SL Marketplace – Page 2

November 12, 2013

More On PrimBay

Thanks to Lelani Carver, I have more information on CasperTech’s PrimBay. Lelani has updated her blog post to include a link to the PrimBay Wiki, which has a lot more information than I was originally able to relay.

I said in my previous post that the site looked a bit sparse, the Wiki informs me that this is by intent:

“The front page of PrimBay is simple. Just a search box. Find what you need, quickly and easily.”

I’m afraid I have to give that a thumbs down, largely because it doesn’t draw curious users in. However other features are certainly worth a thumbs up and they include:

A demo button will be available on listings, no need for a separate listing!
Ability to share listings in social media.
Full purchase support, by L$, Credit Card, or PayPal, including an (optional) device which can make payments automatically, similar to the marketplace.

However where PrimBay really gets interesting is with regards to the future (the current roll out is still officially in the beta phase). Some of the proposed future features:

A special edition of caspervend designed for primbay-only merchants.
Auctions – PrimBay has been designed with auctions in mind, and we will implement these in the coming time.
Multiple store fronts – Multiple brands, one avatar.

There’s more to read on the wiki but PrimBay seems to be throwing down the gauntlet to the SL Marketplace team by introducing features that SL Marketplace merchants have long wanted to see. Multiple store fronts and a demo on the listing being two large feature requests that the SL Marketplace has not yet implemented but which would prove extremely popular for merchants and shoppers alike.

Another feature that SL Marketplace merchants may welcome is via the listing process. As I said in my previous post, you need to be a merchant using CasperVend to list your items on PrimBay, but in order for your items to appear on PrimBay all you need to do is have your account set to enabled and the items will, after a period of up to one hour, appear on the PrimBay website. No need to create a new listing on the site and inworld, one listing will make your item appear inworld and on the site.

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November 11, 2013November 11, 2013

New Marketplace Merchants Will Need PIOF

Linden Lab have announced that those who want to open new stores on the Second Life Marketplace will be required to provide payment info on file (PIOF). The move has been warmly received by merchants, many of whom who seem to view it as a beefing up of security.

This will, once one or two teething issues and quirks are ironed out, undoubtedly reduce the amount of throwaway alts used to practice questionable behaviour on the marketplace. Obviously it won’t cut down on all questionable behaviour but it will greatly reduce it and we should see less of the most brazen scams taking place … one would hope!

The blog post states:

“Only newly created accounts will be required to meet this requirement at this time, and existing Merchant accounts will not be affected. However, we strongly recommend that all merchants complete the steps necessary to meet this new requirement.”

If they ever do get around to requiring PIOF for exisitng merchants, I think we’ll see a few more complaints, but as it currently doesn’t seem to have any implications for exisiting merchants, the news has been well received.

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June 19, 2013June 19, 2013

Marketplace Billing Engine Changes And Materials Project Viewer Arrives

A rather bizarre blog post appeared yesterday: Marketplace to Move to Second Life Billing Engine. I say the post is rather bizarre because I’m bemused as to what other billing engine The Marketplace was previously using. This is probably because I’ve only ever purchased items from The Marketplace using Linden Dollars from my account balance, which were merged with Marketplace accounts quite some time ago.

I can only assume that when people purchased Linden Dollars for use on The Marketplace, they made the purchase via some sort of legacy system, if that was the case it certainly makes sense to update the system to use the same system the rest of Second Life uses. I guess we’ll see if there are any issues in the future, but off the top off my head I can’t think why there would be.

In other, and rather less bizarre news, The Materials Viewer Has Been Released! I haven’t yet looked at this, although I hope to shortly but the blurb tells us:

“This Viewer will allow content creators to build objects using normal and specular maps and will allow users to view the effects of this new feature set. The end result is photorealistic textured objects inworld, such as the SL10B Bear Avatar, which will look even better with this Viewer.”

There’s a video, which I will embed in traditional style at the bottom of this post … well it’s traditional for me to do that! There are some important things to note regarding materials, one is that you need to be using a viewer that supports Materials, which obviously the Linden Lab Materials Viewer will do and secondly, you need to have a system that can handle advanced lighting, unfortunately not all systems will support this option.

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April 6, 2013

No Booze In General!

Last night, whilst reading the Second Life forums I noticed an advert for Stella Artois appear on the adsense adverts. This was quite a surreal moment as at the time I was drinking a can of Stella Artois! Now as it wasn’t my first, the mind goes into the realms of fantasy and imagines a Google Adsense solution based on my eating and drinking habits that Google detect upon a person … one day maybe, horrid thought but I’m sure they’d love to do that.

However far from the Stella Artois advert appearing because I was drinking it, the more likely explanation is that the Stella Artois advert appeared because there are a few miffed and bemused merchants having their items unlisted from the General rating category on The SL Marketplace because they promote cigarettes and alcohol.

There are a few threads on the forums that discuss this issue:

Alcohol & Tobacco Police On The Prowl?

Marking Everything Mature

SL’s Maturity Rating System

The thing to bear in mind is that alcohol and tobacco are not supposed to be listed in the general category and this is not a new rule. The listing guidelines cite as examples of moderate content:

Depictions of or references to alcohol or tobacco use.

So if your item has been moved to moderate when it used to be in General, then it’s a fair cop guv’nor, but that brings us to the next question, who is instigating the crackdown?

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April 3, 2013

Direct Delivery Migration – Demos Disappear

With the clock ticking on Direct Delivery, one area where merchants may have been taken by surprise is in the category of demos, which will have been unlisted today if you haven’t migrated. Linden Lab did warn merchants about the need to migrate, so why would demos have caught merchants by surprise? Well it’s more than likely to do with how some busy merchants think.

Demos are not an item merchants consider they are selling, they are there to demonstrate an item, so when a merchant gets an email telling them items they sell that are priced lower than ten linden dollars need to be migrated, quite a few merchants would be thinking that they don’t sell any items in that range, as they don’t consider a demo an item that they sell.

This issue harks back to the days when The SL Marketplace was first acquired by Linden Lab and people were asking for demos to be included in the item listing, something that still hasn’t been achieved.

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