Tag: SL Marketplace

LL add new SL Marketplace categories

Posted on by Inara Pey

Yesterday, May 18th, Linden Lab added a number of new categories to the Marketplace, together with a new banner promotion. An announcement was made in the Merchants section of the Commerce forum:

As of this morning, we have added several new categories to the Marketplace. Many have been requested by Merchants, and some have been added to split up very large existing categories. We’ve also created a category to support the next banner promotion.

Next Banner Promotion

The next banner promotion is for the theme “Masquerade”, which could be the following:

  • Costumes/masks for avatars
  • Avatars that may be considered “dress up” avatars
  • Decorations to support a Masquerade themed event
  • Other items related to a Masquerade themed event

If you would like to add listings to this promotion, please move them to the Celebrations/Masquerade category. We plan to launch the banner the week of May 21.

New Categories on the Marketplace

Here is a complete list of all the new categories:

  • Under Animals
    • Breedable Pets/Breedable Cats
    • Breedable Pets/Breedable Dogs
    • Breedable Pets/Breedable Horses
    • Livestock
    • Reptiles
    • Rodents
  • Under Avatar Accessories
    • Neckties
  • Under Building Components
    • Mesh Creator Tools
    • Structures/Commercial/Office Buildings
    • Structures/Commercial/Bars & Restaurants
    • Structures/Residential/Single Family Houses
    • Structures/Residential/Multi Family Buildings
    • Structures/Other Structures/Off Sim Builds
    • Structures/Other Structures/Photography Studios
  • Under Celebrations
    • Masquerade
  • Under Recreation & Entertainment
    • Sporting Goods/Camping Equipment
    • Sporting Goods/Fishing Equipment

We’ll continue to take additional category recommendations. Please add suggestions as comments to this public JIRA: WEB-2896. 

[Edited May 18, 2012 to remove Meeroos from Breedable Pets and added Breedable Cats, Breedable Dogs, and Breedable Horses to this category.]

The full announcement is available here, and is open to comments and discussion.

With thanks to Tatiana Dokuchic for pointing me to the forum announcement. 

Marketplace Update: DD migration pushed to August

Posted on by Inara Pey

Updated 19th May: The Commerce team have responded to payment issues. See the comments after this article.

The Commerce Team issued a further update on the status of ongoing work to fix various issues relating to both Direct Delivery and listings problems. Indeed, the announcement itself may have been prompted by a cascade of Tweets directed at Linden Lab’s CEO by frustrated merchants late on the 16th May These both requested help with the non-payment issue (outlined later in this piece) and appealed for news on Direct Delivery issues given the revised migration deadline of June 1st is fast approaching without any clarification on matters from LL having been received since April 26th.

The update is reproduced here in full. For those concerned about Direct Delivery migration, please note the final paragraph of the announcement.

[UPDATE: May 17, 2012]

We continue to work outstanding Marketplace issues.

Performance continues to improve on the Marketplace web site. With our deploy last week, we fixed a couple of JIRAs and order processing sped up, which led to some orders getting stuck in the Queued state (which means no money has been taken from the customer nor have any items been delivered). Orders got stuck because other portions of the system struggled to keep up. Stuck orders were Aborted, and a fix was made to decrease the number of orders getting stuck in the Queued state going forward while we work on a longer term fix. 

Here is the status of the remaining issues:

  • (WEB-4587) Listings show up with images from other Merchants listings
    Current status: we have identified the problem and are working on testing the fix.
  • (WEB-4696) Deleted listings appearing in search results for consumers and in Merchant Admin.
    Current status: we continue to work on this issue, and have decreased the incidence of these occurrences.
  • (WEB-4441) Orders stuck in Being Delivered
    Current status:  we are actively working on this issue and will focus our fixes on Direct Delivery purchases.
  • (WEB-4567) Bulk delete failing.
    Current status: the work-around on this is to delete each item. We continue to work on resolving this.

