other reasons: Customers will be able to rapidly identify the Store Brand because the Delivery Alt will have a Display Name that matches the store brand name. Multiple Creators that all sell as partners through the same store can continue to do so. They won't have to give their stuff to one of the partners, they'll all give their stuff to one central Alt. A Delivery-Only Alt will have a very limited Inventory thus improving delivery issues because the total count of inventory items will be lower (and in some people's cases, a LOT lower). For many of us, having a clear separation (as we have now with an external Magic Box) helps with the mental and physical organization of our "For Sale" items. In-progress versions stay in our personal inventories, Release versions go in the Delivery Alt (now Magic Box). These are just off the top of my head. Given some time to sit down and think through the entire process (and having a bit more detail would REALLY help ... *hint hint*), I'm sure I can cook up more scenarios where having a separate Delivery-Only Alt will be beneficial. Thanks Darrius.... I didnt want to get into all the other valuable benefits of the larger picture of Merchants using SL MERCHANT Accounts within SL, but you nailed it. If LL Commerce / Development actually think more strategically and design the AIS to allow for this flexibility, not only does it provide the option for us Merchants that wish to have this Role/Function separation from our SL Personal Accout, but it will allow SL Merchant and the shopping community to leverage the added value of all you mentioned. It also potentially will benefit LL Commerce Team for future features, services, and even controlled scope of any potential damage thier new SLM applications MIGHT trigger if/when their code accidently does something rogue and potentially causes damage. Brooke, including in your list of AIS beta testers (as well as people you are asking in the SLM community for requirements), you should be looking for people that not just your top SLM Merchants/Sellers. You should look for people that also understand systems since I am surprised that you and the LL Development Staff are even curious and openly asking why I have aske for a SEPARATE SL MERCHANT ACCOUNT FOR THE NEW AIS. LL Development needs to introduce SYSTEMS ARCHITECTURE into their SDLC of creating new solutions/systems/applications. Your design of AIS tells me the team is not thinking this through. I know that when I have brought up this issue in the inworld IM GROUP and in other forums, those Merchants that were already in the AIS closed beta (which Brooke says doesnt exist) could not understand my concerns and do not see the big deal about AIS executing auto transactions from their perosnal inventory. Being that in RL I am a Solutions Architect, I can tell you from experience that often the road to identifying and addressing longer term "what if" scenarios can be very lonely. We are often perceived as being PARANOID and worrying about things that will "NEVER HAPPEN" Well if you want an extreme example of what can happen when you down properly think through about all the "WHAT IFS"... Take a moment to think about the situation at the Japanese Nuke Plant. Looking at the situation now... who was paranoid ??

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. (Changed colors just for Dart)

So my daily peek into this Brooke Blog Thread on Marketplace updates to see if she took some time to answer my questions directly realted to her OP on marketplace update... Still nothing. Its not as if Brooke does not answer questions in this thread as you can see above - she has. Its not as if Brooke has been too busy and/or away on vacation because today she seemed to have the time to posted in another commerce forum thread to provide clarification and updates. So I guess my questions were too tough or she only like answering questions from those she likes. As such, I have to conclude that my questions will not be answered by Brooke or anyone from her team, unless of course someone from the inner merchant circle asks her. But they dont need to ask her because they already know these answers themselves. Therefore, I guess its time for us to play.... GUESS WHAT LL COMMERCE MIGHT BE DOING? So is there anyone else outside of LL staff that might want to publish guesses to the answers above? If you are from her inner trusted merchant circle, I can understand that you will not be able to play this game for risk of being ex-communicated. But if you are a friend of a LL Staffer in the know, or you are a friend of an inner circle Merchants and can safely guess what rumours you have heard about the new MagicBoxLess strategy or LL's plans on fixing SLM's borked reports, or the current borked SLM search by relevance.... please post here. In the mean time I think I will poke at some other LL Management about this issue of LL Commerce Team Management's "favored communications" approach.

