A gentleman will walk but never run

Two weeks ago I was talking here about the need for xStreet change and here we go with the first step it seems. The Lab announced a new pricing plan for xStreet with the proclaimed purpose of reducing the clutter on the Marketplace. All listings will have a monthly 10L$ fee associated with them, the minimum xStreet provision from every sale should be 3L$ and of course, the highly discussed and emotional topic: every freebie will cost 99L$/month to be listed... The horror. Exodus from xStreet. Crash. Number of apparel listings on xStreet fell from 400k to 370k within a week (omg! :)... Everybody's leaving and #fail messages flourish on Twitter.

Well... we're not removing any of our 329 items. We're not moving towards slapt.me or any other e-commerce site as yet either. And I actually do understand the move by Lab. It's not just about freebies, but freebies are an important aspect of the whole halo.

Freebies. I'll tell you something about them, we have distributed next to a million free items both inworld and through xStreet, so I know my bit. Freebies 'sell' like hell. First thing I had to do for every free item we listed on xStreet was to turn off the sales notifications for them. They would eventually end up in spam filter otherwise, because of their brutal frequency and they'd take all the important messages sent from the same e-mail with them... Considering the pressure on my mailbox, I can quite imagine the load it imposed on the Lab's infrastructure. No wonder they're trying to solve this.

The Lindens say that freebies are often a way of free advertising... I'm not sure about that, I mean, they certainly help to raise your customer satisfaction level, they might increase the traffic and they improve your brand's image but I doubt they would be too important in a serious advertising scheme. My view of the high quality fullperm items we give away in PFB was always sort of "Look, we can afford to give away good quality - that others would sell - for free to the people, and look, we can even advertise the free items on the xStreet homepage - you're dealing with a strong, established brand, feel assured" - for us it's a way to tell our customers that we're serious about what we're doing - along with having a dedicated non-rented full sim for the brand, having a serious web presence and clear EULA for example. We don't have many freebies in PFB, but the ones we have are valuable products with thousands of high ratings and good reviews. And if I have to pay lousy 99 spacebucks a month to keep them listed on the ONLY relevant e-shop nowdays, to keep the wonderful reviews they got, then be it, I'm paying 900 a week for some of them just to be enhanced. What's the big deal. I understand the concerns of the truly altruistic individuals, who list their items out of pure goodwill and don't feel like paying for the listing. But then again, do such items really need the free exposure on a premium e-commerce site?

The non-freebie part of the unrest over the fees is a bit ridiculous to me. If the item is not able to earn enough to cover 10L$ a month from sales minus provision, then what's the point in having such item listed on an e-shop? For what, to make it impossible to find anything? I'm really fed up with browsing through the endless variations of the same worthless crap, really, aren't you? Testing, whether the various colors of the same ugly hairstyle will end on page 4 or 8 of the search results? We're one of the bigger stores, yes, and we're talking about the expenses of some 3-4k L$ a month, now really, what's the big deal again?

I think that although it might not seem so initially, the changes will prove to be a good thing in the end. Free services never work too well. I'm willing to pay for a quality service and I hope the changes we're experiencing will indeed bring more quality into xStreet marketplace. The question is how many merchants see it the way we do - with quite a short timeline for the new pricing's introduction, we'll see soon enough whether they'll bring a polished, more friendly to use marketplace, or an empty abandoned mall. And I favor the first option.

Elite visions

I'd like stop for a moment at the latest big thing, or rahter two things that have been announced by the Lab recently. All the infochannels are full of it, so to no surprise it's going to be about the introduction of Nebraska and the SL Work Marketplace. The info on Nebraska and it's specifications can be found on the official blogs and is nicely summed up in Dusan Writer's article here. Briefly: The Lab has introduced a stand-alone solution for the corporates, able to run on corporate hw, behind the firewall, not connected to the main grid. It supports up to 8 regions simultaneously (up to some 800 avs), allows an advanced environment control ('rezzing' and derezzing premade sims instantly, sort of a reg api for custom avatar names, etc.), and is said to be blazing fast. With the price tag set at 55k USD, it's aim at the business use scenarios like conferencing or virtual collaboration is quite obvious.

Along with the introduction of Nebraska, another very interesting service was uncovered: The SL Work Marketplace. We're talking about a separate marketplace where the content for the Nebraska servers will be offered to the corporations - most probably in the form of whole downloadable themed regions packed with content - initially available only to the Gold Solution Providers, but intended to be more open eventually. This is something for the content creators to really watch closely - although the conditions to be met to accomplish the content transfer are quite strict (a good thing) - the benefits can be really worth the effort. I mean with a price of over 50k USD being set just for the PLATFORM licence, there really should be a correlation with the prices of the actual CONTENT for the platform.

The fact that the programme should be limited to the GSP initially had provoked some predictable reactions... the Drama and the Protests were obligatory - but to my amusement I've also seen "the Average Joe unable to meet the Gold Solution Provider requirements" argument show up - leaving me with a surreal projection where hordes of plumbers try to sell content to IBM :) Those fancy egalitarian views remind me strongly of the times 20 years ago in my country - and yes, we were on the eastern side of the iron curtain.

Let's look at the situation of content creators from the perspective of "elitism". With the virtual goods market growing rapidly, we are going to see more serious companies entering the business and I'm also quite sure the market will change as a result of that. We do need another way to distinguish between a trusted source and the piles of junk (aside from just the strong and trusted brand). The marketplace today is still bearing the burden of the old times when most of the content creators were just enthusiasts or small start-ups. It's not just xStreet, but it's very obvious there.

xStreet doesn't offer many possibilities for larger or even mid-sized businesses so far. Personally I'm missing more advertising options, exclusive campaigns, more ways for the merchants to customize the content classificaton and to personalize the look and behavior of the "e-shop" (think eBay)… we need that all and more :) What's increasingly annoying is the constant flow of petty attacks on the creators. Be it plagiarizing of products, concepts or even corporate identity, shameless advertising in the reviews by competition, fake dramas on the forums... I've also seen some senseless acts of malice recently - not just the Burning Man halo, although this one was the most obvious of them. I totally understand that such forms of business and such atmosphere rather discourage serious creative enterprises from entering the field...

A good thing that could help the marketplace reach more solid ground again might be the trusted seller (or whatever the name) label. I've read rumors and seen not much more than mist around, but if the Lab decides to do it, I'll be sure to do my best to meet the criteria, and perhaps enjoy some enhanced services. I surely wouldn't mind to have an according fee associated, if only just to rise the entry requirements and add some weight to the whole thing. And it's not just about xStreet, there's whole wide world inworld there…

In my opinion, in the end everyone profits - while the creative individuals would still have the opportunity to enter the virtual goods market and start their dream, the serious businesses and established brands will be easier to recognize, thus bringing more shopping comfort and security to the end customer majority, and with a good model of operation there will be the revenue to the Lab as well. After all - haven't others been doing that with success before? The "IBM business partner" logo that I've been placing in various webdesigns for years seems to be a good example to me :)

So my applause to the SL Work Marketplace, my support for the identification of serious developers in the Solution Provider programme (I'll have to put down the list of our corporate projects and apply soon), and good health to Nebraska!