Suggestions for additional categories in Kitely Market

[Amiryu Hosoi]

hey Ilan, There is a possible solution to this. Like I explained some time agoo to you I built a luxury marketplace for a customer in RL. This website also needed categories, subcategories and variations for products like cars, planes, ships, villa's. You name it. What I did was the following. I made all categories, subcategories and variations dynamic. Like, when a customer places an add for a car he will get a dropdown menu with the colors that are present in the database at the time the customer is working on the product, same with horsepower, color, type, etc.

When a desired variation or volor or whatever is not in the dropdown menu the customer can add his own. Think of "metalic purple". When the next product will be added the dropdown menu will also have the added option "metalic purple" to choose from. But, when there are no products active on the system anymore with the variation "metalic purple", the specific variation will no longer exist in the database thus will no longer show in the dropdown.

This method has several advantages, 1. Customers can choose from all existing variations and add their own variation. 2. The database will always show all options available, 3. When a customer ads a variation and makes a typo ("metalic purpel"), then this typo variation will also be found. 4. The system will clean up itself because unvalid variations will no longer show up in the database. Simple as that. This works great for a database with adds that will disappear from the system over time (when a product is sold). For Kitely this method would work, but only when products will become inactive over time. To keep your database clean you would have to introduce a listing fee based on time per active listing. This means a complete overhaul of your listing fee system though.

Just some little idea I wanted to share;-)

Ami

[Ilan Tochner]

Thank you for the idea Amiryu,

We considered using a tagging system (which is basically what you're proposing) but decided that it would degrade the user experience over time as the number of tags people are presented at each junction increased and the number of tags meaning the same things grew. The result would be that the user would have to spend an increasing amount of time reviewing the tag options and trying to decide between them. Tag clouds with different sized tags based on their popularity could help but they would still be a lot harder to navigate and wouldn't solve the ambiguity problem.

Our approach was to design a fixed taxonomy that could cover most cases with a few options while leaving text search technology to help people find things that didn't exactly fit the mold. This approach however does require adopting the taxonomy over time to reflect the nature and changing distribution of the items added to the marketplace.

[Rikku Cosplay]

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[Deuce Halsey]

A store that can house 2 or 3 stores under one avatar name has always been something many have wanted in the old marketplace
Example you sell home & garden in one the other you sell fashion or even full perm content for builders
Its very desired by many & would be a nice option for those who need it

I heartily support this concept! My Just4yucks store is perfect for selling funny designs on shirts and posters. It would be less appropriate for my other product line, scripted products for business users. In SL I simply used an alt for the other (non-funny) products, but it would nice to do both under one avatar name in Kitely Marketplace.