Let's Fix the Marketplace

Some time has passed – long enough, actually, that I can't tell without looking – since The Lab surveyed Residents to learn about how the Second Life Marketplace might be changed for the better. Let's review the results.

None.

It is time now to fix the Marketplace and as The Lab takes a commission on sales, it is certainly worth their while. Errors, usability issues, and general maintenance all need to be examined. Here is a brief list of mine just off the top of my head:

Fix the "Cannot Add" bug. It happens some nine out of ten times I add something to my card and yet the item is actually added. Quite often if you hit the Add button again, everything seems normal. How many of us have bought two of one item because we didn't thoroughly check our Cart.

The service often lags harder and more often than Bay City during a big event. Amazon and other shopping services operate on a much larger scale and yet have swifter page loads.

The Lab needs to inject some elephant memory DNA into the system so it can remember my preferences. True, there really is only one preference to set – how many items to display on a page – but it is not remembered between sessions and often not when simply loading another page. The DNA upgrade could also make for a far more efficient Favorites list.

Speaking of which ... at least something never forgets. Items will remain in your Favorites even if they are no longer for sale. This list needs to be dynamic, reflecting not only the item's availability, but any price fluctuations or product updates.

A Wish List would be a great addition to the Favorites list. Or call it a Gift Registry. Any list where others could see items that I would like to own but for some reason or another I have not purchased.

Only two items listed per page of Reviews? Don't be silly. And your place in the sequence will reset if you click on any other tab. Say you are reading a review on page eleven of twenty and you wish to check the Features to investigate something the reviewer wrote. Click Features, read, click Reviews and you are back on page one.

On the topic of the Features tab ... it should be the first up when a page is accessed. Let the Details tab be second for folks who need more information.

A larger font, please, or the ability to control fonts. I'm 8 years old in SL and that means my eyesight is failing in my dotage. Oh, and lots of Residents have vision impairments. Sure, there are nice viewers like Safari that allow folks to easily enlarge portions of a page.

Lastly (for now), a true nit-pick: The interface is just so last century. Time for a refresh.

New Freebie from [PoP Shop]

To the surprise of many, I do sell and give away stuff I make in Second Life. Once in a while I have an in-world shop but you can always find my products on the Second Life Market place here. Partly out of boredom, a new free item was added today (get it here): The [PoP Shop] Builder Deck w/Pose Stand (& bonus Alignment Guide).

I took the classic builder grid we all know and love then messed with it.

It still works like the classic grid, but that noir scheme makes everything you build classier.

A 7 LI Alignment Guilde uses lasers to make your builds even cooler (yeah, man!).

A handy pose stand allows you to edit avatar attachments and follow the grid into the sky if you pop it up to some 2000m like lots of builders do these days. Gratuitous glowy effect included at no charge.

How easy it is to be a Noob? Part I

The Lab's recent announcement (not on the Official blog, mind you as that would be too easy, but here for one source) of its new CEO, Ebbe Altberg, has many people thinking about what might happen to Our World. Most of the comments I've seen in various sources has to do with The Lab's famous inability to communicate with the Residents – like not making their announcement on the official blog, as noted. One of my first concerns has been about the New Resident Experience. I had both of these in mind when I made a late night purchase from the Second Life Marketplace.

For many of us with our own land its natural to just unpack things at home. Long time Residents might even have build rights on some group land for said purpose. At minimum, experienced users know of at least one sandbox location (I keep two in my Favorites so I can log in to one right away). For the rest the question Where can I rez my purchase Inworld? applies. Thank goodness the Marketplace is there to help us on the post-purchase receipt page (or so they call it, but its not really a receipt). Click the handy link and you are whisked to the Opening Boxes page on the SL Wiki.

Then find a buried link for "this list" of public sandboxes and click ...

... then scroll almost to the bottom of the page for a list of links to public sandboxes (or keep scrolling for a list of privately-owned sandboxes). Easy as pie, right?

Happy Yet Sad: A Touch of Ireland

How did I not know about A Touch of Ireland (SLurl) before yesterday when I got the news that it was closing and was having a massive sale? Admittedly it looks familiar and I think I saw one of the Oktoberfest dresses on the SL Marketplace (SLM) when shopping a couple months ago, but I don't think I've been here ere now. Yes, the sale makes me happy yet I'm sad that the shop is going away. Take a look at some pix of the amazing clothes and product shots in the shop.

Tons of holiday costumes, many with special skins or accessories, like these for Día de los Muertos. If there's a national holiday somewhere, I bet you can find a costume for it in this shop.

I bought these devil and angel costumes for only L$50 each, normally L$375 apiece, wings, horns, halo, and skins included. Most items look to have the same markdown. And aren't these pictures stunning? Each product prim is like a work of art. I also bought a Wizard of Oz Scarecrow Girl costume at a huge discount (Web).

I bet pictures like these could be sold as art either in Second Life or on Web sites that feature art.

Squeeeee! I'm so not femme enough to pull this off so I only looked. Despite the gown being just L$50, the matching jewelry pack to the right was L$200 – a fair price or a steal combined.

Of course A Touch of Ireland has Irish clothes! I don't remember if I bought this one or not because I was just clicking and paying, clicking and paying until my L$500-something purse was nearly empty. I bought one item for just L$1!

I hope that AliciaKay Kilara can bring her shop back in-world sometime but until then you should stock up now, ladies, as the shop is going away on the 16th!!. Only a few items will be available on the SLM (Web) at full-price. Guys, too, should stop in as there are many outfits for the gents.

The WTF Towel

Between May 16, 2012 and just a few moments before starting this post, I've given away 989 sets of  my [pop shop] Towel Day 2012 Ladies Mesh Wrap Around Towels via the SL Marketplace (Web). Mind you, Towel Day (Web) was months ago (May 25th), yet every day I get notices that I've given away tons more sets – some 950 sets after the event ended, based on a rough calculation of the Marketplace report data. And the item has had some 3057 page views since it was listed. That makes me wonder how many more towels will be sold before the 2013 update.

Pouloco

When I get busy building in Second Life, I don't think about much else. Like blogging. Sometimes eating. I've been known to dream about building. If you've been following my SL microblog (here) you've probably seen that I've been building a gasoline station. Well, its done and here's the back story.

My brother, CC Columbo (in SL), tried to convince me to start a garden shop when we moved into Bay City. He bought a lovely shop structure and even helped with the landscaping. It didn't take. For some reason the idea was met with apathy so he came up with something he wanted, a good Irish pub. However, while I was mucking about with avoidance, someone built a neighborhood pub not a block away (SLurl). Plan B was required.

And Plan B was a hotel! CC worked on this himself, actually, and had a rather clever one going. He then started working on several variations and was generally having a good time. In the meantime, he pushed Plan C, a filling station/convenience store. He asked me to make the garage for him and often hovered over my Real Life shoulder to point out features he wanted.

Really, I think that Plan B was a ruse since he's wanted a filling station for at least a month (see here). Afterall, our eldest RL brother owns a repair garage, our middle brother used to manage a filling station, and about once a month I don my personalized coveralls (Name tag: Juggs) or garage shirt and earn a bit of extra cash cleaning up the eldest brother's garage (not ashamed to admit I get paid more if I loosen up a couple buttons during hot weather so the boys kick in a few extra bucks).

CC gave this picture to me to use as inspiration, but with the shape of the lot we had, swapping the design end-for-end was required. He also gave me several pictures of other Sinclair Stations from the period on which Bay City is based (roughly, the 50s-60s).

Come to CC's Pouloco Station in Bay City - Dennis (SLurl).

And this is what I came up with ... a bit more modern and with a different brand. I pegged the design as a rehabilitated structure in the mid-1960s so I could mix in some of the newer-appearing convenience store machines I found in-world and on the SL Marketplace. Until the day the whole thing was installed it was still going to be a Sinclair station, with my partner Angela Seale working on some retro-chic gas pumps based on some Sinclair units I found on the Web. It always nagged me, however, about using a prominent brand name so with that and on the advice of others, I came up with a new brand, Pouloco (Nothing Runs Like A Chicken, Cross the Road with Pouloco, and Put a Chicken in Your Tank), for the Poultry Oil Company, and changed all the Sinclair graphics I had already uploaded. Then I had to shift the whole build several meters in two directions because I had totally mismeasured and hadn't noticed for several weeks.

The pumps you see are temporary as Angela is still finalizing the permanent ones. She'll sell non-branded versions to help cover her expenses and to pay for all the rent CC has to be charging her for to leave her car at the pumps since Day One. By they way, Marianne McCann found some nice garage coveralls (and has a great pic of the garage here) so Ange, me, and CC can all dress alike now. I might work on little name patches sometime.

I created a number of custom pieces and graphics, mostly signs, and will sell some of them inside the convenience store portion of the build. Mostly, though, this build was a labor or love. I balked at the job at first as it seemed like I was back in school. CC was an RL teacher and I had his classes for years (pretty much grades 8 through 12) so it was almost like he was giving me homework. But I enjoyed the challenge as it had been a while since I had built something on this scale. And if it is true that "the devil is in the details" then this build is sin-on-a-prim because I had a great time tweaking and sweating and tweaking some more on almost ever detail, even after the garage opened.

Sure the soda and Slurpee machines are a bit modern, but they are fabulously detailed and I make L$1 from each sale. Hot dogs from the more retro unit are also L$1 each, but you get a custom-made, animated frankfurter in a bun. Popcorn is free despite the L$5 sign. Either I have to find a way to erase that sign or find a way to charge for the stuff. CC bought the L$300 cash register but the decorations and machines in this room set me back about L$1000 ... hopefully I sell a lot of sodas and dogs. CC also bought a really, really nice set of fixtures for the restroom. Much better than the stuff I made and adapted.

