Xstreet shoppers point of view?

I am a content creator who does very little shopping. I've read many negative opinions from content creators. Are there any SHOPPERS who have a purely shoppers point of view that would care to comment? Is xstreet clogged with stale or low quality items? Or do freebies on Xstreet enhance your SL experience.

I already made my comment in the Commerce Forums, but it isn't even a matter of freebies for me. It's a matter of losing variety and range of products which will substantially undermine the value of shopping in the Marketplace for me and most likely will result in less shopping, less purchasing and perhaps abandonment to better venues.

There are probably plenty of quality products that will be pulled because they do not sell often enough in sufficient quantity for the merchant to maintain the listing. There will probably also be a considerable amount of new items from new merchant or small merchants that will not be listed because the listing fee, modest as it may be, will probably discourage merchants from listing them. Even bigger operations will probably pull some items and not put out all their new items in the Marketplace.

The less reflective that the Marketplace is of the variety I could get from shopping inworld the less likely I am to use it. It could ultimately lead to a gentrification that makes it a place where only the items that appeal to the lowest common denominator are listed, the Walmart of SL.

To me, their solution to the search engine problem is just a cheap fix at the expense of my shopping choices because they cannot afford to allocate resources to fix the search functionality and don't want to wait on increasing ecommerce driven revenue in the Marketplace (by commissions, not listing fees).

Price and quality seem to have very little correlation on XStreet, or inworld, come to that.

There is a lot of cr*p on the site (in every price bracket), just as there is inworld, but I sort of accept that as the price you pay for a system where anybody can become a content-creator and at least have a go at selling. That, to me, is what makes SL so compelling, even though I have never got round to finishing anything and putting it up for sale myself: if I wanted to, and was slightly more together, I could do it.

I'd say that about 40% of my favourite and most used stuff in my inventory was either free or very, very cheap.

XStreet search stinks, but not quite as badly as inworld search (coupled with waiting for stores to rez). My usual shopping method *was* to use XStreet to find stuff and then buy it inworld. Not only do you get to see the item properly before purchase, but you get the satisfaction of knowing that LL are not getting a cut (hahahahaha). The more expensive the item, the less likely I am to buy it from XStreet.

I like to buy content (especially avatar stuff) from small or new businesses, so I don't look the same as everybody else, and just because it's nice to support them, so XStreet has now lost me as a customer. I withdrew my spending funds from the site last night and won't be buying from there again.

Never shopped on XStreet, don't plan to in the future

The reasons for Xstreet being cluttered are due to issues like the same item in different colours and keyword spam, neither of which are exclusive to freebies.

But LL needs a scapegoat to make up for their incompetence and lazyness. Just as with the Open Space caper. They should be slapt...repeatedly.

yes it is true that there is a lot of crap on xstreet, BUT there is just as much crap inworld, and it is harder to sort through it inworld to find the good stuff. xstreet wasn't broken, why try to fix it?

One of the great freebies I got on XStreetSL is the Salt HUD, for megaprims.

Another is the Texture Alignment Pattern.

Really, in my mind, the ONLY problem with XStreetSL is that it has a search engine from the 1940s. If it had a search engine worth anything at all, it would be EASY to avoid the crap.

Hai. Ma name is Richard n' I'ma shoppaholic...

I'm a little confused... What negative opinions?
What makes a "stale item"
Neither is true... XS isn't clogged with anything. Freebies don't slow down the search and they don't enhance my "SL experience" any more or less than higher priced stuffs.


That I hafta agree with. I used to regularly browse through new items and really hated it when I'd go through page after page of the same item in 5 hundred different freakin' colors.


Ya should Ms Pantie Waver It's a great way to find kewl stuff. You don't have to buy there, I often head for someones inworld shop after seeing their items on XS.

For what it's worth, I don't shop nearly as much as I used to. My previous AV has over 50,000 items in her Inv. You'd be amazed at the difference it makes in TP times alone!

Colossus claims that Linden Lab doesn't have the resources to allocate to improve the search engine, at least not soon enough to meet their desire to increase e-commerce commission based revenue from the Marketplace.

From the Second Life Commerce discussion forum:

My biggest problem with XStreet wasn't the quantity of items, it was the extremely poorly documented search, without a clear explanation of how to do a boolean search.

Once they bothered to explain how to do that, the clutter suddenly disappeared. It's a freakin' miracle! The search isn't completely horrible, the instructions (or lack of them) are!

I tend to search on XStreet and purchase in world, but I often get L$0 demos from XStreet. I will not find removing them at all useful.

I don't find freebies cluttering. I frequently sort results by price, then look at some of the freebies and the highest price items, then go to about the midpoint and shop there.

I DO find the fact that there are no options on purchase very cluttering - many versions of the same item just clog search results.

