Change in POLICY required.

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Spax Zorin
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Change in POLICY required.

Post by Spax Zorin »

Merchants should be allowed to have a link to their store in their ABOUT section on the Market and product descrption pages. Offering the customer an option to visit merchants inworld provides convenience to the consumer. Would you go out and purchase a CAR or a piece of furniture based solely on a picture and a sales pitch? Sometimes it is not practical to offer a demo when a crippled product will negatively impact the purchase decision. Inworld demonstrations are better.

Many customers are former Second Life users, myself included. Their market has links to inworld product. Seeing that Kitely market has similar functionality and purpose, why isn't that permitted here? Denying information which helps the consumer to make an informed purchase decision not only punishes your comsumer, it also punishes your merchants. Since Kitely is getting 20% of all of my sales, and those sales are rising, you would think that a harmless UNCLICKABLE map link would be encouraged to generate even more sales.... Visit my store on OSGRID.... We proudly display the KITELY BRAND in a PROFESSIONAL, POSITIVE MANNER!

I had a number of people BEG me in Second Life to start porting my content to Opensim and I saw Kitely Market as a means to get a return for my time invested in creating premium content. I will not open a region on Kitely because I do not want my customers to WAIT in a holding area for the region to load. I cannot rent a small parcel in Kitely because there is no access to OSSL functions required to make my products work. My home internet connection has sufficient bandwidth to be able to host my own region FREE of charge, this allows me to make DAILY IAR and OAR backups which is critical for serious minded builders, so why have an additional expense every month? If Kitely has an option for me to connect my self hosted region to the grid... that is an option I would consider.

So.... it stands to reason that if Kitely market gives the option to export items to ANY grid, they should also allow links to outside grids to visit stores inworld. Part of the reasoning you want people to visit your store in person is so that you can offer specials they will not get anywhere else and that gives your consumer reason to tell their friends and come back for more. FOR NOW, Kitely is my SOLE outlet for selling my goods. I will not even currencies like Gloebit until their NAG modules are removed from point of entry. I want to give my customers the best Kitely shopping experience. NO POP-UPs and NO SPAM at SimGEAR

Warm Regards,
Spax Orion (Spax Zorin on Kitely)
SimGEAR - Affordable Hypergrid Products.
hg.osgrid.org:80:ozone
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Ilan Tochner
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Re: Change in POLICY required.

Post by Ilan Tochner »

Hi Spax,

First, welcome to Kitely Market.

The reason we don't allow links to other locations (inworld and websites) where items can be bought is that we have no way to practically police that those links won't be used to drive sales away from Kitely Market to other transaction systems from which Kitely doesn't receive a sales commission. Before this policy was enforced we saw merchants directing people to other places where they provided the content for less than what they sold it for in our marketplace. This undermined the financial sustainability of our business and, as a result, put the continued existence of Kitely Market at risk. As I'm sure you can understand, that hurts the people who sell and buy in our marketplace more than the side effects of our current policies.

While I'm sure you would not try to undermine the viability of your sole way of selling content in OpenSim, experience has thought us that there are quite a few other merchants who act differently. If we want to be able to continue serving the OpenSim Hypergrid, which we do, we simply can't risk making policy changes that put our business at risk.

Regarding not wanting your customers to wait for your world to load, please note that well optimized Kitely worlds load very quickly, often before people's viewers have logged them into the grid. As a result, people rarely have to wait for more than a few seconds in the Kitely Transfer Station even when they log into a world that is offline (assuming the merchant took the time to optimize that world). See: https://kitely.atlassian.net/wiki/displ ... erformance
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Re: Change in POLICY required.

Post by Spax Zorin »

With respect, without sounding argumentative, my primary OpenSim account is on OSGRID and I hypergrid travel daily. I have not noticed any improvement in wait times on my end. Large regions tend to take long times to load. This is one pill I do not wish to force my hypergrid consumers to swallow. Further, as a serious content developer, I have other aforementioned criteria a "hosted service" cannot provide me. I am sure you can understand my line of thinking in this matter.

