Commerce Presentation from SLCC August 14, 2011

[Brooke Linden]

Hi all,

Yesterday (as some of you have noticed), I spoke as part of a panel on the Future of Commerce in Second Life. For those of you who are interested, here are the links to the presentation and slides:

• Commerce Presentation
• Commerce Slides

We showed some early screen shots from a test system with Direct Delivery code on it. We’ll be sending out more details on Direct Delivery in the coming weeks. (For those who are not familiar with Direct Delivery, please see the Direct Delivery FAQ.)

Brooke

[Arwen Serpente]

Thanks very much, Brooke. I need to read through completely, however, just at first glance on the DD, please remember that many Merchants are not going to unbox their items. In my case, I have hundreds of boxed items and I will not be unboxing them for DD. So, the screenshot that instructs buyers that their purchase will come unboxed needs to be something that is optional, or, there needs to be an icon or description that the item will be delivered in boxed form.

[Pamela Galli]

Oh very good point Arwen, and was thinking the same thing when I was watching. My stuff will stay in boxes because that's how they are inworld. I will not be making folders to put in Magic Boxes (though if I only had a couple dozen things I might.)

[Madeliefste Oh]

Yes, Pamela, it is more easy for your costumer service when all your merchandise is delivered in the same way, whether it is bought on the marketplace or in world.

Apart from that I neither do plan to invest time in unboxing my items for DD delivery. Changes in the selling system have cost me enough time already. The change from Xstreet to Marketplact took me more then 200 hours of handwork. Imagen how much nice merchandise you can make in the same time.

The future will only be boxless when merchants are willing to offer their items boxless. Unless the marketplace team develops a very easy ´one click - unbox to the right folder' feature for merchants when DD becomes active, I don't think many of us want to loose time at unboxing our existing merchandise.

[Darrius Gothly]

And this brings up one thing that I'm still not sold on ... the fact that new customers can't figure out what to do with a Boxed Item. Okay, so the FIRST time you confront this it might be a bit confusing. But so are zippers, and I daresay that most of us have learned how to work a zipper by now. Once you learn (and it's a simple education too), you've got it mastered for life.

Now .. mind you .. the "Delivery While Offline" bit, and (assuming it works properly) "Delivery Direct to Inventory" features are big sellers in my book, I still think the whole shtick about it helping naive shoppers by delivering unboxed items is just marketing smoke and mirrors.

[Madeliefste Oh]

---

Darrius Gothly wrote:

And this brings up one thing that I'm still not sold on ... the fact that new customers can't figure out what to do with a Boxed Item. Okay, so the FIRST time you confront this it might be a bit confusing. .

---

This makes me think of a party where I was a while ago. One of my friends had a 1000 rezdays party, and the theme for the party was 'remember your newbie days', she asked to dig your inventory for things you worn when you ware a newbie. About 80% of the guests was wearing a box somewhere. Other populair things were for example throwing particles all round you, using spoofers and gestures and smoking a very big joint. It was much fun to remember your newbie days collective.

But these boxes... If there is something as a SL culture, wearing a box as a newbie is certainly part of this culture. And finding help somewhere on how to stop wearing the box is part of the proces of socializing in SL.

[Poenald Palen]

Thank you, this is interesting and also thank you for mentioning the direct sales thingy, and for the slideshow! It is more bandwidth freindly lol.

[Toysoldier Thor]

Ahh the commerce Slides !!  Now i can actually see them.

So Brooke, since I suspect Jeff does not read the forums and since after this presentation it seems clear that he was the author of the heavy SPIN DOCTORING that occurred on this Q2 Economic Results (since his actual presentation was just as positive is the LL interpretations on the Q2 Wiki), how can us that were not at this seminar ask Jeff the tough questions he or Rodvik should step up to and explain?

Many outside LL looked at the numbers and saw a blurry black scene when Jeff and the Author of the report saw Whiite and pretty roses.  I have posted my blog here in the forums and to Rodvik which clearly points out how clearly bogus most of the charts were. 

Even one of the people in the audience (the person that introduced you all) saw what we saw and challenged Jeff that the chart and economic summary of SL is chaulked with vague charts that need much more clarity and breakdown of details (exactly what I pointed out in my blog of the results).

Then in Rodvik's Keynote Address I was a bit confused when Rodvik tried to explain off the most disturbing of the charts (which of course the summary dismissed as not that bad but at least Jeff admitted this was not good news) - the continued drop in LOGGED IN USER HOURS over the past Q's. 

He said that LL has noticed that a significant part of the reduced horus is that the new users that new registering into SL (16,000 a day - snikker - I laugh since of the 16,000/day about only 1 in 100 30 days later continues to log in) are a much younger crowd that has a shorter attention span and doesnt spend as much time in SL but.... according to him - the good news is that they spend more time in main social netowrks ... socializing SL.

My question to Rodvik on this fact and observation is..... SOOOO WHAT??!!  Is Rodvik saying that even though the next promising generation of users for SL is admittedly not staying logged into the Inworld Grid... this is still great news for the SL Economy that they are spending more of their time talking about SL to their friends in FB?  Exactly how does this help the SL economy if they are not logged in and spending time and money in SL???

Sorry... but the whole SL Q2 Economic Summary screams of bad news getting worse and Sr. SL Management playing the role of the 3 Monkey "Hear No Evil, See No Evil, Speak No Evil".

 

ON ANOTHER NOTE....

The slides of DD causes me more stress when I see the details of how this will work.  This is too complex a financial / ecommerce solution for LL Developers to deal with safely.  Based on strong historical evidence - I can see a lot of rough waters ahead for us Merchants when LL forces us into this DD.  The concept might be good but as is the case time and time again - LL Commerce & Development will screw up the implementation.  And when Merchant content gets sent to the entire community by accident or when it gets lost or when unbox folders entering into customer inventory screws up .... all we will get from LL is "we are working on the problem - sorry for the inconvenience".

I so hope that they leave Magic Boxes live for Merchants as an option for a long period - like 6 months or more.  I would like to stay using Magic Boxes for at least 6 months AFTER DD goes production live.  I would rather other Merchants experiment with LL's DD solution for the 1st 6 months.  If there are bugs - they should show up within the 1st 6 months after Production (not beta).

FINAL NOTE...

During the Commerce SLCC seminar - no one asked Brooke or Jeff or the other two  LL Staffers a tough question that so many of us Merchants have been asking sin SLM showed up...... WHEN WILL THEY DEPLOY THE MISSING FEATURES FROM XSTREET & THE BROKEN FEATURES SLM STILL HAS?    Jeff, Brooke and team are just like all the other LL Staff Culture - they want to save the the world of SL with neat new shiny big-splash feature like DD but none of them want to address the growing list of Merchant requests to fix the critical but continually ignored SLM functions that Merchants keep asking for but LL keeps ignoring.

There you go... I was driving for 12 hours crossing 3 states today.... now that I caught up.... time to rest a bit

[Pamela Galli]

I certainly am as frustrated as anyone else by the missing features and broken functionality, and say so regularly. But there is a reason they are concentrating on DD: They did a merchant survey and the #1 concern was delivery failures, which they inherited with the whole Magic Box system. And they have explained that here in the forum many times. For those who say that SLE / Xstreet didn't have delivery problems: Yes they did.

 

So DD is not a new shiney; it is a major fix. Or at least that is the idea.

 

[lazlo Ahren]

A much needed fix for the magic box hack. And for customers who want to go on shopping sprees, they won't be limited by IM caps. 

[Pamela Galli]

/me waves at Lazlo. :matte-motes-grin: