SLBoutique.com v2.0 is here!

I dont like the Search options. The others on the original SLB site was just perfect! Now I have to keep clicking just to find specific catagories.


Bring back the easier SEARCH catagories PLEASE!

Cant get anymore specific with SHORTS. It brings up EVERTHING with the word short in it. Its not fun at all

I agree with you. Why add MORE? Less was better to me. Im an AVID shoppaholic. I come to SLB for the quickness that I dont have to run all over SL to find stuff.

I want them back too!

I agree!

uuuuuuh........Maybe "female shorts"? "denim shorts"? "booty shorts"? "female denim booty shorts"? That's pretty specific.

I hope I am reading too much into that statement because it sounds to me like you don't intend to bring categories back, rather some alternative method.

I hate to say this but I have to believe the folks at SL Exchange are loving this clusterfuck. I know I would.

SLBoutique aims to be the best Web marketplace for sellers and buyers of SL goods. We are therefore going through major changes to our site that we feel are necessary to improve our site over the coming months and years. The existing category system, while it worked yesterday, and may have lasted through the theoretical today, would not scale to tomorrow.

We greatly appreciate the feedback everyone has given us in the last week. We are working hard to respond to the may comments and ideas we've received. Perhaps most notably, this includes adding browseable categories to our new site as soon as possible, in a way that will scale for the future. We are also working to rapidly improve the quality of our search engine and to introduce new features to help both sellers and buyers.

As this work progresses, we will soon post additional changes as well as test areas where you can see proposed changes to SLBoutique before they launch. We would love to continue to receive your feedback, ideas, comments, and especially complaints! And in addition to feedback to our site, we would love to hear any ideas on what we could do to help your shopping and selling experiences easier, more enjoyable, and more effective.

We hope we can work with you to make SLB continually better. We hope the tweaks we've made in the past week, to things like the sellers' tools, will continue to show that we're dedicated to being the best site available for all your Second Life shopping.

Regards,

-Flip & the SLB Team

Tags are the future -- can you imagine what Flickr would be like if everyone had to put every one of their photos into one of a finite group of categories?

As the number and diversity if products in Second Life grow, categories become increasingly useless.

Instead of complaining, content creators need to take an evening and update their items to make their tags more relevant to their items.

To be honest, it's perfect comparison given the search on flicker appears equally out of whack.

search for: "shorts"
top results: Short-Fuze, Philip Short @ UCLA, Short shorts, Short-billed Dowitcher, Short Lane_02, Short Supply, Short Hairstyles ...

compare it to your regular apparel shop where a sign "shorts" indicates you are about to find exactly this, various types of shorts you can wear. Fast, simple and to the point.

if that's a future? i hope it takes really long years to actually come and replace current options which are actually useful.

Is flickr a shopping site? I don't think so. It's a photo sharing site. I don't know of a shopping site that doesn't use categories besides slboutique. I just did a sampling on google for online shopping and can't find one. They all had defined categories.

Personally I'd prefer both - finite broad catagories with tags searchable in each.

Why do I think that tags alone on a shopping site is a bad idea?

Ever been to a webpage that has a half a page of black on black keywords at the bottom?

If I want exposure all I need do is get the handily provided 'hot tags' and add them to every single one of my items.

Now when any of the most popular tags are used, I'll have people pulling up my stuff - regardless of what they've been searching for!


That may be good for the seller - but its a pain in the arse for the shopper... and shopping sites aint about the seller. It's about letting the shopper find what they want and buy it.

Piss off the shopper because they can't find what you want and all you have is just a 'Aint my shit cool!' collection of pictures... wtihout shoppers - it's as useless as tits on a bull.

And the 'well noone will do that, they'll use the system as it was meant!' reply thats bound to come - I say 'bullshit - people are pricks, and some of the shit that goes on in world proves it'

First Land, Teen grid black market, scams, dwell, GL Intercept, if it can be gamed in SL, it will be gamed in SL.

One of the things I prefered with boutique over exchange was that the categories were simple.
On exchange there are hundreds of categories and its always a pain to have to scroll through this massive list when adding items - and even with this list I sometimes find certain items have no real suitible section.

On the old boutique site categories were not so specific - so items were easy to place.

Categories don't have to be complex to be effective.

As you probably have noticed, Christian has figure a way to bring back the categories while working along side our current search engine. Its also quite an elegant solution, because as categories get too big (like Female Outfits, heh) we'll we able to easily split it up into sub-categories. So I think we're all in good shape name!

It appears to be working quite well. We had a few minor bugs to ferret and yesterday with them, and thanks to everyone who brought them to our attention.

I've seen some of the preliminary results of the "female skin" problem Keiki describes above, and it looks VERY cool!

Regards,

-Flip

And all is right in the (virtual) world.

Looks great Flip!

Flipper, while i love to see categories back, it appears that no, they do not work 'quite well' ... in fact they work absolutely the same tag searching does, because well, they _are_ the same after all ... tags presented as 'categories', aren't they?

to be specific. going into Body Parts -> Skins (female) runs a search for "Skins Female" and returns, in order of score:

* 10 pages of skins by Calibris Pendragon
* page after page of various outfit pieces because they happen to be tagged with 'female'

i can only see two explanations here. either Calibris Pendragon is the only maker of skins selling on SLB, or the search engine is still as bonkers as it's been since its introduction o.O;

am sorry if it sounds too negative but well, can't have very positive outlook when you say you checked specifically this 'female skin' issue and saw very cool results, while it only takes this very search with sort order set to anything _but_ score ... to realize the problem is still there and it's as big as ever.

edit: another easy to verify example -- open body parts -> eyes category, pick the 'sort by price, high to low' ... nothing you get on the first page even has 'eyes' in their tags to begin with. how did they all wind up in there? Because there's "eyes" in totally random context mentioned in descriptions of these items :/

Heya!

The new categories work by providing the tags that all previous items in that category were automatically tagged with. This should work out pretty well, once we address the other problem.

The 'female skin' issue is a separate issue with the search engine we're still addressing, as I mentioned above:

I could have been more clear, heh; I've seen results of the work-in-progress to fix this issue. We're going to be showing one result per seller, perhaps two, similar to how Google only displays a primary results and second result per web site. We'll then provide a link saying something like, "See more results from Calibris Pendragon for 'female skin'".

I know Christian is working hard on this, and we'll get it up as soon as its done & tested. Thanks for your patience! I'll let Christian comment more if he sees fit.

Regards,

-Flip

I take it by 'the other problem' you mean 'search results getting littered with items that don't actually contain all specified tags, or even any of them for that matter, but happen to have the tags as part of their descriptions and/or name? since this is what seems to be messing up search results at the moment ^^;;


Ah, cool ^^

Excellent work guys - thanks for listening to us

Only 2 more suggestions from me;

1. When using categories, wouldn't it be better to have it ordered by most recent as default?

This way the casual browser gets the newest items all the time with the option of then changing to tag score.

2. html or bbcode in our sigs so we can use surl links?