Selling on Xstreet just got more expensive

the biggest issue with upfront charges is at renewal time. if the account doesn't have the funds to cover all then you have to code the rules on what money to apply to what listing etc etc etc. either that or you run into the issue of having accounts owe you money.

upfront listing always sounds good but really you'd be better off with some kind of annual account fee - even staged for certain amounts.. i.e. 10 listings = xL pa, 100L = whatever. that way they pay it or they dont and you don't have to jig around with the minutae of individual listings. There's still issues around people upgrading the fee or downgrading if they remove but the rules around that will be a lot simpler.

Yeah; you are right. The trouble with LSL is that you have no way of knowing if someone has available funds in their account (other than at the time someone pays a script). If someone is making a sale, you can be 99.9999% sure they have money in their account because you have the code to do that from the buyer's end, and you end up coding the sale to the customer and that's easy because no data storage is needed. If you have to keep track of accumulated fees, then that'd be a nightmare. Straight commission it is because that's the easiest way to ensure that the money is there to make the payments valid, and who wants to pay up-front if they don't know if they'll ever make a sale? People don't want to lose money, but they are willing to share a sale at the time it is made because they have positive inflow of cash at that time.

What would really help the bottom line, and I disagree with their existence, is listing enhancements. It's a win-lose-lose for the person charging for the enhancement. the sellers and customers respectively. (i.e. the seller loses the money from their profits or has to jack up prices thus losing # of sales, and the customer always ends up paying for the advertising anyways)

Startups always have the problem of not being able to provide data to convince merchants to part with their cash upfront as there is actual value to spending the money. I'd be happy to pay an annual fee to list a certain number of items in a storefront if you can provide data on unique views, sales conversion rates etc. or even if you offered initially a fee free period (which gets over the pain of having to list the items) and then at the end of the trial I can effectively review the outcome and make a decision on whether to continue.

Yeah; but then people get upset like with XStreetSL with "changing" fees. There seems to be two main issues with XStreetSL's changes...

1. Freebies are for all intents and purposes "going away". They will punitively be charged a L$99/month fee per month because they are considered "advertisement", will be relegated to a freebie category, and will not be able to participate in the online search. Basically making freebies rare unless they truly are advertisements. All "real" freebies will disappear unless you have a rich benefactor to provide them (like I would still provide my free universal translator even though it costs, but would pull my other freebies).
2. All items will be charged a L$10 listing fee per month (PER ITEM). This will greatly increase the costs of providing non-"hot sellers" on xstreetsl.

...the whole argument about LL "springing it on us" is a non-issue to me as you have the right to evolve your service. Though the issue was more about who was giving input than maybe the timing.

If I were to initially start a system with no listing fee, then charge a modest listing fee (say L$10/week for all of their items, not per item) then people might cry foul in large numbers. You could go with a "trial period", but then the headaches with that. I like straight-forward, low-cost solutions where someone would be willing to put up a little bit of money (if it were cheap) and give it a go since you'd not be out too much money if you didn't like it.

xstreet is different though. it was part of LLs recruitment and retention policy to encourage freebies and their marketing distorted what freebies used to be. XSL has always had a reputation as a dumping ground - even before LL bought it. many times I heard the "list it on xsl, you've got nothing to lose" or "I'll keep it on XSL"when people spoke about retiring old stock.

There's nothing wrong with having your paying customers subsidising true freebies. You'll note I talked about a storefront rather than just an account. *that's* what makes it valuable to me. but someone who is giving back the the community probably doesn't need that. They just need somewhere to put it so people can find it.

you'll probably have as many different uses of the website as there are merchants. The goods decide how the site is used. I sell very few big ticket items via any of the websites as people come inworld to see and buy (my xsl stats tell me that) but i sell a lot of smaller/less complex/wearable/cheaper things through the sites.

So having a shopfront to me is a valuable add on. One of my other brands sells very little because it doesn't have an inworld location and the items are the kind people want to look at and so it's not relevant. they'd be posted only as a long tail set.

whatever you do though an ongoing listing fee is asking for trouble - purely from the coding/management of it. LL don't realise what they've let themselves in for and aren't knowledgeable enough to come up with the business rules they need to make it work effectively. They think the howls are bad now.. I can't wait to see what happens when they release it lol If you really are going to go for a listing fee you must make sure if there's no money then the item is delisted. otherwise it's a pr/cost nightmare waiting to happen. and you'll still have to come up with business rules around how to apply whatever money is in the account to which listing.

if you do go with an initial listing fee then just remember to make it easy to list. Somehow xsl has become the easiest of all to list on when it used to be the poor relation to onrez.
I'm already on apez, mvx, xsl and slapt.. mvx and slapt have only limited items because it's too time consuming and not straightforward. I pine for the days when my only grumbles were that onrez needed square and smaller pics than slx. sigh

Well my thoughts on ease of adding an item would be editing a notecard with your items. Seems more straightforward than having to click through a lot of buttons and dialogs...

