Commerce

Second Life Market Place CHANGING

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Last Friday was the Third Party Developers User Group meeting. We often have a wealth of news coming from this UG meeting. This week we learn of a Market Place (MP) project that has been in progress via closed alpha/beta since January 2014. We don’t get much news about the Market Place and commerce.

Viewer Managed Market Place

Brooke Linden spoke at this meeting about how the market place will be changing. The Lab is going to move us from the current Direct Delivery system to Viewer Managed Market Place. I expect for customers little if anything will change. But, for merchants this will be a big change and involve migrating the current Market Place to a new backend system.

Server-Scripting UG 2014-41 - Halloween Nears
Server-Scripting UG 2014-41 – Halloween Nears

I did not hear anything about changes in how the Market Place will look to customers or how it will operate from the customers’ side of things.

The problems the Lab is seeing with Direct Delivery, a feature that starts in the SL Market Place and ends in the viewer in-world, is merchants are having problems managing their Market Place (MP) inventory. Also, the Market Place engineers have not been able to fully complete Direct Delivery. Magic Boxes are still used for selling items the merchant does not have COPY rights to. 

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Market Place 2014-2

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Shug Maitland has an article up pointing to Why moving a shop to Marketplace ‘hurts’ the SL economy. She prefers to shop in-world, where she can see what she is buying and demo it. I suspect many of us have similar preferences.

She uses the Market Place as an index and search engine for Second Life. In-world search sucks so badly we have little choice. That says something when we consider how bad the Market Place search is. I often end up using Google via a manual search command like: site:marketplace.secondlife.com gesture vendor 

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Taxes Closing Regions?

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I saw a discussion on SLUniverse about a number of regions closing without notice. The discussion centers on the closing of Beach Front. See: Beach Front Realty Closed?

It seems the land owners collected the month’s tier from tenants and then closed the regions. Correspondence with Linden Lab revealed the closing was ‘deliberate’. I suppose that means the region owner contacted the Lab and scheduled the closing. Not having seen the actual correspondence I cannot tell if the phrasing is nuanced spin that might indicate the Lab closed the owners regions for some reason.

The tenants may be able to get their money back via PayPal. The Lab generally considers these things a resident-to-resident matter and stays out of them. 

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Market Place Change

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Yesterday a new post appeared on the Second Life™ Blog: New Merchant Requirement. The Lab is making Payment Information a requirement to sell on the Market Place (MP).

MP New Requirement
MP New Requirement

Making this requirement should stop some of the churn of accounts made by griefers and copyboters.

This will be hard on some international users of SL. Getting verified and having a means to move funds in and out of SL is easy for those of us in the USA. It’s more difficult in many countries.

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Second Life Market Place Update 2013-29

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The Second Life™Market Place (MP) has been a source of pain and frustration for many. For myself I rate it as an annoyance to my Second Life experience. I continually hope they will get it fixed and working well. But, keeping track of what is going on with the MP is enough of a challenge I tend to ignore it and follow Darrius Gothly’s coverage over at dgp4sl.com.

Fraud by: Peter Blanchard @ Flickr
Fraud by: Peter Blanchard @ Flickr

Today I see he has a new article out: Wanton and Willful Fraud by Linden Lab. Darrius tends to rant. But, his rants are well explained and backed up by his experience.

He does say that the new Direct Delivery (DD) service of the MP is a good thing and generally works better than the Magic Boxes ever did.

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