Warm Regards,
Spax Orion (Spax Zorin on Kitely)
SimGEAR - Affordable Hypergrid Products.
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Re: Change in POLICY required.

Post by Ilan Tochner »

I think a good way to measure teleport performance is not just to measure the time it takes for the avatar to end inside the target destination but also measure how long after the avatar arrives until a previously unvisited world has fully rezzed around it (i.e. testing the grid's actual asset system performance and not just your viewer's cache). If you measure that I believe you'll find that the total amount of time from teleport request until your avatar is fully rezzed in Kitely is no longer than what you get when teleporting to the great majority of Hypergrid destinations.

Comparing a teleport to a complex 1024x1024 VarRegion Kitely world with tens of thousands of objects to a differently filled VarRegion in other grids is not a fair comparison and will lead you to the wrong conclusions.

Having said that, you're free to develop your items elsewhere and just upload them into Kitely when you wish. There are quite a few merchants who do that. You won't be able to test the NPC OSSL functionality in the free Kitely Merchants Sandbox but, if you want, you can get a Starter World and use that for testing and as a showroom for your potential customers. If your wares are optimized then that showroom world shouldn't take a long time to start. You'll also be able to easily create OAR files of that world from the Files tab of its Manage World dialog.
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Re: Change in POLICY required.

Post by Spax Zorin »

Ilan Tochner wrote:The reason we don't allow links to other locations (inworld and websites) where items can be bought is that we have no way to practically police that those links won't be used to drive sales away from Kitely Marke
Back on topic.... After giving some thought to your prior statement, there actually is a way to police malicious activity.... you can have the customers do it for you. I am sure you have seen the FLAG option on the Second Life marketplace. There you can FLAG sellers who are breaking the terms of service and you are presented with a list of items they can be reported for. You could implement such a system here and it would save you the trouble of having to do all of the work yourself. As we say in the Linux world, "More eyes on the code means fewer bugs and vulnerabilities". The same principle can apply here. Happy customers tell their friends. Unhappy customers TELL EVERYONE! I am sure that Market users will be happy to report misconduct by sellers doing any number of things inworld and you can have that as a selection when the report button is pressed. That saves you and staff time and all that needs to be done is to verify the reports when they come in and punish wrongdoings accordingly.


Warm Regards,
Spax Orion (Spax Zorin on Kitely)
SimGEAR - Affordable Hypergrid Products.
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Re: Change in POLICY required.

Post by Ilan Tochner »

We have a Report Product link on all Kitely Market product listings and the way we police merchant compliance with our listing guidelines is almost exclusively based on those reports. So the premise of what you're saying doesn't allude us. The problem is that unlike things that happen in Kitely where we can easily track compliance, doing so outside Kitely requires a lot more time and can be much more easily worked around by scrupulous people. This would end up with the type of cat and mouse game we had prior to enforcing these policies, where some people would list what would amount to free advertising in our marketplace until they were caught and we had to start arguing with them (sometimes publicly) about why they can't do that. We lost some merchants when we started to enforce our policies but the net effect on the marketplace and our ability to continue running it was positive.

As it is, if we consider the amount of time we spend on compliance and customer support for merchant-related content and activities we are paid third-world wages for our Kitely Market-related work. In other words, our work subsidizes a lot of effort for merchants who would have otherwise had to spend time themselves on supporting customers from the more than 190 OpenSim grids Kitely has delivered to to date (grids that run different OpenSim versions, with different modules, using different setups on different networks).
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Re: Change in POLICY required.

Post by Spax Zorin »

I have found AN OFFENDER. If the TOS does not allow LINKS then the following Merchant is is violation [REMOVED BY KITELY SEE BELOW]
Every time I am on the kitely market and I spot someone who has a LINK OUTSIDE of KITELY I will REPORT THEM HERE because I DID NOT SEE the flag button you mentioned.

