New Search: Vendor-based merchants, how will you compete?

In the new search mechanism that LL is preparing, it will be possible to list individual objects that are for sale in Search. At first glance, that sounds dandy. But for those of us who use scripted vending systems like JEVN, and don't sell the contents of individual boxes, we will be placed at a severe disadvantage.

Consider this scenario:

Two merchants in seperate areas of a mall each have a store space where they can display 100 prims. The mall is listed in Search Places.

Merchant A decorates their store nicely, and uses a set of 10 6-prim vendors to display the 100 dresses she sells. The vendors allow her to sort the merchandise by style, and you can flip through the choices in the vendor for color variations (Red floral print versus blue versus green...). She is able to use the other 40 prims to make her store look nice. She has a basic classified ad.

Merchant B doesn't use vendors, and doesn't decorate her store at all. She has used her entire prim allocation to make five "walls" each made of 20 one-prim vendors that each sell one style and color version of her dresses. She also has a basic classified ad.

Under the current search, a search for "Dress" will list each of these merchants one time, along with many others who sell dresses.

Under the new search, Merchant B will show as 101 lines of responses in Search, while Merchant A is still only one line. Because Merchant B will get a free Search listing for every one of her 100 single-prim 'for sale' boxes.

So, how is Merchant A supposed to remain competitive? Anyone searching for dresses sees her competition 100 times as often, but the extra 100 listings don't cost merchant B a single L$.

Any ideas on solutions? Other than Merchant A trashing her scripted vendors and her nice looking store area, and setting up her store like Merchant B has it?



And this doesn't even begin to consider the problem of merchants who intentionally game the new system by filling their unused parcel prim counts with duplicate boxes set for sale...

make a prim flat enough to slide between the true vendor and the wall, small enough to hide under the vendor, or whatever, name it to the object, and set it for sale. It will register, no one can see it and therefore mistakenly buy it, and problem solved, unless you spent your 40 extra prims on furniture for your campers. I tested it out with Sheepbot and it works. I ended up opting out of Sheepbot in the end, but my tiny invisiprims registered on the system (e.g. "Sari, Red."

On the flip side, if vendors could be indexed somehow then anyone could simply game the system by creating a vendor with 10,000 product listings. At least this way they have to use a finite and "costly" resource rather than an infinite, free one.

Merchant A could only do that to get 40 of her 100 dresses listed. So she still remains at a severe disadvantage.

People using the new search get to see a seperate listing for every item Merchant B sells, complete with the price.

Merchant A would have to pay for an additional 60 to 100 prims of mall space to get the same visibility. (60 if they trash their storefront, 100 if they keep the storefront and buy more prims just to get listing space). I am seeing those 40 prims as things like a door and shelves and and plants and other things that make the space look more like a beautiful real store, not other means of gaming the search results, like camping chairs or lucky chairs.

And when it is time to update your merchandise, merchant A has to find all those hidden prims and update them manually, as they will no longer match what is in the scripted vendors.

No, then she and Merchant B would both be on the same playing level. If both Merchants A and B have 100 dresses for sale, Merchant A would need 101 prims, while Merchant B would need 100. I see that as being evenly matched.

Well another thing to consider is the fact that Profile Picks are searched too. I am already seeing group messages where creaators are pushing for their userbase to fill out a profile pick for their store, and fill it with given keywords. So I think you will start seeing a "Picks battle" as creators try to entice their customers to create picks for their store. Some have been doing this for some time, offering incentives for Picks creation. I think this will become much more prevalent now.

As for what I plan to do, nothing much. I've always banked on my reputation and the quality of my goods, and will continue to do so.

Where do JEVN go from here? Indeed where do malls go from here? Having a 25 prims store in a mall isn't going to be as useful for getting your items noticed as renting a 512M plot of land and putting your objects there.

The rental market could go through the roof on the back of this.

Very interesting. this will certainly have an impact on malls.

The mall itself will benefit by having a large number of properly named prims and a proper description of the content sold in the mall - individual stores, however, would not. The market for land rental may get quite a bump, though! It depends on people's budgets.

No, if Merchant A only added one prim, she only gets one more line in Search.

Merchant A is currently using 60 prims for her ten vendors, and has only 100 prims total available to her (assuming she eliminates the 40 that are making her store area look like sonething nicer than a bare horse's stall). She could only make 40 prims like the one you suggest, each listing one type of dress she sells. And 60 items would still go unseen in Search. To get 100 free listings in Search like Merchant B does, Merchant A either has to replace the vendors with single-prim boxes, just like Merchant B is doing, or pay for more prims.