One other question that has come up frequently as we get close to June 1, is around Direct Delivery migration dates. We will not be requiring Merchants to migrate to Direct Delivery before August 1, 2012, and will give at least a 4 week notice for any shutdown dates. [my emphasis]

The Commerce Team

In the meantime, Merchants are becoming increasingly concerned over the non-receipt of payments from good sold. The crux of the issue has been raised in a forum post (which itself links to an earlier and more involved post on the subject). A JIRA has also been raised on the issue as well. So far, there has been no response from the Commerce Team on this latter issue.

Marketplace update April 26th

Posted on by Inara Pey

With trying to cover / enjoy Fantasy Faire last week, I missed the following when it came out.

On Friday 26th April, Commerce Team Linden (CTL) provided an update on attempts to sort out the ongoing issues with the Marketplace. The update reads in full:

[UPDATE: April 26, 2012] We are continuing to work on outstanding Marketplace issues. 

The most significant issue that has been addressed over the past week was slowness on the Marketplace website, which occurred intermittently between April 18 and April 21. Page loads should be much faster now. 

Here is the status on additional JIRAs:

  • (WEB-4587/WEB-4601) Search results, best-selling lists and related items showing up on other merchants items or images. Current status: other merchants’ listings should not be appearing in store search results, best-selling lists, related items, etc. Other merchants’ images may still appear on your listings, but this is less likely to occur as we work on a solution.
  • (WEB-4676) ANS for SLM does not populate the Location field with internal ID. Current status: this is in progress and will be deployed soon. 
  • (WEB-4696) Deleted listings appearing in search results for consumers and in Merchant Admin. Current status: we are working on resolving this issue.
  • (WEB-4441) Orders stuck in Being Delivered. Current status:  the orders stuck here due to unicode problems was addressed, and we continue to investigate remaining orders stuck in this state.
  • (WEB-4567) Bulk delete failing. Current status: the work-around on this is to delete each item. We continue to work on resolving this. 
  • (WEB-4574) Direct Delivery products are re-delivered to purchaser instead of recipient. Current status: we are working on resolving this.

We continue to work on the other Marketplace JIRAs and will provide additional updates as soon as possible.

My apologies for not catching this at the time of publication.

ANS launches: “I have some good news and some bad news…”

Posted on by Inara Pey

The good new is… Automated Notification of Sales (ANS) rolled out yesterday for Direct Delivery. ANS allows information on sales to be forwarded to an external URL, allowing merchants to not only track sales, but to perform a range of different analyses on their sales and customers, in order to provide things like more focused support, identify product trends and so on.

Originally, it had been hoped that ANS would form part-and-parcel of the overall Direct Delivery roll-out, and many merchants were disappointed that this was not the case, with ANS being delayed for reasons unknown.

Yesterday’s announcement that ANS is now available came with a highly-informative user-written wiki article on how to make use of ANS. This is extremely well-presented and spells-out exactly how ANS data can be received and used.

However, it’s not all good news, sadly, as Darrius Gothly reports in the forum thread making the announcement:

 Sadly the ANS for Direct Delivery has a Severe bug and IS NOT SAFE TO USE YET!! The ANS Transaction being sent via the Marketplace service is duplicating the Item ID# (the numeric part of the Product’s listing page) into the Location field. The Location Field is supposed to have the Order Line Item ID number instead, showing which line item in an Order correlates to the ANS Transaction. As long as that field contains the wrong data, you CANNOT track an ANS transaction back to the specific line item in an Order.

Darrius has raised a JIRA on the matter, and merchants who use ANS / have an interest in using ANS are urged to log-in and WATCH the JIRA.

When putting the “lab” back into “Linden Lab” might need more consideration

Posted on by Inara Pey

The recent Marketplace issues are not precisely news any more. LL are working to resolve matters, but in the meantime are coming under increasing backlash from users as in response to the overall management of the situation, both in terms of the manner in which the company has handled open communications with merchants on the matter and in the way the Marketplace as a whole has been handled over the years – which frankly, has been far from stellar.

My thoughts on LL’s handling of communications on the core issues is a matter of record here. Others feel the same way, so much so that a vexed comment from Sera Lok on Twitter lead to a response from Rodvik:

On the one hand, the honesty in Rodvik’s response is to be applauded. Free from BS, it speaks to the heart of the matter in many respects. However, it has to be said that one apology via Twitter isn’t actually enough.

