Marketplace Support

[Shamu077 Resident]

(07-02-2014 08:27 AM)Tad Carlucci Wrote:  OK. It's been years and we still cannot purchase food, milk, vitamins, etc., on the Marketplace.

It's time KittyCatS! got over their aversion to using the Marketplace and made their customer's lives easier.

Easier? Like never having to go InWorld - where someone might say Hi and even ask you a newbie question? OMG OMG

IMO the MP is the worst idea SL has ever had - it has resulted in the closing of thousands of sims, and simply caters to the lazy antisocial who would rather play their online games without the bother of interacting in that world. Shopping In World used to be an adventure. Now it is a ghost land with most of the stores long gone. KC - please force your members to buy food at your InWorld store, as horribly inconvenient as it may be for some. It takes me 20 seconds to buy two 20 packs at their main store, and TP back home to my InWorld cattery - but hey you know how important time is these days. Logging in can take all of a minute or more - now there's a real reason why one should simply stay off SL and play your KC game on the web.

[Tad Carlucci]

If you'll recall, Linden Labs didn't come up with the Marketplace, they purchased it from the creators.

To my mind, the closing of thousands of regions is completely false. Yes, there was a mass closing a few years ago. It resulted from changes to the pricing and features .. remember OpenSpace regions?

As to shops closing, I'd suggest Mesh is the cause, not the Marketplace. Who wants clunky-looking prim/sculpted shoes any more? Who in their right mind would keep their shop open, offering old, out-dated junk nobody purchases?

Calling those who like the convenience "lazy" and "anti-social" says more about you and your prejudiced, elitist views than it does about those you're trying to insult.

Finally, which side do you think you log in and find you need food and cannot teleport to the Main Shop because that happens to be the day a hardware failure has shut it down. I'll bet the day YOU can't get to the sim is the day you start calling for an alternate delivery method.

[Kayleigh McMillan]

I can tell you from my own experience since MP is so heavily promoted by LL it has a lot more exposure than an avarage in world shop unless you spend time, money, thoughts and resources in letting people know where you are.
Clearly KC succeeded in this and as such it pays off.
If I was to run KC I'd rather "die" than maintaining a sim AND give the labs a percentage of the food etc. sales via MP.
Unless I was to calculate that percentage and added that as extra fees to the price of the products for the customer so they had to pay extra for that convience.

The fact they sell starters there makes perfect sense every exposure of their product even on MP makes that more people know about it I see that as an advertisement.

It just makes no business sense to pay fees for a private region and pay fees for MP.
Linden Labs can't have their cake and eat it too.
I know they would love to though

EDIT: I think MP sucks, is laggy, unreliable and anti-social.
And many merchants I know which had little exposure in world indeed gave up their sim and went to Marketplace only.

[Tad Carlucci]

A responsible company considers failure and has disaster recovery plans.

What is the plan for KittyCatS if their in-world-only sales system fails? I can tell you: "Oh, we apologize that our region is offline this week and you cannot purchase food for your cats. When we come back up, if you have any cats on health recovery, file a support ticket and we'll prove a free get-well bottle. Please be patient, though, since it may take us a while catch up with all those support tickets."

The Marketplace, for all it's problems, provides a fast and easy alternative. So, one would hope, when faced with no other choice KittyCatS would rush the supplies to the Marketplace if/when disaster strikes.

Of course, if the Marketplace is that horrible, and they can't see fit to pay Linden Labs for the programming and support, they can always add some form of web-based purchasing on the KittyCatS web site. But, of course, if that system depends upon a critical object being in-world at the main store, it does NOT provide ANY protection against disaster. Perhaps, in that case, they would rush to someplace like Too Adorable and put the in-world component there.

For most, if not all of you, there is absolutely no comparison between your personal shops (in-world or Marketplace) and KittyCatS. I suppose it's possible that one or two of you are running multi-million real-Dollar companies on Second Life. KittyCatS is. And they should ACT like they do. That means ensuring reliable delivery of services to their paying customers. They PAY their provider for that for the web server and database. They PAY Linden Labs for it for their region. Beyond that, they appear to have no provision to ensure continued delivery of the most mission-critical service: the continued provisioning of in-world food.

That's their choice. Let's hope they never need a back-up delivery system. But, when they do, with nothing else at hand, I suppose' "We'll slap it up on Marketplace if we ever need to" will do.

[Kayleigh McMillan]

KC has extra sims behind hand ofcourse plus they have the cattery so that is barely a problem.

(07-05-2014 11:53 AM)Tad Carlucci Wrote:  ...

Let's hope they never need a back-up delivery system. But, when they do, with nothing else at hand, I suppose' "We'll slap it up on Marketplace if we ever need to" will do.

That will do if all regions fail but then again all our in world cats will too on our own regions.

