Eloise's thoughts and fancies - Shopping in SL

Overall review of alternatives to XStreetSL

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 21:27:38 -0700

I have written longer, individual reviews of each of the alternate services to XStreetSL. There are links at the bottom of this metareview.

There are two core things that should really make your choice for you. One is reliability of delivery and the other is the fee.

Just about all of the sites charge a 5% for your sales. Some of them offer various affiliate and partnership schemes with different rates. Apez.biz offers an option where you pay L$2,900 and gain commission-free sales for your own products. If you anticipate shifting more than L$58,000 of stuff (less when compared to XStreetSL with the new charges) then it's well worth the investment.

Of the sites reviewed, SLapt.me, Metaverse Exchange and vitty.jp have all demonstrated problems with delivery. Vitty failed to even deliver their distribution box. Both Slapt.me and MVE have failed to make a test delivery of an item. Slapt also displays adult content on the front page. Not an issue for all of us but quite likely an issue for those working in an office or an educational establishment.

Both Apez and MetaLIFE have made deliveries to customers in the time that I've been writing these reviews. They both seem to work reliably for both test deliveries and deliveries to customers. MySLMarket has made a successful test delivery as well.

Apez and MetaLIFE both offer in-world vendor systems as well. MySLMarket does not. I use the Apez.biz vendors successfully and have done for some months. There is nothing I can see that is technically wrong with the MetaLIFE vendors. They strike me as overly-busy in design, detracting from the shopping experience which is surely their key function, but that is a personal opinion of design and you may well have a different opinion. If you want networked vendors in-world as well as a web-presence either system will do.

Again partially a design decision, I prefer the layout of the Apez.biz site. It is easy to search by tag-words, titles, creators and the like, and to move from one such display to the other - if you find an item of mine by title you can click on my name to find all my products for example as well as clicking through to the product itself. I think the ease of finding information on Apez.biz makes a compelling case for using it if you are only going to use one of them.

I rather suspect over the next few weeks you will find my content appearing on each of Apez.biz (OK, it's already there for that), MetaLIFE (a lot of it is already there too) and MySLMarket. You might also find content appearing on slapt.me if this proves to be a temporary load issue rather than a serious technical problem. The decision about which service to use in-world is probably harder if you have to make such a choice but for content on the web as long as you have a few spare prims you can copy and paste and spend a little while creating the content on each of the sites - your customers might use any of them after all.

And, as a final comment on XStreetSL, their competitors are now clearly cheaper. They are all smaller, some much smaller, but if you sell freebies or any content under L$50 you gain clearly per sale even before the L$100/month listing fee for items of L$1 or more. If you have a small range of goods that all sell well the numbers might make sense for you to stay on XStreetSL although it strikes me it will still be worth selling on the others too - they're not charging you per month after all!

Review Links: apez.biz | metaLIFE | Metaverse Exchange | MySLMarket | slapt | vitty

SLapt.me rereviewed

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 18:50:52 -0700

Following the comments to my original short and not-so-sweet review of slapt.me I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt: after all I was adding to their load in light of the announcement on XStreetSL too and try again. They did, however, fall to the bottom of the list - partly to give them time to sort things out, partly to try everyone else out first. You can find slapt.me at the eponymous site.

Fees
Slapt charges at flat 5% on its sales. Unlike most sites, this 5% is truncated - that is L$1.5 is charged as L$1 rather than rounded to L$2. Depending on your pricing strategies that might be significant to you.

Other Services
To date there are no other services offered. There is a note on the website that there will be vendors soon but they do not currently exist. The set-up box you are sent contains a cuddly toy and other such goodies.

UPDATE: There are vendors offered. I'm sure I found a page that says they're coming soon, but here's a link to their vendors so they definitely exist.

Reporting
When you are logged in there is a button that takes you to a transactions history page. This has tabs for all transactions, sales and purchases but there's no data as yet.

Setting-up
This seems, at first, to be a simple drop items, textures and notecards in the in-world box system. However, when you get to the website you can also choose to upload up to 5 images too. Associating the items, costs etc. it a mixture of drop-downs and filling in text boxes. This is fairly easy to do. There are a couple of "codey" bits - you can set a restricted number of sales for example and must use -1 for unrestricted but they are well explained.