Yes, quality merchandise should always sell well. But only if your customers can find it.

Multiply the above scenario by thousands of merchants. Imagine hundreds of thousands of single-prim for-sale boxes listed in Search. How much first-time traffic will go to the single-prim merchants? How many decent, high-quality merchants won't even get seen, because they are burried in a sea of otehr wares?

I suppose that classified ads will, to some extent, get weighterd higher than the free 'object for sale' listings. Especially if you pay a lot of money for your ad.

But why bother with vendors in a mall? Why not just rent land somewhere and sell from stacks of ugly cubes?

How many of Merchant A's items are TRULY unique? I bet that out of 100 dresses, 10 of them are full-length, flexi-prim skirted dresses... all she'd have to do would put ONE "identi-prim" with the name "Full Length, Flexi-Prim Dress" or whatever to get that type of dress listed. Does she really need to list them separately as "blue, green, yellow, pink, etc?" Won't the customer searching on that dress be able to see all the extra colors when she comes to shop?

better yet - put them underground.

The question should be less how merchants can employ cunning tactics to get search results, and more how accurate the search actually is.

At the moment, vast numbers of merchants use vendors. The proposed search clearly does not properly represent those goods - this was the same with the ESC search, though that has been abandoned apparently. Therefore the proposed search is not properly representing what is available in SL. Saying "well, people who use vendors need to add extra prims with the right names" is really saying "this search doesn't work properly and you need to take new measures to account for that". I tend to think that the search _should_ work properly and that is what needs to be aimed at. After all, it is meant to be an improvement, not a reason for merchants to have to alter all of their stuff in some arbitrary way.

Strictly budgetary concerns. A 512 will rent for 200+ L/week, typically. Remember, there are lots of people who don't want to put a single cent into this game. They are basic members and do not own land. They may make enough from camping/hosting/DJing/scripting/escorting/dancing/whatever other service to open a store in a mall and pay rent on an apartment, but not to rent out two full parcels of land (home and business), or maybe even one. I have a small plaza that offers 20 prims for 50L/week (In light of the new search, I may get rid of it completely, as now big malls with properly named prims are now favored over smaller venues). Typically, it would be someone who can only afford to pay that much who would rent there - someone just starting out and needing a place to show off their wares. Now the financial burden is on them to make at least 200/week if they want to have their own shop and not put any money into the game.

Let's say, for simplicity's sake, that Merchant A and Merchant B both sell two styles of Cheongsam dress, in ten different colors each.

Someone searches for "Cheongsam Dress".

They see twenty listings for Merchant B, listing every color they sell, and the price for each.

They see two listings for Merchant A, listing one color each, or maybe listing "Available in red, pink, blue, orange..." at the end of the line (which is probably not even visible until you click that line in the search results).

Which merchant just got more advertizing? Which is more likely that a new customer, who knows nothing about either merchant, will go to?

I would have to believe that most people would glance at that and think, "Merchant B has a huge selection! I'll go there. Merchant A only has a couple dresses that they sell of the type I am looking for."

This isn't entirely academic. I am seriously thinking that with this new system, I may as well close all my mall locations and trash my scripted vendor system, and just sell from one huge store, with single box prims for each of the hundreds of items that I sell. Because I can't see any other way to get the same visibility that the 'sells from single prim objects' merchants will get. And none of my mall stores have enough prims available to display even half of the items that I sell there, if I have to use one prim per item.

I agree somewhat with what you are saying. Personally I think it's incredibly redundant to list 100 of the same item, with the only difference being color. But that is what could occur. I think once users start using the new search, they will grow weary of wading through such results, and go to more targeted searches, such as classifieds and Places. Word of mouth, and "wow that's great, where did you get it?" will continue to be major forces in moving traffic. I can safely say my last 80 purchases were all from seeing things on other people. I think the best thing to do is watch and see what develops.

one question about all this - how often do the lindens scan the grid for items for sale?
Does anyone know?

On point I'd like to make.

If I TP into a store that's nothing but box after box of single sale items that lags me to hell and back as SL tries to load all the textures along the very inept texture feed LL has set up, I'm personally TPing right the heck back out and noting that store as a place NOT to go to.

