Featured Merchants Requirements

[Sierra Jakob]

Just wondered if we could get an update on the current requirements for "Featured Merchants" for Kitely Market. I may never get there myself, but it would be exciting to know if anyone else was getting close. What's the scoop?

[Ilan Tochner]

Hi Sierra,

The existing Featured Merchants gained that status as part of our early-bird promotion for listing more than 100 unique products prior to the marketplace opening for business (that promotion has since ended): http://www.kitely.com/virtual-world-new ... promotion/

We've yet to decide on the criteria for additional Featured Merchants. There is a correlation between people who have a lot of good product listings and people who sell well in Kitely Market so it seems a bit unfair to give free promotion to people who are already doing well in Kitely Market. We have a commitment to the existing featured merchants as part of the early-bird promotion which we intend to honor but we've yet to decide whether we'll retain that type of promotion after that commitment ends.

[Sierra Jakob]

Wondering if folks would support continuing the same requirements to add additional featured merchants--at least until something else replaces it. It was pretty objective--difficult to achieve, but could be done by anyone who wanted to, in a straightforward manner by their own honest efforts. It was a nice way to reward and incentivize merchants. Was just looking at the market and noticing there seem to be some very deserving merchants. The Featured Merchants make Kitely Market look better, and by extension make every merchant involved in the Kitely Market look better, IMHO. Just a thought. Shoot me down--here's the bullseye, I'm holding it real steady.

[Constance Peregrine]

"I shot an arrow into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For, so swiftly it flew, the sight
Could not follow it in its flight.

I breathed a song into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For who has sight so keen and strong,
That it can follow the flight of song?

Long, long afterward, in an oak
I found the arrow, still unbroke;
And the song, from beginning to end,
I found again in the heart of a friend."

--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

anywho, good idea Sierra-))

[Amiryu Hosoi]

Hey Sierra, I asked Ilan the very same question. I told him I was willing to pay for a banner add at the featured merchants spot. I think Ilan and Oren are way to busy right now to handle server updates. I think they don't have the time for marketing related and other issues. Which is not good in my opinion because there is so much work to be done if Kitely is to be put on the Map. At the last mentors meeting I suggested Ilan to "look" for support under the "dedicated" users to help them. I didn't get a reply on the suggestion.

Ami

[Zuza Ritt]

Just my personal opinion for this issue.
The "add" which is not changed for month made the "add blindeness" for everybody, who is not entering the Market first time. Nobody looks at this place. With the hundreds of high quality items (and hundreds of low quality items due the no listing fee) this "add" is looking quite weird... It is not the link to the best content at Kitely Market (no offense to this creators, I am just judgding by the vendor pictures...) so it looks kinda... "there is something wrong with Market." It is not good for Market and it is definitely not good for these two stores with add - it is anti-add. My opinion, anybody is allowed to disagree:)

The "amount" criteria for this add was good (questionable because of variations, but generally good) when listing fee existed. Now it is bad, because I can list 200 pieces of junk for free, and it is not help for Market neither the buyers... on the contrary.


Now something more helpful:)
We know Ilan and Oren has got plenty of work on most important issues now... let's disscuss what the rules for add here should looks like.
We know we are able to lead very civil disccussion here albeit we are very different people with very different experiences and opinions. So let's do it:)

Paid adds seems to be good for Kitely. But paid add means the promotion of whole store? Can merchant change the picture anytime? Can merchant have just one add there? Why just one, when it is paid:) How the early birds adds will works, forever free? The "position" in this place will be random? Based on something like... amount of clicks? Amount what was paid (guess we are back to the blind spot - not changing adds in first page row).

Free ads based on amount of products seems to be very unfair now when listing fee is free. And very easy to misuse.

[Ozwell Wayfarer]

Just chucking in my 2c here; if we are talking about a system that is fair to both customers and merchants, then I would say the only way is for featured merchants to not be “fixed” but to be changeable, based on their total sales volume (by units AND total profits) and ratings. People want to see what’s hot and rated. Not what was uploaded en-masse a few months/years ago then forgotten.

This would give customers a good guide and encourage merchants to continually improve their service/marketing to achieve the “featured” status.

[Ilan Tochner]

The existing Featured Merchants were granted that status for 1 year from the time Kitely Market opened (which was August 30, 2013). Once that year ends (in less than 9 months) so will their status (unless we decide to continue the Featured Merchants feature and they earn that status again using whatever criteria we create). This is not a lifetime perk but it is an existing obligation we will honor.

We started out with this program to give merchants an incentive to list products before the marketplace opened so that there will be more quality items in the marketplace on opening day. Now that that's behind us, the question that remains is what is the ongoing purpose of having Featured Merchants. Is it to promote deserving merchants that aren't doing well? Is it to let potential buyers know which merchants are the "best" (using whatever way we decide to quantify that term)? Is it to help Kitely earn advertising money? Something else?

After we agree on a goal we can decide what needs to be done to achieve it. The more complex the solution the more work it will require to implement which will decrease the likelihood of us being able to allocate time to do so while there are higher priority features still pending.

[Constance Peregrine]

I say this:



or this:

[Ilan Tochner]

Hi Amiryu,

I apologize for not replying to your comment during the last meeting, I was trying to address the many different comments that were being made and I may have missed yours.

We don't outsource product development but we do crowdsource various projects to the community whenever we can. See for example the community-created Kitely Transfer Station and Kitely Welcome Center. We also try to get community feedback and help in defining (almost) all the consumer-facing projects we've undertaken.

I agree that we need to do a lot more to promote Kitely. We were supposed to already have an ad campaign going to promote the Kitely Market following the rollout of its hypergrid delivery system. We already bought good audio equipment and video editing software to create video tutorials for Kitely Market which were to be used in the ads landing pages. Unfortunately, that has all been delayed due to the unplanned OpenSim optimizations we were forced to do following the update to OpenSim 0.7.6. We hope to finish this optimization work later this week which will let us get back to our roadmap.

There is an open thread requesting community assistance with the marketing campaign: http://www.kitely.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=834 (it's even promoted as a public announcement in the forums) - people who are willing to help are encouraged to participate in it.

The thing we could use the most help with while we've yet to roll out the key feature we need to have for our ad campaign, is spreading the word about Kitely Market to additional content creators. That can be done via word of mouth, blogs, videos of projects in Kitely, comments on third-party sites, etc. The more content creators there are in Kitely Market the more sales are made and the more people buy form the marketplace. Having more content also makes Kitely a more viable option for people who just want to build worlds or outfit their avatars. Content is king at this stage and building it is something the community does much better than we can.