Other comments
The site still seems to be rather twitchy to me. It is supposed to stream up to 8 pictures and links as part of the advertising to the main page. This does not always work. In addition, the images are most definitely NOT PG. Whilst this isn't an issue for me at home it would be something I would need to consider if I were in a work environment - having an erect prim penis image on your screen is likely to cause issues in most work places I think.

There is quite a lot of white space around, more than I would normally expect to see. However the site seems easy to use. If you search by name, the products of that creator show up.

It is hard to be sure if this is load related or something else, but the site navigation does not work reliably for me in my browser of choice. In particular I cannot access my inventory, nor can I associate pictures with items for sales. Given this is a mozilla browser (in the Firefox family) but with rather strict implementation of coding structures this is not a good sign. It may not work in Firefox reliably, or it may have some potentially unsafe coding in there. It seems to work for me in Safari, which is rather more forgiving of poor code. You may like to try and comment on both Internet Explorer and Firefox on a PC. This is, however, definitely a minus for me.

Finally, it is not clear to me that slapt meets the Linden Lab guidelines despite the delivering avatar being called Slapt. If it is a legally recognised name, I imagine Second Life will have problems challenging it, but it seems more likely that it will fail on the "2 nouns" element and be required to change when the lawyers get round to it. UPDATE: Same source says they've talked to Linden Lab's legal department and slapt.me with no capitals (which is how they name themselves) is OK under the trademarking guidelines.

UPDATE:
Have tried a test delivery. Again not sure if it's a temporary load issue or a more fundamental issue, but I've tried a test delivery. 15 minutes ago now and no delivery... Oops. UPDATE: There were technical issues yesterday it appears. I have not tried them out again yet.

MySLMarket Review

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 11:44:11 -0700

MySLMarket offers another online market system. It is currently quite small but seems technically sound. It is bilingual in German/English (more on this in the "Other Services" section) but the owner of the site is a German coder and there are odd moments when the geeky-German to English translation is lacking. It's not incomprehensible but takes a little time to understand properly.

Fees
There is a simple 5% cut on all sales.

Other Services

This site offers free translation between English and German. You fill in one section of the website (or both if you'd rather) and the other side will be filled in for you.
The site offers a HUD and a variety of in-world vendor systems. The vendors can be quite prim-heavy (11 prims for a vendor that shows one main and 4 small images for example) but the 11-picture vendor has only 5 prims.
There is a flea-market as well as a normal market. The flea-market will allow you to sell second-hand, non-copy items.

Reporting
I can't tell you what the reporting looks like - I haven't sold anything yet - but there is a simple link from the "For Sellers" tab that takes you to the report. One click access.

Setting Up
MySLMarket is set up like XStreetSL in terms of handling images: you load objects for sale into your in-world box and upload pictures to the website. Everything is accessed via the "For Sellers" tab. A little confusing at first sight (although in good English) when you are putting an item for sale you choose "Insert Announcement" rather than "Add Item" (which doesn't exist). You are prompted first to choose if to sell via the market-place or the flea market. You are prompted to get a picture first (either upload a new one or choose an existing one) and you can (USP here) also upload an attached audio clip - for example for gestures.

You then associate the picture (and presumably sound) with an item (called a data file, but they're labelled with the names of the objects in your box), and fill in the various boxes on a fairly simple form for price, prims, title (in English or German), description (in English or German) and the like. There is, unusually, a simple series of check boxes that are not automatically populated for permissions.

If you tab through the form the order is somewhat odd in places, but not unusably so.

Setting up in-world vendors seems bugged - you have to enroll things into a group for sale (seems easy) but then you have to create a link to a picture (this requires the key of the texture in Second Life) and I get caught in an endless cycle of clicking to add a picture, clicking to confirm it's in the group etc.

Other Comments
Delivery seems a little slower than I'd expect - measured in minutes rather than seconds - but unlike MVE seems to work to the very limited extent of my testing.

The blues and mellow-yellows look is not my favourite, but the website is clear and simple to use for online advertising, hiccoughs with the translations included in all fairness. Less obvious for selling in world as mentioned in Setting Up. That doesn't bother me - I won't be switching in-world vendor systems but might be an issue for you.

There are a number of schemes to help expand the site, and included in them you can earn some extra money - 2% off commission, a 2% slice of any sales for a friend that you register as recommending you and the like, for 30 days.

As mentioned in the comments, MySLMarket does not meet the naming guidelines issued by Linden Lab. It's not clear to me how efficient and quick they are, but their legal team do appear to be quite aggressive in pursuing breaks in those guidelines. It is likely this site will have to be renamed soon.