[Tad Carlucci]

Let me put it this way, in Equinox' place, I would present the following challenge to KittyCatS Resident:

Prove that you can move the system, including all web services, databases, and the in-world components we need to continue providing all services, and maintain our present income and cash flows, with minimum interruption to us, or our customers, and without reliance upon the availability of our present systems.

Personally, I expect the answer would be painful.

Yes, Linden Labs can move the region. Yes, Linden Labs can restore the last snapshot. But, if Linden Labs will not, or can not, or won't or can't do it quickly enough, I'll bet there is no plan to get up and running in-world, even in a limited capacity.
.
Yes, their web and database provider makes backups. And, yes, if asked nicely, they might even restore them. And, yes, they can quickly and easily move the services to different hardware. But what if a hurricane takes out their offices (one almost did a few years ago)? Their service provider does NOT provide backups you can take to another provider. I'm betting, if they suddenly needed to change service providers, they'd be out of luck. That sort of backup is their responsibility, not their service provider's.

Oh, sure, "That's a lot to go through! It's JUST A GAME!" Sure, it's a game to us, their customers. But it's a multi-million-Dollar income to them. I'm thinking those Dollars are not just "nice", but nigh on "critical" to THEM.

Disaster planning is not an all-or-nothing thing. It's rare (but does happen) that everything blows up at once. Disaster plans should provide for partial and incremental failures. Using the Marketplace is a quick, low-cost method of ensuring continued operation of one part of the system. Yes, there is a trivial fee (when considering to the cash flows involved). But they also get some added value beyond disaster planning such as increased sales, and increased customer satisfaction.

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I guess, I should make clear that I am NOT asking they prove this to Tad. I'm saying, if I were Equinox, that it be proven to HER.

[Kayleigh McMillan]

I think we can assume a lot one thing I learned over the years when it comes to businesses either we trust how they treat their content or not.
I tend to trust KC seeing how they handeled stuff over the years.
A HUD as Kendrah suggested would be a cool solution I think.
What I've learned myself is to not talk figures when it comes to doing business in SL.
Perhaps that is also a cultural thing we in The Netherlands don't speak about what goes around in our business because yes,.. that's our business

EDIT Not dealing with MP while maintaining sim(s) as well can also be a principal matter by the way.
To me it is not so much the percentage LL wants over the purchases but it does completely make no sense especially not if we pay fees for sim(s) as well and work our *ss off to make that known and work out.
The times I use MP it is a true pain in the butt also; slow, many things do not arrive in inventory, money is taken but nothing in return and so on and so forth.

[anna Acanthus]

Yes and OMG what if a meteor strikes the planet and there's no MP option ?

I'm also pretty curious to know how one arrives at these hypothetical multi-million USD figures, i've done some quick rough calculations at times and even with over-estimations i end up with waaay lower results.

[Tad Carlucci]

To date, there have been about 2.5 million boxes produced (a very close estimate, determined from examining the KittyCatS web site). Ignoring the 7-day lead-in, that is 18.5 million days. Divide by 30, we get 620,000 bowl. Divide by 20, for the best discount, we get 31,000 20-packs. Multiply by 3725, we get L$115,000.000. Divide by 250, we get $500,000.

That's definitely a HUGE understatement. It assume everyone breed perfectly, producing a box every 7 days (highly unlikely), and always used 20-packs (highly unlikely). And it does not include: start sales, milk, vitamins, collar kits, accessories, etc.

So doubling that to 1 million USD is probably a better estimate for gross sales, to date. My feeling is even that is a bit low. Hence, I say "multi-million" because it's probably more than one. But. yeah, I might be wrong, and it might only have been 3/4 million.

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Drat. I forgot to multiply by 2 because it takes 2 parents to make a box. So double everything I said above.

[Kayleigh McMillan]

(07-06-2014 10:18 AM)Tad Carlucci Wrote:  To date, there have been about 2.5 million boxes produced (a very close estimate, determined from examining the KittyCatS web site). Ignoring the 7-day lead-in, that is 18.5 million days. Divide by 30, we get 620,000 bowl. Divide by 20, for the best discount, we get 31,000 20-packs. Multiply by 3725, we get L$115,000.000. Divide by 250, we get $500,000.

That's definitely a HUGE understatement. It assume everyone breed perfectly, producing a box every 7 days (highly unlikely), and always used 20-packs (highly unlikely). And it does not include: start sales, milk, vitamins, collar kits, accessories, etc.

So doubling that to 1 million USD is probably a better estimate for gross sales, to date. My feeling is even that is a bit low. Hence, I say "multi-million" because it's probably more than one. But. yeah, I might be wrong, and it might only have been 3/4 million.

It might me just me but I think it is not decent to make publications about assumptions how a business, in this case KittyCatS!, does.