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.