Metaverse Exchange Review

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 12:09:06 -0700

Metaverse Exchange offers the capability to sell items in both Second Life and Legend City. It is another one that I am completely new to. You can find it at www.metaverseexchange.com

Fees
Hmm, good question! I think it's the standard 5% cut but I can't actually find that on the website anywhere.

Other Services
There is a fairly active forum but there do not appear to be networked servers or similar.

Reporting
There is a simple link from your account page, so a couple of clicks from the front page, that looks like it lists your sales, who bought, when etc. By default this shows the last week's sales but changing the dates is easy enough.

Setting up
The process for setting up on MER is more like that for XStreetSL, although there are some wrinkles. You put the items (up to 64) in a server box in world. You go to the website and you can upload pictures from your hard drive (rather than from the server) to associate with the item. You can also set a price here. Then it gets trickier - you have to go to a different page to edit the words part of the listing. That struck me as not intuitive, nor easy. If this was the only vendor system I was using, it would save L$10/texture upload here.

The system also insists (it's not clear how it's enforced mind) that if an object varies by only one thing, e.g. colour, you list them as a single item with variants. This would apply to my viewers for example, there's a copy version and a transfer version. Searching the inventories suggests this does not appear that way to the customer though. I can certainly find 20 different colours of the same dress listed if I search for dress.

And it is worth noting that you can associate multiple avatars with a single account too. I'm not sure why you would, but you can. It might be good for a group sales programme, or for testing deliveries and permissions to an alt.

Other Comments
I set up one item and went for a test delivery. Before I started writing this review. It's still not arrived. That's not good.

You can't search directly by merchant, but if you find something they sell, you can click on a "view all by merchant" link. There are no tags/keywords. This is presented as a feature - it stops keyword spamming - however it does mean you have to know what you are looking for is called.

It's 30 minutes now and no delivery. That's a test delivery when I'm standing in the same sim as the object that should be making the delivery. It doesn't inspire confidence in the ability to deliver to others.

Vitty review

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 19:37:52 -0700

Also short and not-so-sweet.

If you sell in Japan a lot you might want to persevere with Vitty. Me? I registered eventually (it didn't want to give me the links to the website that I needed on the first couple of occasions) but can't get them to deliver me a box in-world. I've tried three times now and not had a single delivery.

So... I can't tell you much else. It doesn't fill me with confidence that they can't deliver their own boxes to new potential sellers though.

metaLIFE review

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 04:21:03 -0700

I'm new to metaLIFE. I'd been invited before, shortly after the demise of SLB but at that time had decided to go with apez and didn't feel like I had the time or inclination to set up another service. You can find metaLIFE at meta-life.net.

Fees
metaLIFE offers free selling of your own goods as one of it's headline features. There is some small print though - that's only if you're selling it from your own vendor and it's available to others to sell from their own vendors. If you sell from a different vendor, there is a base 20% commission split between metaLIFE and the person who actually made the sale. You can also set up a brand (EPED for example) and allow people to become affiliates and sell your products through their shops in an affiliate program. The descriptions of fees here are confused but it looks like for those sales you pay 10% to the metaLIFE people and an amount you choose to your affiliate partners. Presumably this has to be more than 10% to make it attractive - scanning the page of brands, 40% seems typical, but you can find lower rates too.

Other Services
metaLIFE offers in-world vendors and a vendor HUD. The in-world vendors are fairly quick and easy to set up. You can offer "all content" or "my content" for sale. If you make a wide range of different types of products it doesn't appear that you can differentiate different types of "my content" so if, like me, you make educational gadgets, other gadgets, some furniture etc. you can't have a furniture vendor, a gadgets vendor, an educational tools vendor etc.

The base vendor design seems very busy. It's certainly clearly branded but it seems to be adorned with unnecessary tabs, buttons and the like that are not functional - and which make it harder to find the functional ones.