I had also made some sculpted garage bay equipment such as a lift, tool boxes, shelves, and more. Then I found everything I had made but in mesh from a shop that that wasn't charging much at all. Fewer prims and much, much better looking? I had to drop the bucks on that stuff. Now I need to get up some girly pictures, slop down some oil and dirt, and take pix to my eldest brother for a critique.

CC made a lovely headstone honoring his real life daughter and Angela left some beautiful lilies.

Saving prims is always a good idea, especially as Angela and I still have our home on the lot, right behind the privacy wall (like there is any real privacy in SL). And CC had me build a cemetery (Web) in the roadside corner.

Of course, I still want more prims. Sometime I'll look at the house and the garage to see what can be trimmed. I found an animated mole in a hole I'd like to put in the yard and the shop needs more signs. Still, though, the Pouloco property really has a great feel. I'm as pleased with it as anything I've built in Second Life to date.

Be Alert (the world needs more lerts)

Towel Day is May 25th, just a few days away. As of the moment I write this post I've given away 110 commemorative towels via the Second Life Marketplace here. A number have gone to men though I honestly don't know how they'd look. But the towel is transferable so maybe they are gifting it. Or maybe they are getting it because there are pix of me all scantily clad in the cottony goodness of this towel.

Shop Local

Our family — like most, I'm sure — is no stranger to shopping online or via the TV shopping channels, but whenever possible we prefer to shop locally, such as at the hardware store a few blocks away, rather than take our custom elsewhere. This supports the local economy, builds trust with frequented shops, and is actually more convenient in many respects.

Without consciously thinking about this, when I logged into Second Life for the first time today and wanted to look for some particle scripts, I immediately proceeded to Outy's in Nangrim (SLurl), my home sim to shop "locally" ... and then it hit me. That's not really a "local" shop for several reasons, not the least of which is that there seems to be one every few hundred meters on any SL roadway. That makes it a "national" chain and not a local "mom and pop" store. And the Mainland isn't all that big anyway, if you were to outright measure it (as seen here) so everywhere is "local" if you think of it.

The real comparison, I suppose, brings us back to shopping online versus going to a "brick and mortar" (or prim and physics-defying principles in virtual terms) shop. Many merchants have left their in-world shops to sell their goods only on the Second Life Marketplace since that requires little at all (or now with Direct Delivery, no land). This has got to affect the economy much as it would in Real Life. Residents are ditching their private estates, huge tracts of land lay empty, often abandoned, on the Mainland. My friend Daniel Voyager keeps track of this sort of thing (he's very bright and never seems to sleep) and just recently had a post on his blog noting that total region count (and thus land area) has dropped yet again.

This has to effect The Lab's bottom line as land rent is probably their main source of income (I could be wrong since they also have commissions from the Marketplace and premium membership fees as revenue streams, though I don't know which might be larger). But what about in-world merchants? If shoppers rely more and more on buying from the Marketplace, trips to in-world shops will decrease and the land will become less economical to keep.

See a cycle starting? Makes one want to shop local more often.

New XStreet, New Problems

It wasn't that long ago that The Lab announced a revamp of the Web-based Second Life® shopping service, XStreetSL (Web). It is now called Second Life Marketplace and it looks pretty much like the previews we were given. No "live" previews that I could find, though hints were given that one could see it early. If I had learned earlier than today that my Favorites, Rated/Unrated Items, and Wish List items would be gone with the revamp, I would have complained at the time. Now I'm looking for a place to bring this to someone's attention though I'm sure the typical Deaf Ear that The Lab is famous for having will be turned. I should have known something was up when the Purchase as Gift option stopped working a month ago.

My Favorites was a great way to quickly access frequently purchased items and to think about possible purchases. Now I have to search for them all again and likely bookmark them in my browser. Or, I could just Landmark the store, buy the items in-world, and tell The Lab "screw you and your commission". Not as convenient, but there is a satisfaction factor.

Rated/Unrated Items was also a great way to track my purchases. I loved giving feedback and, with one exception (see here), helped good relations with many merchants. Maybe I'll be able to rate items I purchase in the new design. The Reviews feature is not available at this time and for the items I've checked, all my ratings and comments from previous purchases are gone.

Wish List? How little I knew ye. I seldom used it but I was making an effort. It was a nusiance but I wanted to use it. Really. There seems to be a new Wish List, non-functional at the moment, but I can't find my old one.

The good news? The design looks nice, many features seem to be merchant-friendly, and the search/sort features remind me of shopping at Amazon.com, though a friend of mine says the new layout is a clone of the shopping area for the game The Sims (Web). I don't see it. Not enough positives for me, however, to make up for the losses, especially with The Lab's recent changes that log my out of all the Web pages tied to SecondLife.com if I'm idle for a few minutes.