Selling on Xstreet just got more expensive

So if most crap is removed, and colors are multi-listed in 1 entry, the marketplace will be a lot better. If you then look for a jacket, a page will show 30 different items of reasonable to good quality. Not 30 of the same jacket in different colors, not 25 crappy jackets and 5 good or average ones. Improvement in my eyes.

This could be done without adding fees or even raising them, because the ability to have all that jacket's colors on one listing would reduce search times. In fact, this was something they should have tried BEFORE they added fees. Believe me, I hate having to list each of the 6 colors of the same items, but LL didn't give us the tools to do otherwise.

This could be done without adding fees or even raising them, because the ability to have all that jacket's colors on one listing would reduce search times. In fact, this was something they should have tried BEFORE they added fees. Believe me, I hate having to list each of the 6 colors of the same items, but LL didn't give us the tools to do otherwise.

It's the same story. Just about every problem that has arisen in the 3 years I've been in SL could have been solved IF LL had either heeded the warning signs, listened to the users, or did some heavy lifting. But they always take the easiest route for themselves, with little regard to the downstream consequences. They always want the easy way out.

I know.. which is why I cry male-bovine excrement when someone uses something like the ability to list colors of an object on one listing as an defense for LL's new "fees." I remember asking Philip Linden why we didn't have the tools to deal with the griefers that kept coming back after 06/06/06. His response? "Because we didn't know what tools we'd need." If a griefer hadn't crashed the sim he was in... I'd have asked, "Well, why didn't you listen to your residents? We'd only been asking for exactly what we wanted."

That L$10 per item fee isn't going to go away, and you'll be paying up to 30% for commission on top of that, (probably pre-fee) for the "honor" of being able to have all your colors on one listing. This is something that should be in place for free, because it benefits LL just as much as it benefits us.

Depending upon desire for this marketing opportunity and perceived value given such demand, we will adjust the price as necessary to maximize this value and keep the freebie listings from becoming bloated again.

That's the second time I've seen a comment like that attributed to a Linden The other was, I think during the Zindra caper. I Linden who's name escapes me answered a similar question with basically: "How were we supposed to know what would happen in a year's time?" That's just mind boggling. It's ironic that we are being told to adjust pr adapt, where LL seems totally incapable of doing the same.. Is thinking out of the box against the teachings of the TAO, or does it just doesn't scale well?

One thing that baffles me is that nobody has commented yet on this sentence, smack down in the middle of the freebie fees paragraph:

I dont find it surprising at all. Much of what SL is was taken/bought from what out of the box thinking residents created. Lindex came from GOM. Themed sims came from private estates. XStreet from 3rd party sites. Even alot of bug fixes and viewer features come from the open source community.

LL Created SL at which time the creativity gene in all Lindens was surgically shut off. After that it was what can we mooch off our residents most easily.

Tonight I delisted all products (about 10 of them) from XStreet. My sales stats were during the period I sold there were:

Date: 2008-01-01 To: 2009-11-19

Total number of sales : 186
Total SLL Sales Revenue : $329400
Total SLL Commissions : $16470
Net SLL Proceeds : $312930

SLExchange/XStreet has not accounted for more than 10% of my sales during this period but even so they and the previous owners made a healthy commission from my sales.

My business mainly comes my way via word of mouth and so I doubt that delisting will affect me that much and since LL took over and as the changes they have made have taken effect there has definitely been a decline in sales.

It would even be definitely worth it for me to remain if I could believe that LL could really make XStreet viable from this point forward but I cannot. The measures they have announced are clearly a money grab and not even credible attempts to fix the problems with the whole thing.

Bottom line, they screwed it up, it is now almost worthless and their plans going forward suck monkeys balls.

From what I have seen one of the biggest factors in the marketplace getting cluttered up is the fact that if you sell multiple colors or styles of the same product there is no way to list them under a single listing, the solutions provided by LL do nothing as far as I can tell to address this problem. It should be possible to allow a buyer to choose an item and then choose a color or style of that item rather than having to search through tons and tons of similar listings. If LL was really interested in fixing clutter on XStreet they should start there, instead it seems to me that this is about increasing revenue and has nothing to do with fixing a problem.

This will hurt buyers that use XStreet to find low cost or free items as most of those items will probably end up removed by their sellers. I know there are a lot of people (especially established sl merchants that sell higher prices items) that will really love this but it is definitely at the detriment to the community as a whole. One of the things that I have found wonderful about sl is all the talented people that provide great freebies and low cost items just because they love doing it and want to give back to the community. I guess that sort of good will is not something that LL is interested in promoting anymore.

For those who decide to just suck it up and raise prices to cover the extra cost - you are just feeding the LL money machine. An extra L$10 to list AND 5% of that higher price... I can barely hear above the sound of greedy Linden bean counters hands being wrung in delight.

Paying for higher placement in in-world Search results is next.

Actually, people already do that.. it's called the classifieds. If LL did something like that for XStreet, how many of the big players do you think would jump at the chance?

Actually, people already do that.. it's called the classifieds. If LL did something like that for XStreet, how many of the big players do you think would jump at the chance?

Paying for higher placement in in-world Search results is next.

...until LL makes it disappear in-world.

BTW... is there a way to track the number of active items in Xgreed?

Current status: small profit
Future status: estimated 36% drop in profit

You can sort listings by most expensive to least, currently.

But I've thought for a while now that they should list under 50L items separately. Freebies should also have their own section.

To me that makes more sense than penalising creativity.