#Use the rest of this notecard to list your items for sale.
#List the item multiple times to specify additional color/style options. Must have same category and item name.
#
#Category,Item Name,Style/Color,Price,Inventory Name, Inventory Notecard, Inventory Demo/Trial, Description
#
#1. Category = the category of the item. (See Help Notecard for list of categories)
#2. Item Name = the product name you will show to the customer
#3. Style/Color=the option that will be displayed to the customer (8 characters max). If there is only one Item listed, then the customer will not be presented with options.
#4. Price=the price of the item in L$. You can set the price of all items to the same or different.
#5. Item Name=the corresponding inventory name of the item that will be delivered.
#6. Item Notecard=a notecard with additional information on the product, more pictures, etc. (Optional)
#7. Item Demo=a corresponding inventory name of a FREE demo/trial version of your product. Note: this will be FREE to customer (Optional)
#8. Description: a short description of the product being sold to be displayed to the customer. Maximum 3 lines of text (separated by "\n" and 30 characters per line.
#
#For example, if I am selling a "Shirt" with 3 different colors and a blank box with a notecard called "Blank Box Info", I will list them as follows...
#=================================
Clothing-Unisex|Shirt|Red|100|Shirt (Red)|||A beautiful shirt colored\nin beautiful shades of red.
Clothing-Unisex|Shirt|Blue|100|Shirt (Blue)|||A cool shirt for those hot summer days.
Clothing-Unisex|Shirt|Gold|150|Shirt (Gold)|||Want to be regal or show of\nyour riches? Go Gold!
Gadgets-Misc|Blank Box|A blank box|1|Blank Box|Blank Box Info|Blank Box Trial|The best box you will ever find!

======
Each server box would have the notecard that "maps" the items for sale to their metadata in the notecard. There would be a single notecard, landmark, and texture for the seller to market their brand.

Or maybe have a "second mode" (maybe it's easier for some people) where you wouldn't need a notecard, you'd just dump your items for sale into the box and the LSL script would pull-in the Item Name, Item Description, Permissions, and Price. You'd just set a category for each "server box" you'd keep your items in.

You need to allow pretty long descriptions. I would recommend one notecard per distinct product, with a more human readable format, for example:

# Example file. Lines starting with # are ignored.
Category: Clothing-Unisex
Name: Shirt
Styles: red, green, blue,
Price: 100
Deliver: Shirt (%S)
Image: Shirt Picture (%s)
Notecard: Shirts
Demo: Shirt (Mud)

Description would go from the first blank line to the end of the notecard, or maybe until the next blank line, or a line just containing some signal string (eg, "." alone on a line). %S would be replaced by the style with the first letter capitalized, and %s by the style in lowercase. The same substitution would be performed on the asset names.
.
# Multiple items in the same notecard would be for more complex styles, and would only need to contain headers that differ from the original
Styles: plaid
Name: Special Plaid Shirt
Price: 150

This is the same shirt, and it's got the same description here, except the description notes that it's in plaid and allows you to travel 50% faster!
.
# This kind of file format is much easier to edit and understand than a bunch|of|lines|where|you|have|to|count|symbols
# And it's not really any harder to parse.

After another night of thinking about this whole fiasco, I've decided to raise my prices across the board. People have been telling me since I began selling I was pricing way too low, but I wasn't sure my quality was up to higher prices.

My raising prices isn't going to be any earth-shaker as I think my highest priced item is $150 or less (still on first Pepsi) and 99% of them are in the 15L-45L range. This Xstreet caper has now convinced me to raise prices and it will be interesting to see if there is any difference in sales.

I'm still a bit concerned if LL is going to charge the listing fee for inactive items. Somewhere in this thread someone said one of the Lindens said they wouldn't be, but until I see it in an official statement or the first month of this new policy goes through and the inactive items have not been charged, I won't feel too confident on this issue.

I haven't decided whether or not I'm going to stay with XStreet. I'd have to increase my prices to cover the costs, while still making ends meet in world. I'm thinning my item ranks now, deleting the ones that I should have deleted ages ago.

I do know that when I am less hectic, I'll be listing all my items that I intend to sale with SLapt.me and maybe Apez. Might as well branch out.

Selling shit on xstreet must be more expensive, but they have also do something about alts or friends fake reviews damaging business.

Not allow no payment info on file to rate an item or to use xstreest to sale something?

If Linden lab want more money from Xstreet they have to do something about fake sales fake rewievs. You now only need few proxy servers to rank your shit in the first 100 sales rank.

Hence why you never trust sales ranks and review anyways. I won't include them in my sales network.

Oya that reminds me to delete my items.

Thanks for that.

Slapt is a very high risk investment for me with NO guarantee of any returns whatsoever, because of LL's ability to change the goalposts at a whim, yes I want to ensure over the next 5 years it at least breaks even, but it was never started to turn a profit. It was started, to offer SL merchants a viable and independant alternative to Xstreet. The annual investment for the site is about €10k allowing for marketing, in and outworld advertising, sponsorship of various high profile events in SL etc. and the running costs and bandwidth for 1 dedicated and possibly 2 dedicated servers as the site grows and an inworld sim.