The only real rationale I can see for segregating freebies out to an area that does not show up in search (yes, even if the vendor is willing to pay to list them, the wiki says they will not show up in search) is that some merchants do not want competition from the very high quality freebies that are often available. For LL to respond to this by (effectively) purging freebies from XStreet is emblematic of their lack of knowledge of SL, and/or their lack of caring about their residents.

I hope someone sets up an alternative freebie shopping site, that ultimately garners the support of merchants and supplants XStreet. Performance has been abysmal there ever since LL bought it, and the layout just seems to get worse and worse.

I rarely shop inworld. About 99% of stores are so badly designed that I want to scream. Mostly, I only go to stores that I already know or that someone highly recommends, or when I just can't find something on XSt.

XSt's search is inexcusable, but better than shopping inworld, most of the time, for me. If you love to wander around a poorly laid out store for a long time, figuring it out, more power to you.

Financially, I can't afford to skip the freebies completely. I try to support good merchants as much as I can. But if comparable products are 0L vs 300L, I'm gonna take the freebie most of the time. I do lots of costume contests, so I buy lots of stuff I'm going to use once or a few times. I can't lay out a pile of money for them. Now if I won the contests more often . . . .

I hear various Lindens say things like this.

Is it that they've got a really high attrition rate or they don't pay well or that they're really picky on who they hire or what? They've got a whole bunch of openings and it's definitely a sellers (employeers) market..

We've been hearing for years that they're hiring, hiring, hiring. What gives?

I've done fine without it.

I have picked up some freebies from there. But as far as spending L, I would rather go to the stores directly. If I am going to come up off my wallet its going as much as possible to the person that actually made the item, not to LL and their listing fees, commissions etc.

I really don't search either in world or the marketplace as too much junk shows up in both searches. Most places I head to are ones I have heard about from forums, already shop, or find while exploring.

I don't have problem with the freebies, I have huge problem for the extra charges for cheaper items. Such as a bunch of my particles I sell for 10-20L and the price they want to change for having those prices is insane.

According to the log of the meeting they had Lindens made it sound like cheap and free items are low to bad quality.

Well that sure says a lot about their own service. Second Life account is free they must think their own company is low to bad quality.

Last count they had over 3 dozen openings with most of them in software development and engineering. I am somewhat perplexed that they have had so many open positions for quite some time given that presumably most of these jobs are for their California offices where the official unemployment rate exceeds 12%, the actual unemployment rate is far in excess of that number and a significant number of jobs have been lost in the software development and engineering sector. One can only speculate that either the pay is well below market rate, there is some kind of general perception on the employee side of the industry that the work environment is very bad, or some combination of the two.

Wasn't Linden Lab bragging earlier this year that Second Life was finally turning a profit? Surely, now that Linden Lab is making money and has a bright financial future, it has the money to reinvest in that future by offering salaries to attract the top talent to work for them.

Offering below-market salaries with the hope that someone talented will come along and and be force to slum it with one's company would be the mark of a financially desperate company.

Oh so very true, but why buy a fatpack when you just want one color? I can certainly understand this... but that keyword spam, that LL said they were going to address..... I suppose thats on the burner until they crunch some more numbers.

I will say that maybe the reason you get so much crap results when you search xstreetsl is cause their search function is crap.

I have gotten some really great free things from Xstreet.. and frankly I "did" list one outfit a month for a week for free that I sell normally.....people scoop them up ...

what I see is a remarkable amount of alts rating their own stuff.. to bad you cant do something about that.

Why can content creators not reply as well? Shopping is shopping.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that fatpacks should replace individual colours, more that the item should give you the option to purchase a different colour from one listing, maybe even the fatpack could be on that listing too.

So for example you search for a T-Shirt and it's available in black, red, green and blue, instead of having four different results, you have have one result but then you can choose your colour from that result.

Did that make sense?

This is supposed to be policed....but of course LL make money with every purchase so don,t bother. money money money.

I change my scenery quite often. week to week sometimes. I change the landscape or make a whole other landscape up top.
For instant last week i wanted a snowy scene so I put a platform uptop for it. I went straight to xstreet for all my items. Looking mostly for freebies as I dont have alot of money and i change my mind every week. But while looking for a decent cabin that was cheap I found a really nice once that was under 500L so I bought it.
The freebies brought me to xstreet but the product made me want the non freebie
If something is free and the same quality of something that cost of course I am going to get the freebie

There are times how ever that I just spend my free time going through the freebies on xstreet just looking for freebies. I want to check them out see whats out there. I have found alot of fun stuff on there that I wouldnt have inworld.

Then when i am looking for something I dont mind spending the money

I almost exclusively shop on xstreet. I almost never tp around looking for something.
But because some of the merchants through a hissy fit about all the freebies. I will no longer be shopping on xtsreet and I was a merchant myself and I will no longer be selling there either
ohh well I will stick to the stores that I know and if they dont have it then I will build it myself.
Hopefully there will be something competitive in the future where you can find almost anything and I can continue to shop

Perfect sense.

It is how online catalouges and online stores have functioned for years. I