Like the gamed traffic, people will figure out the nitch of "real" stores and use that to find what they want from vendors that actually make a good product and offer good service.

With current traffic system, I start at the bottom. Why? Because those at the top are still gaming the system. I TP in and see camping chairs/pads/etc, I'm gone. I don't care about the product. Camping adds to traffic and falsely portrays the numbers, imo. I feel if a vendor needs to game traffic, then their stuff isn't worth crap. It's not always the case, but is a good % of the time.

"Box stores" will be the same way. I much rather see vendors than box prims for sale, along with an astetically pleasing store.

Cheep and quick doesn't get the job done.

~Jessy

Probably as often as they update the map.

Ceera, consider this - someone decides to open up a themed mall - akin to what Hairspray does as an island. Smaller vendors, all selling the same genre of stuff, will now have the advantage of going to Shaka Zulu's Ethnic African Mall because the mall itself will have the advantage of selling all the same items, and will trump someone else who has a smaller plot of land. The malls still have an advantage over an individual, but *only* if they sell the same kind of stuff out of prim boxes.

They say it will take 1 to 3 days for a new object to show up in Search, or for changed information to show in Search.

To get these free listings, all you have to do is make the land searchable in Search/places, which costs L$30 per week for the parcel (virtually all malls are listed, and that listing is paid for by the mall owner). Then initially any 'for sale' items in the parcel will default to getting listed for free, one listing per item. You can turn them off individually. Compare that to paying at least L$50 for every classified ad.

I gather that after they populate the database, for any new items you would need to check the "show in search" box when you set the item for sale, to get it to show. But who won't check that, when they are trying to sell the item to the general public? Why turn down free advertizing for every item you're selling?

There won't be a seperate search tab for Objects. They will be lumped in with the "All" and "Classifieds" listings, and you won't initially be able to select just objects or to exclude object listings.

I ran some numbers, comparing my main store, which is on a 2048 M2 double-prim parcel, versus my various mall locations. Ignoring the initial price I paid for the main store's land on a private island (not necessary to pay up front with many landlords), the cost per prim or the 936 prims I can place at my main store is less than the cost per prim at the cheapest "L$50 per week for 25 prims allocation" mall spaces that I sell from with vendors. And some of my mall spaces cost 4 times that much per week, because they supposedly get better traffic and more customers through the mall. Even with the current setup, my main store gets the same sort of sales volume, or better, than my mall stores do. And I juat have one low-cost classified ad per store site.

So if this stands, I may as well close the mall locations. It's chaeper to run one large store than it is to run a bunch of small mall locations, where I won't even be able to get listings for everything I sell. I suppose I could leave those stores alone, and just "prim up" my main store. But when the main store shows in hundreds more search results than any of the mall locations, can there be any doubt which location will get the most sales?

That's the main reason why I don't like web based SL stores really. If I'm looking for something specific (in this example a specific kind of dress) I'm only really interested in the different places that sell them, not what colours/options are available (it obviously matters, but I'll find that out if I decide to tp over).

Seeing 21 results that only represent two stores isn't particularly useful, it should only return one result per store.

On the topic of vendors, single prims for sale are far more realiable (no script glitches) and much faster (it's wait 1-3 minutes for everything to rez, or wait 1-3 minutes per click on the next button).

Big malls will be charging them close to the same price as a 512 plot. The reason big malls charge higher prices is because they attract customers. However this new system is going to direct people away from looking for malls and browsing and into browsing via search, which changes matters rather dramatically and I'd say it's the big malls, rather than small plazas that are going to be the ones considering their options.

I can also see a big increase in yard sales.

Why shouldn't a themed mall like Hairspray do better than a mall with Xcite, womens clothes, gadgets? If you've got a quarter sim of all the same genre of stuff, you have an advantage over the single shop on a 1024. I don't see it as the end of malls, but I do see a transformation coming.

It's not the end of malls but they're going to have to consider how they market their wares and when someone can rent a 512 for less than the price of a shop in a big mall then people are going to consider their options. It's changing the dynamic of how people find items.

If I have an item for sale on a store on my land and an item for sale in a mall, someone searching for that object isn't going to care where it is. However right now people happily browse malls. Malls attract people by being a collective, there's power in the classified ad, will it have such power still when the new search is implemented?

It look like many of you need to read about how the Google search appliance works.

http://www.google.com/enterprise/gsa

Just so you know... the sky is *not* falling )