Fortunately I have the spare cash to fund it and not be worried if I lose it either and for many of the sites springing up now, whilst their intentions are admirable and merchants can always do with extra places to sell their wares, I think they will soon realise that its not a way to instant cash gratification, as I thought 2 years ago when we started cruching the numbers and forecasting the growth curves etc. you soon realise as you put the business plan together that is very high risk with as I said no guarantees of any returns as well as dammed hard work

These merchants are picky and demanding buggars lol

Bet you didn't forecast that LL would create quite the current opportunity, though.

Of course, the Good Lab giveth, and the Good Lab taketh away--although I'm a bit puzzled by the concern I've heard that LL could just "pull the plug" on competition by blocking communications to in-world objects, or delivery of goods. There's a tremendous amount of content dependent on that all working, and more every day, having nothing to do with web retail. I suppose they could block specific competitors by fiat, but then they'd have to contend with the wrath of merchants who list with those competitors.

Recent actions may appear to suggest a willingness to throw merchants under the bus, but I think that's not really correct. It's my impression that the Commerce team really thought they were listening to merchant stakeholders, but heard from a largely unrepresentative sample and then filtered the signal through an astonishingly obsolete vision of e-commerce.

Sometimes I wonder why LL has this bizarre penchant to play to their weaknesses instead of their strengths. Perhaps a self-esteem issue?

Well they could block outworld comms, but they'd have to block inworld comms to stop inworld versions of slapt or xstreetsl.

Unfortunately it has been my experience that when you have a bunch of people editing configuration notecards they all will define how it should be done in different ways. On one project where I did that I built in time after everyone did their work to edit the results so they would all work with the script ... and was glad I added that time.

Heh. Welcome to project management. Except replace "editing configuration notecards" with all the different ways pieces of software can interact in an unrestricted environment. Network protocols, procedural APIs, file formats, file layouts, databases, ...

That's why so much time gets "wasted" on defining APIs before any of the code is written, and then afterwards you still have glitches.

No for sure I didnt forecast this thats for sure Yes we are aware that LL could block the comms but we plans in place in case they do, but as much as I personally feel LL makes some crazy cock ups, I feel this is just about creating extra revenue for the Lab based on the fact it holds now the market share. In the early days of slapt when I was dealing with LL legal team over matters they were helpful and courteous with me at all time and they could have caused us problems from then if they were intent on wanting the marketplace just for themselves.

I believe the Xstreet team are understaffed as far as developers for that area are concerned as I have heard this from reliable sources and they are trying to put a full Xstreet dev team together. Maybe just maybe this charges system is another way to help raise some revenue for the Xstreet arm to fund development. Remember we at slapt do not take any wages, we do it because we love SL and I fund the company as a registered business so I do not have to go cap in hand for extra funding from upper management and we do not have to be profit driven as Xstreet has to, if I need extra funding I look at how much and for what and get the card out to pay for it an advantage Xstreet and others do not have.

Personally I want to see Xstreet have a healthy business as it reflects on our business and the marketplace of SL is big enough for several systems as they will all have differing ways of working and ultimately that benefits all the merchants. We have several plans in the pipeline which I wont discuss yet to enable the growth of slapt and we are always open to working with others on projects thats for sure.

I think it could be the start of an exciting time for sites such as ours and ideas such as Hank's etc.

Just my personal opinions though

I know, I am a follower of the cult of 'The Mythical Man-Month' and reread it often. Even though the amount of data was large I knew the only way to get it done right the first time was if the scripter (me) was the sole person doing it.

Someone else convinced me that as a project lead my time was more valuable on other tasks, so against my better judgement I subdivided something up that I knew was atomic. Then spent the last few days before the deadline in a mad dash to edit all of the notecard contributions together while I had other pressing (but unrelated) last-minute issues. Alternately, I would have been done with the notecards long before that and able to devote more attention to the usual 'whups, our subgroup sort of forgot xyz and this is due at 8 AM' stuff.

Hmmmm... interesting timing:





So, I guess we all did our bit to ease the data transition by removing ~ 50,000 items (so far).

Rime

http://slapt.me/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=1464

and they are disconnecting also

We do indeed have a freebie section

As one of the evil office hour attendees I'm getting cheesed off with the impression that LL listened to us. There were diverse opinions at those office hours, ranging from people who wanted a solution that was akin to price fixing to those who questioned the need for any changes, there was no consensus on the best way forward.

I also think we need to realise that Xstreet is pretty much operating on its own, LL are surely not that bothered whether people spend their Linden dollars on Xstreet or slapt.me, what they care about is where we cash those Linden dollars out, if we're cashing out via the lindex they won't care whether the income is via a LL website or a third party website, they still get a slice out of the cake.

Then why can't we mention other sites in these forums? Officially, I mean.