Merchant Tools Needed

[Sierra Jakob]

Kitely might increase merchant participation in the market if it would focus on improving the merchant tools & features. Before initially investing in a market or expanding product placement in a market, experienced Merchants evaluate the tools a market offers to
A) manage products
B) analyze product placement effectiveness
C) document & analyze income and outlay (--in both real dollars and KCs).

Currently I am aware of several experienced merchants who have declined to participate in the Kitely market due to the lack of any real merchant management tools. Unfortunately, such merchants tend to be merchants who could expand the Kitely significantly. What is more, the merchants that are already participating in the Kitely market have already experienced the difficulties associated with a lack of basic analysis tools, and this adversely affects expansion of product placement in many cases. For example, if basic tools had been available, I would definitely already have expanded & improved my own Kitely Store.

The result is a weak and less effective market for Kitely, and of course a weakened source of Kitely revenue as a whole. If the market is meant to be a significant revenue source for Kitely, it would be a productive use of Kitely staff time to respond to the needs and requests for analysis tools from the larger merchants. Also, providing the most common basic tools offered by other successful and popular electronic market-space providers, such as Yahoo, would be a good start.

Here are a few basics I personally would most like to have available.

1) Historical income details by date, with an option to chose the span of dates, for my store as a whole, with a graph showing rise and fall of sales
2) Historical income details by date, with an option to chose the span of dates, per product, with a graph showing rise and fall of sales.
3) Data showing how often each product shows up on someone's search screen--with specific dates available.
4) Data showing how often each product screen is actually selected by someone to study that individual product--with specific dates available.
5) Under "Manage Products", the ability to search and sort my store products by category, income, words in the name, words in the description, income, how often viewed, and how often shows up on a search page.
6) A detailed Merchant Instruction Web page. It's such a time-waster having to search the forums and blogs for basic instructions.

I'd love to hear from other merchants--what tools have you been yearning for in Kitely Market?

[Kayaker Magic]

I've asked about automatic notifications (SL calls this ANS) for the Kitely Marketplace and Ilan said it is not even on the horizon any time soon. This is a feature where the SL Marketplace sends an HTTP request with all the details of each sale to a URL of your choosing. I wrote a script to catch those requests and store the data in a database. It is the same database that my vending machines feed. I have already written my own report pages (WEB based) that help me analyze that data.
So in my case, and I realize this doesn't help any one else, just this one ANS feature would get me all those analysis abilities without Kitely having to write them all.

[Ilan Tochner]

Thank you for your input, we'll be assessing what to work on next after we're done rolling out full hypergrid support and a few other roadmap features we have planned.

[Dot Matrix]

"Hypergrid!" cry some.
Others: "Merchant Tools Needed!"
Poor Ilan, Oren.

(Hat tip to Freda for her Haiku Throwdown)

[Sierra Jakob]

Hi Kayaker,

Merchants can already download a CSV file that contains all of their sales. To do so, click “Download sales report” in your Sales History page.