In February of this year, we shared our 2010 land pricing plan where we discussed pricing and policies for private regions and  addressed grandfathering, transfers, and retail pricing. In the spirit  of giving you as much advance notice as possible about changes that may have an impact on your plans and budgets, here are two important updates on 2011  pricing:

1) All retail private region maintenance, including grandfathered pricing, is expected to continue without increase through Dec. 31, 2011. 
What you pay now, as a retail customer, is what you’ll continue to pay through the end of 2011.

2) We will adjust how education and non-profit advantages are provided, effective Jan. 1, 2011.  
All  education and non-profit private regions of any type, purchased after Dec. 31, 2010, will be invoiced at standard (i.e. non-discounted) pricing.  All currently discounted renewals which occur after Dec. 31, 2010, will be  adjusted to the new price at that time. To continue to provide  entry-level, private spaces to educators just launching their programs,  we will be providing Homestead and Open Space regions to qualifying  organizations without their meeting the retail full-region criterion. Customer Support will be available to answer any questions that you may  have about these changes.

We  hope that these announcements help you effectively plan for the coming  year. And, we’ll continue to update you well in advance of any  additional pricing changes.

In February of this year, we shared our 2010 land pricing plan where we discussed pricing and policies for private regions and  addressed grandfathering, transfers, and retail pricing. In the spirit  of giving you as much advance notice as possible about changes that may have an impact on your plans and budgets, here are two important updates on 2011  pricing:

1) All retail private region maintenance, including grandfathered pricing, is expected to continue without increase through Dec. 31, 2011. 
What you pay now, as a retail customer, is what you’ll continue to pay through the end of 2011.

2) We will adjust how education and non-profit advantages are provided, effective Jan. 1, 2011.  
All  education and non-profit private regions of any type, purchased after Dec. 31, 2010, will be invoiced at standard (i.e. non-discounted) pricing.  All currently discounted renewals which occur after Dec. 31, 2010, will be  adjusted to the new price at that time. To continue to provide  entry-level, private spaces to educators just launching their programs,  we will be providing Homestead and Open Space regions to qualifying  organizations without their meeting the retail full-region criterion. Customer Support will be available to answer any questions that you may  have about these changes.

We  hope that these announcements help you effectively plan for the coming  year. And, we’ll continue to update you well in advance of any  additional pricing changes.

Migration of Listings and Images
The Commerce Team will be doing a data migration of products and images next Monday and Tuesday. This Migration will run for Monday, August 30, at 9AM PST to 6PM Tuesday, August 31, and will apply to all listings – but only listings that are active will be visible to the public. You can change your migration preference by going to the “My Inventory page” on Xstreet. If you find migration bugs, you can file bugs using the public JIRA, also known as the Issue Tracker. File them as Project: “3. Second Life Website – WEB” and Component: “Marketplace”. More info on how to do that. Here is an example.

New Reporting on Top selling products and Listing enhancements
There is now reporting on the Top Selling Products, and the amount of views that listing has received. You will also find reports on Listing enhancements that provide data on impressions for the last day, week, month as well as how many click throughs have been reported for the last day, week & month. (Since we just started collecting data for click throughs, the number will be lower than the number for impressions.) We will be adding start/end dates as well as export to CSV over the next 5 to 10 days.

You can now edit multiple lsitings at once!
On the Beta Marketplace “Manage inventory” page you can now select multiple items and edit them together. You can update, feature descriptions, listing enhancements, prices and more.

Sincerely,
The Commerce Team

Quick Links:
SL Marketplace Help Pages

Deutsch

Français

日本語

Português

As you know, there have been a lot of changes recently at Linden Lab and the Lab is rallying around the principles of  “Fast, Easy, and Fun” that you have heard about from Philip and BK.  These concepts also apply to Customer Support. We want to make sure  that your Support experience–whether it be direct interaction with our  Customer Service team or with our online self-help tools–is as  effective and helpful as possible.

The  day after our reorganization announcement, we quietly launched brand new case reporting and live chat systems. Both systems are easier for  you to use and will provide us with better data and insights to more  proactively address and resolve your support issues.

Updated Self-Service Offerings

We  are also investing in technology and the development of self-service  tools to enhance the support portal, including our public wiki and knowledge base. And we’re looking for more opportunities to put basic account administration tools directly into your hands, informed by the metrics we’re gathering in the new systems.

In  addition to new metrics, we also asked for your input on how we can  provide a more effective self-service offering. Based on the results of the self-service tools survey,  we are in the process of developing new and better self-service capabilities that can help you resolve basic issues quickly. Big thanks  to all of those that completed the survey! And, you can expect to see  the results of our efforts soon.

Customer Support Changes

As  we strengthen our self-service offering, we’ll be making some changes to Customer Support. You may have noticed a few of them already.

• Concierge support hours are now available at our high-traffic hours which are 8am – Midnight (PST), M-F, and 8am to 8pm (PST) on Saturday and Sunday. 
• We will also be reducing our non-English language support to German, French, Spanish, and Japanese. 
• Finally, we’ll be examining all of our support channels and simplifying the  support contact types and issue types we allow for our various account  levels.  We’ve not taken the impact of these changes lightly and want to provide a higher quality support experience balanced with the costs of  deliver those services.

