Help Improve Market Place Search!

[Maeve Balfour]

Wishful thinking on my part, but.....

In the feedback section of the survey, I recommended (strongly) that LL include a "mesh uploader" status as a search filter.

Reason? To provide a method to help screen OUT the fradulent empty box scammers. This primarily concerns those fake stores selling exhobitantly priced mesh avatar replacements / mesh full perm clothing kits etc. (Fraudulent mesh product listings (especially "full perms") have been getting an absolute HAMMERING by the empty box scammers over the past year or so).

As someone who has been a mesh hobbyist creator for years (outside of SL as well as within), I can generally spot a fake product from a mile off. (These almost always use product shots stolen from 3D brokerage sites, which are far too good to possibly be SL inworld shots). Unfortunately, a great many customers don't have this knowledge, and time and time again I see people getting ripped off. (I tend to add suspect items to my MP favourites list to keep tabs on them - and sure enough, my hunches are always right... if I am quick enough, I spot scathing reviews on the suspect items before they are pulled and relisted, until the account is removed by LL. The scammer then probably returns with an alt account, rinse and repeat etc).

To be a "mesh verified uploader", LL requires the account owner to have payment information on file (in addition to passing the IP test). If this status was implemented into a search filter, this should in theory filter out the majority of the fradulent "mesh product" empty box scammers (assuming the majority of the scammers are not using stolen RL payment info/accounts).

 

Unfortunately, this is probably wishful thinking... Likely in the "too hard basket" for LL, plus uneducated customers will continue to be ripped off... Still, if implemented it would at least provide an option for screening out the scammers to a degree.

[ObviousAltIsObvious]

I think they already got this one for new accounts, they now need payment info to open a marketplace store. The problem won't completely go away because phishing, phishing everywhere.

 

 

[Perrie Juran]

---

Maeve Balfour wrote:

 

To be a

"mesh verified uploader",

LL requires the account owner to have

payment information on file

(in addition to passing the IP test). If this status was implemented into a search filter, this should in theory filter out the majority of the fradulent "mesh product" empty box scammers (assuming the majority of the scammers are not using stolen RL payment info/accounts).

 

Unfortunately, this is probably wishful thinking... Likely in the "too hard basket" for LL, plus uneducated customers will continue to be ripped off... Still, if implemented it would at least provide an option for screening out the scammers to a degree.

---

In case you were not aware, moving forward, to create a store a Merchant will now need to have POIF.

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Commerce/New-Merchant-Requirement/ba-p/2321469

While this will not help with existing stores it is a step in the right direction BUT ONLY IF Linden Lab deals decisively with fraudsters.

[Maeve Balfour]

Thankyou Perrie for pointing that out to me - that snippet of information had slipped past my radar.  :matte-motes-smile:

That should in theory go a long way to stopping a lot of the empty box MP fraudsters in the future (once they have used up all their "pre-made" stores prior to this coming into effect (many of the "new" stores I have spotted have been owned by AVs several months old, presumably created and "aged" in readiness for scamming).

A positive move by LL, but as you said, LL needs to actually DEAL with the fraudster element as well.

[Spica Inventor]

"Overpriced is a subjective word. Few people would agree to what is overpriced".

Prices should be relative and reflect overhead costs, (5% for the SL Marketplace and substantially higher to feed inworld tier costs) I have found that prices on the SL Marketplace are generally lower and substantially lower in some cases (newer stuff) but not reflective to the reality of almost zero overhead costs in the case of SLM when compared to inworld store costs overhead (tier and rent). This price adjustment shouldn't take more than perhaps a year as 'price stickiness' in SL should only be psychologically based as opposed to having  more concrete factors modifying overhead that one would find much more substantially in the real world such as payrolls and energy costs and such).

Prices have been 'pumped up' greatly from relevancy search results by heavily correlating merchandise search result placement priority with price in the SLM which didn't allow for any sort of more natural price adjustment that would have otherwise have happened quality still being a large factor. Older and once popular merchandise tends to be much more expensive because they are in effect being artificially inflated price wise due to their total sales history being longer on a time basis, and as more products are added to the market, which makes it more difficult to find any particular item, these factors just intensify to put upward pressure on deflationary trends.