Another one links to a websute outside of kitely: [REMOVED BY KITELY SEE BELOW]
This vendor invites avatars inworld to view product which is also not allowed [REMOVED BY KITELY SEE BELOW]
This vendor publshed an email address in their ABOUT: which means they are doing business outside of kitely: [REMOVED BY KITELY SEE BELOW]
and ANOTHER: [REMOVED BY KITELY SEE BELOW]

And more....
this one has links outside of kitely (social media and that can do more harm to kitely) :[REMOVED BY KITELY SEE BELOW]
another one directs people inworld: [REMOVED BY KITELY SEE BELOW]
This vendor publshed an email address in their ABOUT: which means they are doing business outside of kitely: [REMOVED BY KITELY SEE BELOW]
another email: [REMOVED BY KITELY SEE BELOW]

If emails ARE allowed then I would like to add that to my store profile!

-Update I found the report button... it is only on the product page and not on the store profile

and I found more: [REMOVED BY KITELY SEE BELOW]
outside links: [REMOVED BY KITELY SEE BELOW]
and another one: [REMOVED BY KITELY SEE BELOW]

It did not take me long to find these while shopping so that tells me someone at Kitely is not doing their job. As a concerned and productive member of this community I am doing my part to ensure my fellow merchants have the same rights I have to succeed!

Warm Regards,
Spax
Graham Mills
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Re: Change in POLICY required.

Post by Graham Mills »

The report link is adjacent to the maturity rating. It isn't displayed on mobile as far as I could see which may be your problem.
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Re: Change in POLICY required.

Post by Ilan Tochner »

Hi Spax,

If we had to moderate every change a merchant makes to a product listing or an about store page then we'd be spending all our time doing just that. Which is why I've already stated that "the way we police merchant compliance with our listing guidelines is almost exclusively based on those [user] reports".

Having said that, thank you for your reports. If you find a problem in the future please use the Report Product link or send us an email about it. There is no need to start drama in our forums, these are our guidelines and we want them enforced. I've therefore removed the links to other merchant's stores from your post but kept the rest as you wrote it.

Supplying an email address for customer support is not against our TOS. Directing people to contact the merchant in order to get the items not via Kitely Market is and so is linking to places outside Kitely where the items can also be found. All but a few of the links you supplied were for customer support emails or for locations inside Kitely and were therefore already in compliance with our TOS. In the cases you reported which were not in compliance we've contacted the relevant merchants and will work to ensure they comply with the same rules as everyone else.
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Re: Change in POLICY required.

Post by Spax Zorin »

Ilan Tochner wrote:Having said that, thank you for your reports. If you find a problem in the future please use the Report Product link or send us an email about it. There is no need to start drama in our forums,
Many thanks for pointing out the preferred delivery method for reportiing these issues.

I would also like to make a suggestion to have a POP UP added whenever a new product is listed to REMIND merchants of items which will not be tolerated. This will be extremely helpful to merchants who sell goods on other platforms such as Second Live who allow inworld links, websites urls and other items of interest outside of their market, which are NOT permitted here.

Such a pop up would say: Thank you for listing your product on Kitely Market.
Per our terms of service the following items are not permitted on the market or listings:
1. No Links or communications directing customers inworld to see the product.
2. Links or map coordinates to your inworld store are not permitted.
3. You must use the variation tool on products with slight differences such as color.
4. Ads can not contain communications letting customers know they can get the product elsewhere free or otherwise.

Starting Drama is not my goal. As a forum administrator myself, I vehemently abhor it. I am providing suggestions and offering feedback to make the service better for everyone. I am under the impression that Kitely is strongly concerned with providing the best consumer experience and offering tools to help their merchants succeed. This involves getting feedback from internal and external consumers and taking constructive suggestions into consideration.
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