Not One-off

The problem here is that the current Marketplace issues are not a one-off situation; the fact is that the Marketplace as a whole has effectively lurched from controversy to controversy ever since XStreet, its progenitor (so to speak), was purchased by Linden Lab back in January 2009. Indeed, some of the problems being experienced today are as a result of issues relating to the re-coding / relaunch of XStreet as the SL Marketplace back in 2010, as LL themselves note in updates to their forum posts on problems.  As such, it has caused merchants and SL commentators to give voice to the widespread sense of frustration many feel towards LL and their management of updates and changes:

And herein lies the rub: one can well understand the managing, maintaining and updating a beast such as Second Life, which has had an organic growth over its 10-plus years of life,  to be nothing short of a major headache. It’s a difficult and complicated monster to control without sometimes breaking things; but the same cannot be said of SLM. This is a product that was originally purchased  as XStreet in a reasonably robust and working form, thus LL had no reason to rush through its redevelopment  and implementation  – yet that appears to have been precisely what happened in the drive to replace XStreet with SLM.

There can be no excuse here: the entire process appears to have been mishandled from start to finish, frequently with deadlines seeming to come ahead of consideration as to whether code was ready and often missing critical functions.  Even the recent roll-out of Direct Delivery trod this all-too-familiar route; while merchants openly pleaded with the Commerce Team not to roll out DD without ANS (Automated Notification of Sale) with some even posting precisely why ANS is vital to many merchants. Yet, when launched, DD brought with it the statement that ANS would be enabled in “next couple of weeks” (a time frame which itself, unsurprisingly, has slipped given the ongoing problems).

“Putting the Lab back into Linden Lab”

In a recent interview with Games Industry,  Rod Humble indicated that one of his goals from the start of his tenure as CEO was to “put the ‘lab’ back into Linden Lab”. Well, the mark of a good lab is its ability to rigorously apply robust and consistent processes and procedures to the work it carries out. At the moment, particularly with reference to the company’s management of the Marketplace, it would appear that much more needs to be done before the “Lab” is anywhere near being back in “Linden Lab”.

While it is very good to know the team is “crunching hard” to resolve issues, one very much hopes that the outcome will be more than a simple “fix it and move on”, leaving the door for the same mistakes to again be made in handling future Marketplace updates. Rather, one hopes that a long, objective look will be taken as to how things are being managed and the necessary checks and balances implemented to ensure that product roll-outs are no longer subject to the poor level of quality that  – as Tateru points out in her Tweet – users have been forced to expect and accept over the years.

Related Links

Marketplace: LL updates further, but communications hardly “regular”

Posted on by Inara Pey

Linden Lab has issued a further brief update about the on-going Marketplace issues, to whit:

Today we updated Marketplace to address two of the top three outstanding issues:

  • WEB-4580: purchases are now delivered to recipients with the inventory name (which does not allow unicode characters). This will prevent future orders from getting stuck in the Being Delivered state due to this issue. In addition, all orders affected by this problem have been pushed through.
  • WEB-4587:  updates have been made to support updating store search results, which we will process over the next week; we continue to work on the issue related to mismatched data on listings. We do know that this issue has existed since September 2010 (during the migration from Xstreet to the Second Life Marketplace).

We continue to work on the other Marketplace JIRAs and will provide additional updates as soon as possible.

Menwhile, Rodvik has stepped in to defend how matters have been handled in terms of communications, stating on Twitter:

While it is true that the Commerce Team clearly engaged with individuals experiencing problems through the medium of e-mail exchanged, it is nevertheless also true that feedback on this matter in the broader sense has been severely lacking from the Lab, with little or nothing being posted to either the main forum thread on the WEB-4587 issues or the JIRA itself. This left many merchants both frustrated and feeling as if they’d been abandoned, while those who had received some feedback from the Lab via e-mail tried to pass on the information to a wider audience in lieu of LL doing so.

It is good that progress is being made – but equally, it would be nice if LL would do more to keep users openly informed. As those responding to Rodvik’s tweets note:

Related Links