"Xstreet was not perfect, but I guarantee you that most made more money on Xstreet, even the owners of it".

Xstreet had much less competition due to far fewer products being sold when compared to today's SLM. Such a reality will inflate both prices and sales on an individual merchant basis, and although price deflation in SL was some factor due to Xstreet's existence, price deflation didn't seem to accelerate in earnest until LL bought it and changed the name to SLM.  suddenly causing an unavoidable natural promotion of its existence. I remember Xstreet being around for perhaps a half a year before I ever new of its existence. (2009?) Of course LL had no desire to promote it at the time not wanting it to have ever existed in the first place imo.

"They listed results from highest to lowest price, and relevant to the search term. It makes sense to promote the most expensive, because you could easily find a cheap version by choosing a few options on the side".

Not much of a price pumper since you could just as easily start from the bottom and work up instead. They had to default to something after relevancy. Price seems the best as a sub emphasis imo.

"Plus, much like in RL, people who buy the best 1 out there, generally have less complaints than those that buy cheap, and the consumers are getting a much better experience than what they would get from something cheap".

Actually I have found that peeps who buy 'cheap' are less likely to complain about a product that cost them relatively little. They expect much more out of the relatively expensive stuff regardless to actual relative quality as is the case in the real world.

"Now, maybe just going highest price to lowest is not the best way to do it. I would contend that probably the best way would be for the top results to have the best profits"

Well I would agree that that would be better than the way it's done now, but something would need to be done to help the new popular 'quality' stuff get exposure along side the old popular 'quality' stuff, and on the other side of the token drop down the old stuff that no longer sells. Right now the SLM has it if something sells more than once in a few days time it gets boosted up greatly on the relevancy search result pages, and I think that's a pretty good thing to have in existence. Of course old stuff that no longer sells only drops down very slowly. Perhaps the relevancy search results should be more based on what has sold for the last few months  or so instead of total sales, not to say that total sales shouldn't be a factor to some degree as well because things do get 'sold out' but still may be 'popular' 'quality' in world items.

[Flea Yatsenko]

Is there any hope of LL marketplace team abandoning Ruby on Rails? Twitter saw a 1000x speedup in search by going to Java from RoR.

To put that into perspective, that's the same as going from 10ms to 10,000ms, or 10 seconds.

XStreet used PHP, and while it's an ugly language, it performs very well and has a large amount of utilities available for optimizing performance and caching things.

Try using a web page performance analyzer like http://www.webpagetest.org or http://tools.pingdom.com. The site performs horribly and that's not even using a search query.

[Perrie Juran]

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Flea Yatsenko wrote:

Is there any hope of LL marketplace team abandoning Ruby on Rails? Twitter saw a 1000x speedup in search by going to Java from RoR.

To put that into perspective, that's the same as going from 10ms to 10,000ms, or 10 seconds.

XStreet used PHP, and while it's an ugly language, it performs very well and has a large amount of utilities available for optimizing performance and caching things.

Try using a web page performance analyzer like

http://www.webpagetest.org

or

http://tools.pingdom.com.

The site performs horribly and that's not even using a search query.

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I thought they were using "Mule in the Mud" for the MP as slow as it loads at times.

 

[Lelani Carver]

Ah, so it's not just me then? It's not just slow, but the little search widget in the merchant home/marketplace listings section (for when you're searching for an item to update) is borked.

[Pamela Galli]

Wondering if the Commerce Team would like to share with merchants the results of the survey and what the plan is.

[Pamela Galli]

Going to keep bumping until the CT answers  (could be a while, I know).  But I do not think it is none of my business.

[Pamela Galli]

Bump.  Is anyone working on Marketplace Search??? Or anything else to do with Marketplace??? 

Why, LL,  did you have us all complete this survey?

[Phoebe Avro]

Yep I do, TBD^^

[Pamela Galli]

So, how is work on search coming along?