Kitely Forums

Thank you for your suggestions Spax. We welcome feedback and constructive discussion of ideas.

Just to clarify:

1) Product listings may include text, links and map locations for where the items can be viewed inworld, as long as they are to locations inside the Kitely grid. We also allow links to YouTube videos that demonstrate the products but those linked to locations mustn't instruct the viewer how to acquire the content from outside Kitely.

2) Product listings may inform the viewer that they can get a free copy of the listed item in a Kitely-hosted grid location but It's not okay to direct people to buy content outside Kitely Market.

3) Product listing edit pages already include a link to Kitely's product listing guidelines.

4) We will indeed reject any Kitely ad that directs people to acquire content from outside Kitely Market.

What about links to information on a website? I provide instructions and other information about my products on my website (because notecards are not enough) - is it not permitted to link those pages?

The only place on the Hypergrid where people can buy my products is Kitely Market, and I have no plans to change this.

Hi Handy,

You can include a website where you provide information and instructions about your products but only if that website doesn't include any mention of where those products can be acquired outside Kitely / Kitely Market.

Well, my website links to my stores in Kitely, Second Life and Inworldz, so there's no conflict there, right? My products in SL and IW only work on those grids.

Hi Handy,

Content bought in Inworldz and Second Life based stores can be technically imported into Kitely and vice versa using the viewer (and OAR imports in the case of InWorldz). In fact, most OpenSim users joining a grid seed their inventories from content they bring over from other grids. So saying there is no conflict is not accurate.

There is no fundamental difference between what is now a closed OpenSim grid and Inworldz or Second Life. Sales made in any of those grids can hurt sales made in Kitely Market when it is a Kitely Market product listing which directed people to buy from another store. Maybe not immediately, but if and when the buyer decides to move to a grid Ktiely does deliver to (which happens quite frequently for people who visit Kitely Market).

In other words, Second Life and Inworldz stores are NOT an accepted exception to our terms of service.

I've very disappointed by the lack of trust this demonstrates.

I suggest you compare our TOS to those of other marketplaces that sell 3D content, such as Turbo Squid, that go so far as to make it very hard for merchants and their potential customers to communicate directly prior to a sale (whereas in Kitely Market you can easily IM people directly from the marketplace and provide contact emails in your product listings).

What you call lack of trust we call what's required to keep Kitely Market in business. Neither merchants nor your potential buyers will benefit from us being too nice for our own good, to the extent that running Kitely Market becomes unsustainable. If you check our forums you'll see that running Kitely Market is very time consuming and if you do the math on our published sales volume you'll see that we currently aren't making a lot of money running it. We provide a lot of support that you would otherwise need to provide yourself when selling to people from multiple grids. I don't think that respecting our rules is too high a price to pay for what we provide. You, of course, are free to think otherwise.

It's also important to remember that our rules weren't created for a specific person; they were made to help us run a marketplace that services a wide variety of people from multiple grids. Keeping your door unlocked may be reasonable in a small town where everyone knows each other, but it would be a very unwise thing to do in a big city. Kitely Market isn't a small town when it comes to OpenSim.

Frankly, something is very broken here. What has happened needs to unhappen.

Hi Graham,

There is nothing new about this policy being enforced and there is nothing wrong with it. I highly recommend that people who think otherwise see if other online marketplaces allow linking to alternative places where the listed items can be bought. That is not allowed in most marketplaces selling real goods and it isn't allowed in the leading digital goods marketplaces either. Many of these other marketplaces also place a lot more restrictions on pre-sale merchant-to-customer communication channels than we do.

The great majority of the people selling in Kitely Market have no issue with respecting our terms of service even if they don't like some of them. Once every few months some merchant has sufficient issues with some policy that they decide to leave. Most of the merchants who left later returned when they stepped away from the argument, tried selling and supporting OpenSim users using other channels, and had time to get some perspective. We welcomed them back warmly and didn't keep a grudge even against people who went out of their way to attack us in social media with quite a bit of vitriol.

We spend a lot of time running Kitely Market, helping customers, merchants and grid owners from many competing grids. Most of that time is spent dealing with technical issues in merchant's products, configuration problems in other grids, and with user-side viewer/computer/network problems of buyers from other grids. All that effort enables merchants to sell to customers from a lot more grids than they could have practically serviced without our system and customer support. We do this despite the fact that our world hosting business is a lot more profitable for us and requires a lot less time and effort to manage. We don't leverage Kitely Market to tie people to Kitely, we just ask that people not use Kitely Market to direct sales to stores outside Kitely.

On a personal note: having to deal with this type of occurrence is acceptable as a business but it is in no way fun. This isn't a hobby for us, it's our livelihood. As it is, our world hosting business is subsidizing the time we spend operating Kitely Market. We don't want to end up in a situation where it doesn't make sense for us to continue doing so. Changing this policy will take us closer to that happening, so I suggest that people pushing this issue take a step back, consider the service we provide, what we get from running it and the pros and cons of their own actions. There are people, emotions and business interests on both sides of this argument.

I'm sorry, Ilan, but I agree with Graham.

For complex products like Handy's (I can think of others too) there needs to be good documentation. That is best achieved via a website.

How otherwise would you suggest such documentation be provided?