SLBoutique.com v2.0 is here!

whaa

will you be bringing back categories?

We were doing some work and Java took a spill. The search should be back up and flying now - give it a whirl! Sorry about that, SiRiS and Ordinal.

Wanda, to answer your question, I'll quote myself above; it looks like it might have gotten buried a bit in my response.



Regards,

-Flip

The site looks great Flip! But in the interest of getting you feedback for improvement, I thought I'd throw a few things your way.

As Pham mentioned, the loose tag system just isn't enough. Perhaps setting up a taxonomy (related synonyms and hierarchy) of tags would help. For example, Capris would be related to Pants. Common misspellings could be linked to each other as well. Then a search for Pants would bring up Carpis, even if they're not tagged as Pants. A search for Automobiles would bring up Cars, Autos, etc. Also, it would help prevent things like Dressers showing up in a search for Dresses, since the system would know one belongs in furniture and the other in clothing.

I think the search relevance rank is somewhat meaningless to me as a consumer, and might be better left out. You can tell the relevance by the order of the results.

Some general IA type gripes, like "SLB Stores" going to a list of sellers (I realize they're the same thing, but the labels and headings should be consistent). And it seems like "Sell Items" is more related to "My Account" than it does with the other main nav headings.

This one is more of a request. It would be much easier for me to list items, and produce cleaner search results, if styles could be grouped under one product. For example, each color of an otherwise identical item could be considered a style. That way you could set up the pricing, description, permissions, etc. once, and just add a picture and name for each of the styles. They could be grouped together under search results, as in "Shiny Belt Buckle (available in 7 styles)."

I hope my big spiel is helpful in some way!

Great feedback!

One of the next big changes we want to focus on (after we shakeout all these new ones) is enhancing the seller experience. Any feedback on this front is appreciated.

Oo! *claps* I like that idea. Keep the tags, but organize them!

Amen to that. That is an awesome idea!!!

Can someone please tell me how i can make clothes i got psp 7

Head to the Design and Texture forum. They can help you there.

This is something I mentioned to Flip a couple months ago, and I'm not sure how do-able it is, but... Having a way to edit our items without having to find which vendor they're in first would be wonderful. (Especially for me.) Maybe having an Edit option on the listing iteself, available only to a logged-in vendor/owner.

This would make it much, much easier to correct typos and mistakes in the listing, and also to change information or prices on a whole category of items. If I wanted to have a bikini sale, I'd have to dig through all of my vendors on SLB trying to find all of the bikinis.

And as for how things are now... Being able to search via Tags within a larger category would be ideal. For instance, I want a blue dress, so I pull up the Dress category (with no furniture in it, hopefully) and then search for the Blue tag.

'female skin' returns more skins now, indeed. ^^ lack of easy ability to sort results in way other than search score is a serious pain, though.

figured would try something more specific though....

'female pale skin' -- returns "Pale Grey Hooded Shirt" first, then a handful of skins of all different skin tones. Maybe 'pale' isn't popular word, let's try something else...

'female light skin' -- first 4 pages return all different sorts of skins _from a single maker_, and then starts to thrown different 'tube lights', 'light blue dresses' and haircuts into the mix.

'light tone female skin' -- practically same results. Maybe there _is_ only one skin maker selling their products on SLB after all o.O;


I'd dare a guess while _sales_ might have happened more frequent as a result of search function, this doesn't mean there wasn't large group of people who just 'window shop' using categories -- as it seemed like easiest way to keep tabs on new releases. (pick category, check first few pages)

Personally i don't buy much things from online shops, but it doesn't mean i don't actually spend time browsing through selection, without anything very specific on mind. So removing that ability practically removes my reason to go to SLB again... :<

Is there a way to change the colors of the sight, like in a personal setting? The grey on blue and alternating blue/white gave me a rather nice headache really fast. I have to assume I'm not the only one experiencing this.

Hi, Im also having search related problems. As anyone would, the first thing I searched for was my own name, or rather the name of my store (Gestalt This 'n That Market).

I entered the search term "Gestalt". Only one of my listed items was returned with a score of 100%. The first 4 items on the list were things I listed. My next listing wasnt until the bottom of page 4!!

I include the word Gestalt at least once, sometimes twice in every item description. How is it possible that they do not all get returned at the top of the search list? And how do items that, as far as I can see, do not contain this word appear in the results list at all?

Thanks

Hi Jonquille! I haven't forgotten about this one. I just wanted to make sure we got the major changes out of the way first.

What I'm thinking we'll do is give a button to show "Newly Received Items". Clicking this link (instead of a vendor) would show all items from all vendors that have a status of "Not Listed on Site", you can can have an easy queue to find new items.

This wasn't an issue when we started, of course, but seeing as Jonquille is pretty far ahead of the pack in number of items, its wise to look to her comments as they light future scalability concerns - thanks for the feedback, Jonquille.

Regards,

-Flip

So the answer is what? its under discussion?

I personally do not like the site without catergories.
My feeling is that once an item is removed from the "new items" list it is lost within the tonnes of items already listed.

As sellers we selected a category and it was quite natural for me to then use catergories for browsing.
I preferred boutique to exchange for this reason - it was far easier to browse the site.
Recent sales was also a nice thing.

