On Wednesday, August 12, 2026, under the title Improving Marketplace Search and Product Discovery, Linden Lab new new Second Life Marketplace maintenance policies designed to help improve the shopping experience. The approach builds on operations carried out in the past on a periodic manual basis, but will not be carried out on a monthly basis using automated tools.
The new policy comprises two parts:
- Unlisting products:
- If a Merchant has not logged in for one year AND a specific product has not generated a sale in one year, that individual product listing will be automatically unlisted from Marketplace.
- Disabling stores:
- If a Merchant has not logged in for two years AND their store has not sold anything in one year, the entire store will be automatically disabled.
Important notes for context:
- In Both of the above policies, products and stores will only be acted upon if both elements of the criteria are met during a review.
- Neither policy option will result in anything being physically deleted from the Marketplace; affected products and/or stores will simply cease to be visible when browsing the Marketplace and in things like search returns.
- Merchants will be able to reactivate unlisted products / disabled stores by logging into the Marketplace and updating them.
- Active merchants and actively maintained products will not be affected by these changes.
- These new policies for products and stores will come into effect on Monday, August 17, 2026.
In order to avoid accidental / incorrect unlisting of products / stores, the blog post suggests merchants periodically:
- Review older or lower-performing listings.
- Refresh product listings, images, descriptions, or pricing to help improve visibility and sales activity.
As noted, there have been manual operations to clean-up the Marketplace in a similar manner to this is the past, and requests for the de-listing of inactive products has been frequently requested during Web User Group (WUG) meetings, so these new policies appear to be aimed at making making the process easier to handle via automaton whilst also addressing the requests made at the WUG meetings.
Those with any concerns / feedback on these polices can raise them through the forums or via the WUG meetings, the next one of which will take place as follows:
- 14;00 SLT, Wednesday, September 2, 2026 at this location. Note that meetings are held in a mix of Voice and text chat.
- Summaries of past Web User Group meetings are available here.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 
When this new Marketplace policy is implemented, it will become difficult to obtain older products—even those we rarely use but would like to acquire again—and this creates far too many disadvantages for the creative activities that enrich Second Life. Useful older items will likely decrease drastically, while new releases of low quality and limited utility will flood the marketplace. The total number of Marketplace listings is expected to drop significantly. This impact will greatly diminish the overall value of Second Life. Ideally, the proper approach would be to maintain the number of listings while enhancing and upgrading the search functionality.
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If I might play devil’s advocate: all it takes is either for an item to have a single sale in any 365-day / 8,760 hour period after this policy kicks-in on August 17, 2026, OR for the merchant selling it to simply log-in to the Marketplace for it to remain listed and visible. Realistically, how many items are going to fail to meet one or other of these criteria? Sure, there may be some edge-cases which get hit by this change – but are they really going to be enough to have a “significant” impact? Again, if the Merchant is still active, then all it potentially takes is for them to receive a poke that one of their items is no longer showing on the MP and they can make a change to re-list it – so the potential for an overall impact is further reduced.
In terms of improving search – this is something that has been in progress; a lot of feedback given to LL at the WUG meetings by both creator-merchants and consumers that the Elastic Search implements a number of years ago simply wasn’t performing as has been hoped. As such, LL has been working to replace it with a new engine – the problem here now being the new engine needs to be properly bedded-in (full indexing of the MP, UI refinements, etc.), so the overall benefits (or maybe otherwise) will take time to be properly assessed.
Change always rings with it fears and concerns – and these should be heard and balanced; again, if you can, do please attend the monthly Web User Group (WUG) meetings per the blog post. My most recent summaries of these meetings also hopefully provide more context on discussions around this particular issue.
*Edited to correct an html mark-up error.
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This doesn’t in any way take into account merchants that have passed on and CANNOT log in to do anything to their store. There are products in that situation that absolutely should not be delisted and may not sell oftent enough to remain. This is NOT a good policy. In fact, it’s going to cause a significant amount of good, useful, but infrequently purchased items to simply disappear.
The last time a merchant logged on to SL or to MP should be taken into account, and it should NOT be used as a trigger for removal. A product simply not selling for 365 days should not be a qualifier for removal. Those items simply remaining available isn’t harming anyone, and there’s no logical reason for such drastic action. Flag it as not often sold. Allow items not often sold to be hidden from searches, BUT DO NOT REMOVE THEM.
This needs serious rethinking.
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