Pearl Vollmar wrote: Did I understand it right? People have to log in to the marketplace to see the products even if they are in the general category? :womansurprised: I checked it myself. We can see the general items withouth logging in. For a moment I thought they had made the marketplace kind of a closed thing only for members. My sales are slowly going back to normal, at least demos are going out. No... I said that a not logged in SLM SHOPPER/BROWER will "only" see GENERAL items. All other items will be blocked - even the Moderate items (which while logged in - Moderate content can be seen). If a non-logged in SLM shopper had even GENERAL filtered out - there would be nothing to see. Sadlly, what Brooke's team has totally forgotten - or simply doesnt care - is that most SLM shoppers start out as non-logged-in shoppers of SLM. So, unless and/or until they find a product they are looking for in SLM, they wont log in. And this makes sense because why would I waste any of my time logging into SLM to just look for what I was looking for? As a general shopper of SLM, I would have to naturally assume that when the main SLM home page pops up and I start using search, my results will obviously give me results for ALL CONTENT that meets the criteria. I would come to the conclusion because the Commerce Team has not displayed a big sign to the BROWSING shopper that they are only seeing a GENERAL-TEENIFIED filtered view of the content in SLM. And lets go a step further.... EVEN IF Brooke and team cared enough about the Merchants to consider putting this big sign up on the home have warning all shoppers that not-logged-in shoppers are TEEN FILTERED, this is only part of the problem to their strategy damaging merchant sales... There are a lot of BROWSING shoppers that might see this future sign and say "ohh thats ok - I was just looking for nice bedroom furnishings only" so I still cant be bothered logging into SLM. As such, these users will not see content results from NON-GENERAL content that could lead to an impromptu sale of MODERATE or ADULT content. Afterall - they are in the mood to shop for bedroom stuff - a sex bed might interest them.... but not in our beloved SLM. So, I can now see Brooke's team spinning their wheels and thinking up another knee-jerk solution to the problem they just caused from last week's problems.... "WHY DONT WE JUST FORCE ALL SLM SHOPPERS TO LOG IN TO SLM BEFORE THEY CAN DO ANY BROWSING OR SHOPPING?" So although in theory that sound ok, all it would do is reduce overall SLM shopping on all categories by yet another 10 or 15% since many shoppers simply cannot be bothered and will close the SLM window.

Couldbe Yue wrote: Toysoldier Thor wrote: So Brooke and LL Commerce Team. You know what you are causing and I know your team is being tugged by the nose ring from Legal that is forcing you to destroy the SLM economy because of the stupid non-strategic decision last year to TEENIFY the Main SL Grid. But please dont play the role that this is not going to hurt the economy and all will be good when we are done. even though this is actually off topic, I think I finally worked out who the missing millions are. If you look at the site stats, you'll see the under 17s are a huge group compared to their actual presence in the teen grid. I think they thought they could tap into that market, rather than realising that the kids are probably hanging out here because they get their titilation from the discussions. I'd like to hope I'm wrong but on LL past performance I'd say I'm probably spot on. After all, it is an amazing amount of disruption just for a couple of hundred teen accounts. The other thing to remember is that LL prefers to only deal with a few creators rather than a sea of them. Each change reduces the number of creators and I'm sure they're more than comfortable with it. Assuming the amount of money being spent on the marketplace hasn't decreased then I would say they're more than fine with what is happening. I think the problem they may find is that most people these days aren't happy to keep paying tier when the income isn't there and they've never quite managed to understand that diversity is the key. Hey ho. I am 99% positive that you are spot on as well Couldbe. As I have already said, the actual actions from Brooke's Team on continually applying more and more MATURITY FILTERS to a larger scope of the SLM service (now even those potential shoppers that are not even officially logged in AND are likely the largest percentage of any POTENTIAL SLM SHOPPER) those actions speak the real truth. And when Brooke's response from one of the User group meetings after her team's first huge blow on the SLM service in January was basically that "we are not removing the changes" no matter how bad it has impacted so many of the Merchants, it makes it clear that LL is doing what they have always done ... BLINDLY EXECUTE A BAD STRATEGY AND IGNORE ALL THEIR CUSTOMER ANGER AND FRUSTRATIONS. One has to really think that LL is truly a business that was purely established as a "LAB" or an experiment by some rich kids to see what happens when you virtualize a world and play with the "factors" of the virtual world. Their #1 primary objective is not to be a successful or profitable growing business with any long term existence in the plans. They are a LAB and they are just here to perform Social Experiments. Sadly there are too many people / merchants / creators that have been deceived into actually believing that LL is a real legit business with a primary driver to be financially successful (which would lead most to belive they would do whats right for their customers and do what will drive MORE revenue for them). Too many creators / merchants have already been burned by LL's constant economy destroying plans, actions, changes in direction. The Teen Grid "experiment" is playing out to be the huge sleeper strategy that is really having some of the most detrimental negative affects on SL (that and the onslaught of SL Privacy Issues). So for all Merchants that have put a lot of investment into SL and SLM and if you are a creator/seller of non-TEENIFIED content... you really need to consider coming up with your own rationalization strategy, or SL exit strategy, or finding out a way to adapt. Because Brooke's team has been mandated to shut down mature content. These actions make it clear. You will basically soon will only be selling your mature content inworld from the back of a virtual truck down by the virtual river.