New Abuse Appeals Process

One  thing that we updated already, as part of our new case and chat platform, is the Abuse Appeals process.  As you will notice if you peruse the case submission form, you will see that the abuse appeals option has disappeared.  Our new approach is directly targeted at those affected by disciplinary action.  If your account is suspended or  banned, then secondlife.com will allow you to log in on the affected account and will take you to a  form designed specifically for creating an appeals case.

Unfortunately, a secondlife.com authentication bug has temporarily disabled this function.  While our  web team works on that issue, we’ve established a temporary process.  If  you need to file an abuse appeal, please log in to secondlife.com with an alt account.  Then, file a new ticket from http://secondlife.com/support, selecting “Account Issues” and then “Second Life Web Login Issue.”  Be  certain to include any information you believe is relevant to our re-evaluation of your case. As soon as the new Abuse Appeals process is  reinstated, then we will let you know.

More Enhancements to Come

You’ll  be hearing and seeing more from us over the coming weeks as we make some additional changes to improve the customer support experience.  While contacting us with service-related issues may not always be  ‘fun,’ the changes you’ll see from us will certainly enable a fast, easy customer support experience that we believe will ultimately exceed the  high expectations you’ve come to count on from the Lab.

In the meantime, please pardon our dust.  Change is always a resource-intensive process and we are putting a lot of effort into  building our new Support structure and infrastructure.

As  we migrate the virtual goods business from the XstreetSL platform to the new SL Marketplace Beta, you will see features being retired from  XstreetSL and turned on for SL Marketplace Beta. We will do our best to communicate the progress of this product evolution as it happens. 

Today’s updates:

• Merchant email address
  • Please check to make sure that your email address on file is updated and valid.
• Browsing for Product Categories
  • A “Browse” tab has been added to the category selector on the item listing page. This will make it easier for merchants to find the most appropriate categories for their listings.
• Unlist/List in bulk
  • It is now possible for merchants to mark as “listed” an entire page of inventory, providing a smoother work flow for merchants that are   publishing multiple listings.
• Changes to Ratings and Reviews
  • Today, the Commerce team moved XstreetSL Ratings and Reviews to the Second Life Marketplace Beta.  The following is a quick rundown of the details:
    

• Ratings and Reviews feature for XstreetSL will be turned off, meaning that no new Ratings or Reviews can be added to the site.
• Today, we have migrated all Ratings and Reviews for all products that have already been migrated to the new Marketplace.
• A new feature allowing for comments on reviews has been added
• Ratings and Reviews for merchant listings that have not yet been moved over to the Marketplace (either due to opt-out or they are new products that have not yet been migrated due to our refresh frequency) will be migrated at a later date.  Ratings and Reviews for inactive listings will not be migrated.
• After  the Ratings and Reviews are migrated to the SL Marketplace Beta, the team will begin to tune the relevancy of Search results. (Expect to see  results vary over the next three weeks as we find the most effective balance.)

If you see an issue with Ratings and Reviews, please make a comment on the Issue Tracker thread here: http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-2591

Thank you for your patience and support as we work to create a new virtual goods experience.

Sincerely,

Melissa posting on behalf of the Commerce Team

Distribution Feature is Live!

• Many  merchants have asked to change the way the distribution feature works.   On XStreetSL, distributions are based on a fixed dollar amount.  The  new marketplace offers distributions based on percentages.
• Existing  distributions on XstreetSL will be migrated over and converted to  percentages. For more information, please see the Marketplace Wiki .

Commissions Turned On

• Commissions  are live on the new marketplace.  Over the first few weeks of the beta  period, we offered merchants commission-free sales in appreciation for  partnering with us.
• From here forward, a five percent commission will be charged for all products on the Second Life Marketplace Beta.

As always, we are grateful for your business and your participation during the early phases of our new SL Marketplace.

 

Sincerely,

The Commerce Team

The  Commerce Team is heads down this week working on more key features and  functionality for the new marketplace.  Below is a list of updates we  made over the last week. 

 

Feature Updates and Bug Fixes for SL Marketplace Beta

• We added a “continue shopping button” when a shopper comes to your detail page from search results
• SL  Marketplace Beta orders now show in your transaction history as “MKT2” -  Xstreet purchases continue to show in your your transaction history as  “MKT”
• You can now use bit.ly urls for links to more information on inworld items
• You can now use bit.ly urls for inworld stores
• We have added the “category tree” to the store landing pages
• Edit link has been moved back to the right in “manage inventory”
• The Carousel on the home page no longer rotates

 

Quick Update on an XstreetSL Issue:

Linden dollars showing on Xstreet or during a purchase as L$NA should be fixed.

 

Distributions Coming to the SL Marketplace Beta

This  week we will be introducing the distributions feature to the  Marketplace Beta, but this feature will function differently than it  does on Xstreet today. The new marketplace will have distributions based  on Percent’s and not based on a fixed amount. The existing  distributions on Xstreet will be migrated over and converted to  percents. For more information, please see the Marketplace Wiki.

Be sure to refer to the the Marketplace Wiki for more specific FAQs, updates on features and other Marketplace project information.

We’ll  be reviewing the forums this week, as usual, but will have limited time  to respond during this busy time. In the meantime, the development  team will be watching the Issue Tracker, so as you find bugs, please  file them using the public JIRA, also known as the Issue Tracker. File them as Project: “3. Second Life Website – WEB” and Component: “Marketplace”. More info on how to do that. A handy compilation of Marketplace bugs can be found here.