WTF Marketplace Cull

[Couldbe Yue]

Uncharitable me thinks this is a money saving move as the storage on all those items must be huge. It may be cynical but considering there's not even a mention here, I assume SL is really moving into survival/maintenance mode..

Happy Monday everyone! As we posted last month the Web Team has been busy with an array of different project and fixes. One we’d like to highlight is our effort to clean up Marketplace listings. We’ve had many of you give us feedback on absentee store owners who cannot offer sales support for their products. You also told us there were older products which were still in demand even though the Merchant hasn’t been currently active. Keeping all this feedback in mind, we had undertaken a cleanup sweep of the marketplace in the past, and had very positive response. Today, we have taken a second one:

• If the Merchant hasn’t logged in in two years *and* a specific product hasn’t sold in 1 year, the product will be unlisted.
• If the Merchant hasn’t logged in in two years *and* the store hasn’t sold anything in 1 year, their store will be disabled.
  
• This means that if a product has sold within the past year, that product listing will remain available on the marketplace. If a store has products, which have sold within the past year, it will remain enabled.
  
• We are confident that a more relevant selection of products and search results will benefit the shoppers on the Marketplace, as well as active Merchants. Spring is in the air!

Marketplace Early Spring Cleaning

 

[Chalice Yao]

Ehhhh. It's a tricky problem to solve.

I've actually helped out with a few products sold by others - either through scripting help (not whole scripts in these particular following cases) or meshes - and some of those people simply don't log onto SL anymore.
But they still have marketplace listings.
Their products get sold, people actually IM *me* for support because I am credited - and I kindly tell them that I'm the wrong person to ask. But I know they probably won't even be able to reach the actual seller to handle their issue. And I can't exactly tell them that.

The problem is, LL's current steps won't even solve that particular issue - technically I'd take it a step further and disable marketplace stores where the seller hasn't logged in in years, period, independent of any product sales. If a store does not get supported anymore by anybody, nothing *should* be sold by it.

Which of course in turn would cause products to vanish that don't actually *need* support.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. As I said..actually a very tricky problem that *has* caused issues for SL consumers, spending money and then not receiving needed help with their purchase.

 

[Ashiri]

Uncharitable me thinks this is a money saving move as the storage on all those items must be huge. It may be cynical but considering there's not even a mention here, I assume SL is really moving into survival/maintenance mode..

Marketplace Early Spring Cleaning

I think it would be more a case of old shit cluttering up the marketplace listings. I've seen listings for furry avatars which are the same ones as I got as freebies when I started in SL.

 

[Pamela]

Merchants have begged for this for years.

 

[Wesleytron]

LL have not long since upgraded the marketplace so that you can now get redeliveries of pretty much everything you've ever bought on there. I've been able to get redeliveries of items I bought going back to when first joined six or so years ago. Now the ability to do that is, in some cases at least, going to be taken away it would seem.

Some of those older products, like some of the old system layers, don't need support. But if I lose the ones I have, and want to get a redelivery using the great new MP feature, if the creator hasn't been around for two years then I'm not going to be able to retrieve them. Which would be a shame. But which leads me to...

Conspiracy theory alert: Maybe that's the point! With 'bakes on mesh' on the horizon, all those old system layers could become relevant again - and LL don't want you just reusing what you have already - they want you to buy new stuff from new creators! And how many people deleted all their old system clothing? If those people can't get them back via redeliveries because the creator is no longer around, they too will have to by new stuff from new creators.

... although maybe that's a good thing. New, better products, and better for the SL economy?

 

[Pamela]

Merchants support it because it helps prevent buying things that are totally unsupported, even if broken — people regularly report doing this in the official forums. There is nothing that be done to get support. Also, search is full of too much junk that nobody wants to buy. Keyword spam already does enough to clog up search.

 

[Chav Paderborn]

I'm sure I remember people asking for this. Surprised it actually happened.

 

[Beebo Brink]

I should log in to see how many of my products have been disabled... or not. Yes, I'm part of the problem.

 

[Archer]

Well, from the other side of things, I go to a lot of theme events, like at least one a week. It's very helpful to be able to find offbeat stuff cheap on MP, usually very old things that are pre-mesh. If that stuff went away I would be very sad. OTOH, I agree MP is very very crowded. No easy solution to make everyone happy.

 

[Pamela]

Well, from the other side of things, I go to a lot of theme events, like at least one a week. It's very helpful to be able to find offbeat stuff cheap on MP, usually very old things that are pre-mesh. If that stuff went away I would be very sad. OTOH, I agree MP is very very crowded. No easy solution to make everyone happy.

All it takes is one sale per year AND no login for two, so we are talking about a very small percentage of the total. I doubt more than a handful would ever be missed.

This is a big win for almost everyone.

 

[Amity Slade]

I would have liked a solution where the older unsupported products are flagged but not removed, then create a search option to allow consumers to include or exclude such products from search.

Second Life does not have a problem of too much content. Second Life has a problem when it comes to sorting through the content.

 

[Spirits Rising]

I would have liked a solution where the older unsupported products are flagged but not removed, then create a search option to allow consumers to include or exclude such products from search.

Second Life does not have a problem of too much content. Second Life has a problem when it comes to sorting through the content.

There are a few "improvements" Linden Lab made that are half-assed at best ....

 

[Amity Slade]

I know for a long time, Marketplace- the central hub of Second Life's multi-billion dollar virtual economy- use a freeware search engine. Is that still true?

 

[Couldbe Yue]

I think the thing that irritated me the most is that I don't believe the merchants were notified. I don't really have a problem with it as such but I would've thought that pinging the vendors to tell them might have been nice and of course there's the chance it might stir their interest to get back inworld.

 

[Summer Haas]

They could always just put a timer on every listing. After 1 year you get a notice your product will be disabled in 30 days unless you opt in to have it renewed. Most games with marketplace listings have a similar feature. In some cases the listings are far shorter before they go inactive. I think a year would be appropriate for SL. It would not be that big of a bother to just "select all" on a batch of items and click "renew" once a year.

I will say I get really sick of how many old items clutter up marketplace. It makes every search harder to find newer, relevant listings. The one thing I really wish they would fix is making the permissions checkboxes persistent across searches. Having to reset them every time you change your query is highly annoying.

 

[Wesleytron]

I will say I get really sick of how many old items clutter up marketplace. It makes every search harder to find newer, relevant listings

Have you never seen the list of options in the 'Sort by' menu? There has long been an option in there to sort your search listings by 'newest items first'. If you use that then you won't have annoying old items in your search results.

 

[Katheryne Helendale]

I should log in to see how many of my products have been disabled... or not. Yes, I'm part of the problem.

Likewise!

 

[Erich Templar]

If the Merchant hasn’t logged in in two years

Logged in to where? The marketplace website? Or Second Life itself?

 

[Pamela]

Logged in to where? The marketplace website? Or Second Life itself?

I don’t know for sure but what has been requested in the past is inworld login. Although MP login would at least mean they are still able/alive.

 

[Pamela]

I would have liked a solution where the older unsupported products are flagged but not removed, then create a search option to allow consumers to include or exclude such products from search.

Second Life does not have a problem of too much content. Second Life has a problem when it comes to sorting through the content.

The problem is with things that people buy, like a famous dance ball, that are broken, the creator has left SL, and there is no support. Yes people leave bad reviews but people keep buying and complaining. It makes some of them paranoid.

I sell lots of ancient merchandise, but I am there to support it.