So based on the changes that Brooke and Commerce Team deployed last week where they have even further crippled the SLM with this full bore effort to "TEENIFY" all aspects of SL and SLM by filtering out the "ALL BUT GENERAL" items from the vast majority of SLM customers/shoppers that dont log into SLM unless they want to purchase an item, LL Commerce Team has now even further damaged the economy of SL. What boggles my mind is how with all the priorities that any common sense rational business person would belive would be a priority for a company like LL that has been hurting in growth (in residents and revenue generation), LL Management has thrown all that aside and is clearly driven on the #1 priority of dealing how to TEENIFY SLM. Lets make this very clear in case Brooke and the Commerce Team and LL dont understand this.... TEENIFYING THE GRID AND SLM IS DAMAGING THE SL ECONOMY AND CAUSING MAJOR DAMAGE TO A HUGE PORTION OF THE SL MERCHANT COMMUNITY. And yet Brooke's responses to those Merchants that her team's MATURITY FILTERS efforts have devastated in sales is paraphrased as: "awww I am really sorry to hear that and we will see what minor uselss efforts we can do that will not really help you out but it will make it look like we care enough about the merchant community... but suck it up. But f the sales and merchants of moderate and adult content shuts down or is lost - ohh well - LL needs to look like we are a moral outstanding internet citizen and we dont really care if we lose all the merchants that sell all these immoral non-teen content". Sadly, what the LL Commerce Team and LL in general fails to take into account (which is completely in line with how LL has always been and will never change) is that the MODERATE/MATURE content makes up a huge portion of Merchants and Merchant sales. With LL intent to shut down these mature content (actions speak louder than words), LL has removed the L$ from the virtual economy. This means that those high spending Merchants slow down spending on LL Land Teirs and content from other Merchants that sell the GENERAL content that LL wants to promote. So then the economy keeps spiraling as this lowered sales in other GENERAL products will force those Merchants to stop spending. So Brooke and LL Commerce Team. You know what you are causing and I know your team is being tugged by the nose ring from Legal that is forcing you to destroy the SLM economy because of the stupid non-strategic decision last year to TEENIFY the Main SL Grid. But please dont play the role that this is not going to hurt the economy and all will be good when we are done.

SO I will reply to my own questions as it has been a couple days since I posted my questions to Brooke in this thread... If my questions dont get answered by the LL Commerce Team at the bi-monthly Office Hours (i.e. the 1-way communication from Brooke to attendees). And they are not answered in the forum threads. And they are not answered here as Questions to the Blog Post..... How does one get OFFICIAL ANSWERS from Brooke and LL Commerce if he/she is a Merchant that is not in Brooke's growing inner circle of Merchants that she will give the time of day too? I have already seen and taken notes of the few Merchants that Brooke tends to favor and invite to the smaller meetings and will entertain questions in the Office Forums. So.... how do the rest of us get our answers from LL?

Seems there is similarities in Sculpties and sculpted prims as both Made's and my numbers are very similar on the ratios of search hits and views to a sale.

So what was the criteria on who got the survey and who didnt? was it just a "every 3rd person" survey?

that is a good alternative. New Forum/SL accounts could only create 1 or 2 new threads a day. If they are new - most noob accounts would not be legit creating new threads except to ask a question in the Q & A forums. So maybe they their new threads would also be restricted to only the general help forums for 30 days. This should stop the SPAMMER that has been using this new forums weakness now on 3 hits in the past 10 days.

QUESTION: Is AIS the official new term for the MagicBox-less item delivery system? QUESTION: If so, will Merchants be able to opt-out of the AIS if they are happy with MagicBoxes and/or have security concerns about LL performing automated sales transactions directly out of our main personal Avatar inventory? QUESTION: If this AIS will be mandatory and magicboxes will be eventually banned/shut down, will LL give us Merchants the ability to easily create a new SLM MERCHANT Account that we can configure the AIS to process transactions from this seperate account? I do not want LL performing SLM sales transactions from my main SL account BUT I do not want to go through the hassle of moving ALL my SLM integration to my main SL Account. I simple want to create an SL Avatar that can replace the role of a MagicBox. Will LL inlcude this in their new AIS design? QUESTION: When will we all get to see details of exactly how the new AIS works? If it already exists, where is the link that explains exactly how this will work? I know there are Merchants in a closed beta that already know these details. My fear is that by the time this AIS is announce from formal release, LL will not agree to any changes that the larger Merchant community has of AIS and that the little closed beta group did not see or had no issues with. QUESTION: Regarding sales/traffic reporting of SLM. You posted "Additional built-in reports will be considered as merchant feedback comes in. " This implies that you and LL believe that the current SLM reports are not broken and limited. As has been told to your team several times - the current SLM reports are only a fraction of the limited reports we got in xstreet. but now your statement seems to indicate that "adding" new reports is not a priority to you and that just giving use on-demand dumps of CSV files is all you really will focus on. Will LL ever get the basic SLM reports at least to the level of XSTREET? QUESTION: Does LL Commerce Team even understand the the Search By Relevance is using an ineffective sort algorythm? I am getting so frustrated that although all my SLM landscape sculpty map packs use almost identical keywords and titles - that only my top seller always shows up on the top of mose of my SLM search query tests.