The HUD... I'm a mac girl. I run Second Life in a window. It's no bother for me to have a browser open at the same time and hit the website directly. If, unlike me, you run Second Life full screen, there's a built in browser so why wouldn't you use that? And, let's not beat around the bush here: the HUD in its collapsed state is HUGE. I routinely wear 4 HUDs. Two collapse, two don't. The collapsing HUDs are both, quite rightly tiny. If you use a standard viewer they are, combined, smaller than "Fly" button on the bottom of your screen in terms of screen real estate, one of them is smaller than the "show chat bar" button - the other when collapsed has 3 buttons still and each of those is smaller than the "show chat bar" button. This is great. When active, one of them is huge: it takes up 75% of screen real estate but that's OK for me because when it's active I want to concentrate on it and use it. The largest of my "always on" HUDs takes up pretty much the same amount of screen space as the minimap. It could go a fair bit smaller but with 12 buttons on it there's a trade-off between ease of hitting buttons and reading labels and screen estate and this is a good balance point for me. The metaLIFE HUD though, when collapsed, takes up more than twice the screen estate of the minimap! This does not strike me as a desirable feature, although it is rather hyped by the advertising for metaLIFE.

Reporting
I can't 100% accurately comment here but as far as I can tell there is no quick summary. There is a transactions page that will (hopefully) show all transactions - although not free ones. It's only a couple of clicks to get to the sales report so that's not too bad.

Setting Up
The process here starts off being very reminiscent of the Apez system. You get your box, drop in textures and boxes and then head over to the website. On the website you associate a picture with a box, write the text, write some tags and a description and off you go. The layout is a little clearer than the apez one I feel but it is marginal. Textures are listed as "inactive products" in your listing so the site recommends deleting them from the box once you're done with them. Whilst this might make sense, I can't help feel that an option to suppress textures from the list should be easy enough to write into the php.

If you make videos of your products, there is an option to auto-embed the video. I've not actually come across anything that makes use of this but it is there as an option. Ironically there are videos about setting up your box etc. but they're not embedded in the item page.

There is, as previously mentioned, no equivalent to the Apez collection concept - it's all or nothing. There is a "brand" concept which seems similar, and allows affiliate sales, but selling from a branded vendor takes a 10% commission rather than the 0 for the more open one.

Other comments
The white and yellow colour scheme of the site seems quite attractive. I feel, however, a bit like the site designer read about white space and thought "Ah yes, we can't have too much of that!" Each item entry has a thumbnail of the image, the item's name and price. On the marketplace page it adds the seller's name and the first line or two of the description. There's probably space to show the first 8 lines or so and still have visual space - the alternate row colour coding helps differentiate things efficiently. The seller's name is not a link, so you can't easily see other products from that person. In fact if, like me, you didn't think to tag your products with your name (they're currently all tagged EPED if you want to search for them and I will be adding Eloise Pasteur as a tag soon enough) you can't search by name at all. Oops. You can, eventually, get there... find something they sell, click on it, ignore the nicely highlighted name tag hyperlink - that takes you to my profile instead - and click on the rather hidden "show all by this merchant" link instead.

The metaLIFE box is a more standard 1-prim. It, so far, seems to use hovertext to communicate. It's only been up for 18 hours or so and hasn't crashed in that time. It's only made test deliveries to me mind!

UPDATE: I have now sold three items via MetaLIFE. Reporting of sales is a couple of clicks away. It appears to not be restricted for date of sales, but can she shown most recent at the top or at the bottom of the list. In addition you can search for a specific item and show all those sales. Withdrawing money requires a visit to a kiosk, ATM or wearing the HUD but payment is simple and fast. In addition, the tool you use tells you what your remaining balance is. Payment took a couple of seconds on the only time I've tried it.

There is also a "balance" option (separate to sales) that shows a month at time (you can change this period) and income in that period. This also lists withdrawals.

slapt.me review

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:05:18 -0700

A short and not-so-sweet review. I have given up.

I quite like the look of the interface, but about 2/3 of the time over 2 days that I've clicked on a link I get a "loading..." progress bar and then a "Sorry, this page no longer exists" message. That's for things like logging in!

If I can get onto the site to load up content I'm concerned that my potential buyers can't either. And if they can't find it there to try and buy it, what's the point of spending the time setting the stuff up?

Apez.biz review

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 12:00:34 -0700

I've been using Apez for a while now - in fact since Linden Lab GOMed SLEx and SLB. You can find them online at apez.biz

Fees
Apez offers two service rates. You can get a free vendor and pay commission at 5% or you can get a pay vendor (for L$2900) and pay no commission on your own products that you sell. You can, in addition, set vendors up to sell other people's products in your shop, and have your products sold from their shops. There is a minimum 2.5% commission for arranging this. Minimum commission on items is L$1, except freebies which remain $0. Some of my items are sold this way but most from in-world vendors or the web-site.