As far as I can see 'Top sellers' benefits no one except the people in that list. This could be replaced by a basic category navigation clothes/hair/buildings/interiors/scripts/etc

That's not really an issue for me. I know which vendor my latest items are in.. the latest vendor. It's items in the older vendors that are hard to find. Being able to find things Not Listed on Site might be useful to some, but what I'm trying to request is an easier way to edit the listings of the items that are listed, without having to check every single vendor until I find which one the item is in.

I'm the type of shopper who likes to browse. A good deal of the money I spend is from impulse buys. You don't impulse buy having something specific in mind to shop for. You impulse buy by browsing. Taking out categories makes that harder to do. In a real world shop, do you go to the customer service counter, and give them a list of tags and hope they give you a list of items to look at? No, you walk around the store.

Yes, yes, before you people start saying "this isn't real life", no kidding, but the same prinicple applies here. If I can't browse a store, I'll go somewhere else where I can.

With that said, this "scoring" system needs work too. Why is it when I type "couch", an item that isn't a couch got a better score than a real couch did? Doesn't make sense.

Also, before the new system, I could find something specific in a category quick and easy. Last night, I spent an hour trying to find something specific, and finally gave up. I went to SLExchange instead, where I could go to the category and pull it up in about 1 minute by browsing. So you lost a commision and they gained one. I wonder how many commisions you've lost already?

Sorry, I tried to like it. I really did. The new layout does look great, from one web designer to another, kudos on the visual asthetics. I've made a lot of online shops for RL stores, and I've always had category browsing available. Even if only 10% of people use it, if it makes that 10% spend money, then it's a valuable service, regardless. Losing 10% of sales does not make for happy vendors.

I agree...bring back the categories. I tried searching for stuff this morning and went on a wild goose chase.
Orange category? what the heck is that all about?

I agree about categories and browsing. One of my most popular items is a scrub bucket. Most people dont set out to find a scrub bucket. They come across it while browsing, and go: "Hey, great, a scrub bucket, just what I need to keep my pub clean! Oh, I wonder if there is a broom, too!"

I sometimes browse the online sites, then make my purchase inWorld, after I've had a chance to take a look at it more closely. So its my opinion the stats from purchases by browsing need to have some weight added for those activities which are invisible to the site.

BTW, is there a separate thread you are using to collect feedback about the seller experience?

Great job, Flip & Crew... the site looks great!

One comment: What happened to the Events listing at SLBoutique? My old links just take me to the main page, and there seem to be no links anywhere to get there.

Just curious - I thought that was a great community service

Ah, I understand now. Would a simple search box for item name within the sell page make this easy enough?

Regards,

-Flip

The SLBoutique design overhaul, coupled with SLExchange's annoying introduction of "pay us more money to make your item bold and show up on the front page or else you won't get any sales" crap, have made me switch to SLBoutique as a seller. The site looks great now, I find it easy to list stuff on it, I love the unique URL for my seller name.

However, I gotta agree with what people are saying about the searching with tags. I've tried to find my own products after listing them on the site and had a hard time. I think I like categories better myself. So I'm not 100% converted yet.

Ok - Now I have had a look at the purple being gone.

To me it is no longer an appealing site. It is too sterile. I feel like I am at a medical site or something.

It no longer has Flippers signature style - but I guess that makes sense since it is no longer really his site.

I also want categories back. I only have 81 items but after trying search and not finding my stuff. I went in and edited the tags on all of them for a couple hours. I do hope there is not a limit to the number of tags allowed.

Also - Can we no longer edit the look of our shoppes ? Mine is gross now with the whole new color scheme.

Sorry - my gut reaction is to pull my stuff off. But since I have invested so much time in putting it on I will wait and see how things evolve.

Oh are the things at the left side supposed to work ? Like New Items etc ? I click one and the nice triangle at the edge turns into a circle but I do not see any links or pics.

That would help.

It would be great to be able to search just my own stuff, so if I wanted to do a sale on all bikinis, for instance, I could just search for Bikini and edit the listings from the results, instead of having to check every vendor for bikinis to lower the price, and then go back and do it all again when the sale was over.

Another picky request...

I can't make head nor tail of the flow of this thread so I will just stick this on here...

I don't know how anyone else feels about this as it's an aesthetic thing but one of the big reasons I liked SL Boutique over SL Exchange was the large image tiles that could be (or mostly were), arranged on the page in a grid.

I really really like seeing all my stuff or the results that I am searching for displayed on a grid like that as I have a wide screen monitor most of the time.

With the new site, the layout is more like SL Exchange in that one is presented with a long long list of items with what appears to be a smaller picture and a long (usually one line) text description on the right. This is a waste of space. That same screen area could hold an entire second column of image tiles, the image tiles could also be bigger and it would all still fit in the same browser window. Much more efficient that way.

I am a visual person I like pictures, big pictures and I like to get a clear look at what I am getting. I find SL Exchange is particularly bad this way as they have tiny pictures with a big ugly blue border around them and you have to click multiple times and even open separate browser windows just to get a good look at the product.

Even if this new list view is the default, please consider adding the option to go back to the "tiles on a grid" view. Many of us don't really read the text and browse by looking at the pictures.

My preferred way of shopping was browsing through categories by looking at the images, sort of "virtual window shopping." The site looks great, but my preferred shopping style has been eliminated.