Other Services
Apez offers networked in-world vendors in a variety of designs. It offers the opportunity to sell other people's products too - you can for example set up a "women's clothes" vendor and sell any shared items in that category.
The whole Apez package offers L$ exchange, a leasing service and an advertising service. I have not used any of these.

Reporting
When you are logged in, each page you are on shows you your current stats and the overall stats in the right hand edge of the screen. You can see this full size to the left, with my sales stats blacked out. All of the green headers in this area are also links, and there is a far more detailed transaction log available. Unlike SLEx this transaction log lists all transactions.
If you use the in-world system you can get reports by vendor too. I can tell you that my vendor on Info Island, which I only put up last week, has yet to sell anything.

Setting up
You drop your boxed item and a texture into the inworld box. Head over to the website, and associate a "box" and a texture with each other to form an "item" which can then be added to a collection. I, for example, have all my educational goods in the Edu-collection. You can tag, write descriptions, set prices etc. at this point. It took me a couple of minutes to get the hang of this - other systems have a better interface for it even when they use a very similar concept - but it is not hard to use once you do get used to it. These collections are useful in-world if you rez a vendor there - you just choose the collection the vendor will sell with a simple click from a well put together dialog box.

Other comments
Apez.biz is the biggest of the alternatives to XStreetSL at the moment. I don't, as yet, sell the full range of my goods via Apez, but I do get sales both via the website and in-world. Speaking personally, I like the black background to the site - if you take good pictures of your products it makes them stand out clearly. I am, perhaps, abnormally antipathetic to white websites since I started getting migraines: bright light is one of my triggers.
With XStreetSL I have had delivery failures at about 2% in the last two months. I have sold enough that I should have expected some failures if Apez.biz failed at the same rate. To date I have had no failures, despite the boxes being right next to each other in the same sim.
The vendor boxes in SL show you the number of sales from that box too. I don't go and peer at the numbers each day, although I could, but if I happen to be near them I do check them out. It looks like a 5-figure XyText type arrangement, so should cope with up to 99,999 sales - it might just be a 6-figure one and up to 999,999. This, plus an indicator light that the server is online make each "box" 3 prims rather than the more normal 1. Personally I find it makes them more user friendly too.
If I was a serious landlord or looking for somewhere to lease I would seriously consider the Apez system. It too offers a "dip the toe in" free vendor with 4% commission. The advertising for spaces available is nicely handled in my opinion - in particular the fact you can see at a glance how successful each space is. Would you lease a shop in a mall with only 43 of 252 spaces leased when you could easily pick up the last space in one of 39 spaces... You might, I might too, if the traffic figures and the products were a better fit but that information is right there.

A farewell to SLEx

nospam@example.com (Eloise Pasteur) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 04:02:39 -0700

Thank you Linden Lab. Not.

According to this lovely post from Colossus Linden and the Commerce Team the customers demand that they not be allowed access to free and cheap items and that even more expensive items aren't charged enough commission on sales.

I can continue to sell my numerical best selling items - each of which are dollarbies - as long as I'm willing to pay Linden Lab L$2/sale net. I think not. In addition, every item L$1 and over will cost L$10/month to list. I list about 100 items. OK, paying £2.50 per month or so to have those 100 items available isn't dire and I certainly shift more than L$1000 in sales every month BUT I already 10% commission on that. Now they're going to add an extra flat fee and they're going to punitively charge on anything less than L$60 that you sell. That is actually a lot of my sales that are about to be punished for not being expensive.

I shall be moving my items to Apez.biz since I already use their service for some items. Having looked at my sales over a few weeks with Apez I coughed up the L$3000 up-front for a commission free service. If Linden Lab decides to alter its current policy and charge such a flat fee, I might reconsider. I shall certainly be looking at other alternative ways to make my items available in-world via the web. I believe there are a couple of other competitors already.

I am not the only person to take umbrage. Ordinal Malaprop for one has already stopped all her listings. It will be interesting to see what the ultimate impact of this is. I suspect a fair number of "dead" items will remain, because their account holders no longer use Second Life and won't care that their account balance becomes negative. In the meantime, Linden Lab is nicely moving out at least some people who do well items via their service - if they move a sufficient number of them they'll end up with the lovely effect of concentrating the deadwood rather than their avowed intent of clearing it out. Way to go!