Search Kitely Market Sales History

We updated the system today with a couple of improvements to merchant tools and some bug fixes.

Search the Sales History

In Kitely Market, merchants have access to a page that shows their Sales History. One of the most-requested features by our merchants has been the ability to search the sales history in order to find particular transactions, and we’re happy to announce that this is now possible.

You can search for sales in two ways: sales of a particular product, or sales to a particular user (buyer). You can also combine the two options.

Search Sales History

To perform a search, start typing the name of the product or user that you’re looking for. These text boxes use autocomplete, so once you type a few characters the names of possible matches will appear. Click on the product or user that you want to search for.

Show Prices in Manage Products

Another page used by merchants is the Manage Products page, which shows all of the products in their store. We’ve added a “Price” column to this table, to make it easier to differentiate between products at a glance. The price shown in this column is the price of the default (first) variation of the product.

Manage Products - Price Column

Other Changes

We fixed a number of bugs related to analytics, and how search engines see the website. These are subtle changes, so most users are unlikely to notice anything different. However, If you advertise in Kitely Market you may see changes in how sales are attributed to your ads.

We also added support for the upcoming ad campaign for Kitely Market.

Showcase Your Items for Free in Kitely Market’s Ad Campaign

Kitely Market is the leading metaverse marketplace, serving all Hypergrid-enabled destinations as well as several closed OpenSim grids. However, not everyone knows that, so we’ve decided to start advertising Kitely Market on virtual-world related websites to help spread the word.

Our advertising campaign will showcase the high-quality products that can be found on Kitely Market and delivered to the metaverse. If you’re a Kitely Market merchant and you want to get free exposure for your products then read this post to find out how to get them included in our advertising campaign.

What do the ads look like?

Here are some examples of ads that will be included in our advertising campaign.

Kitely-Market-728x90Kitely-Market-300x250 Kitely-Market-200x200

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kitely-Market-160x600

How does this work?

We created several templates for the different ad sizes that we’ll use. Each template includes an empty area where merchants can insert an image of one or more of their products. Create ads by combining these templates and your products, and then send them to us (the details are explained below). We’ll include in the advertising campaign several dozen of the best ads that are submitted to us.

All the ads will lead to the Kitely Market front page, overlaid with a message that introduces the visitor to Kitely Market and its benefits for buying and selling content on the metaverse.

We don’t guarantee that all the submitted ads will be used in the advertising campaign, because we can only show a limited number of ads. We’ll select which ads to use based on how good the products in them look; uniqueness (we want to highlight a diversity of items); and effectiveness (how often the ads are clicked). We may add or remove ads from the advertising campaign at any time, or change their frequency of rotation. We may also discontinue the campaign.

We promise that any submission that you send to us will be given serious consideration, and that we’ll let you know whether it has been selected for inclusion in the advertising campaign. Note that ads that are selected for inclusion may not appear immediately on the websites that we advertise on, because there’s a rotation of ads and it may take some time before your ad’s turn comes up.

How do I create ads?

1. Select and pose your product

  • Select the product that you want to include in the ad. Most ads will show only one product, but you may also choose to display several products in a single ad if you can make them look good together.
  • The ad must show the items as they appear in-world, after having been delivered from Kitely Market. You can create a montage of several items, but don’t modify the items to include elements which they don’t come with. An exception is made for elements that are necessary in order to show the item. For example, in order to show a piece of clothing you must show it on an avatar, and the avatar will need to wear other pieces of clothing in order to avoid being naked. If you’re uncertain which additional elements are acceptable then ask us via this forum thread.
  • Only products with a General or Moderate maturity rating may be submitted. See our Maturity Rating Guidelines for information about maturity ratings.
  • The slogan we’re using in the ad campaign is “We deliver to the Metaverse”, so only products that are sold in Kitely Market with the Export permission may be submitted.

2. Capture and process an image

  • The most important criterion for inclusion in the advertising campaign is that the products should look good in the ad. Place your product against a white background; set the viewer to Ultra graphics quality; turn on anti-aliasing; and then capture the image. After the capture, crop the image so that the item appears with no visible cropping artifacts, and its edges are anti-aliased. The image must not appear fuzzy, jagged, or otherwise deformed.
  • The image must not include any logo, trademark, or brand name. Only a clean image of the items.

3. Download the ad templates

We’ve created four ad templates, corresponding to the four ad sizes that we’ll use. Download the templates as a ZIP file here. Note that the ad templates are copyrighted and property of Kitely; you may only use them for emailing us proposals as described below.

4. Insert the image into the templates

  • Select which ad templates to use. Ideally we would like to get each ad in all four sizes, but if your products don’t fit then you may choose to use only some of the templates.
  • The templates are Photoshop files. You can edit them using either Photoshop or Gimp. Insert your image into the layer called “PLACE ITEM HERE”. The item(s) must be centered between the logo and the slogan.
  • Don’t change any of the other layers.

5. Send us your ads

Send us the final ad image(s) via email. You may send us multiple submissions if they’re for different items, but please don’t send us multiple submissions for the same item with slight changes; submit only the option that you think looks best. If you do send multiple submissions then send only one ad per email.

Submission emails must include the following information:

To: kitely-market-ad-campaign@kitely.com

Subject: Ad Submission – Your Name – Product Names

For example:

Ad Submission – Ilan Tochner – Beachball, Plastic Bucket

Message Body:

In the message body you give us legal permission to use your submission in our advertising campaign. We also need to verify that the items you included are indeed sold in Kitely Market with the Export permission. Insert the following text into the email, replacing your details in the underlined sections:

I, Your Full Name, hereby grant to Kitely Ltd. the non-exclusive, unrestricted, unconditional, unlimited, worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual, and cost-free right and license to use any and all parts of the images sent in the attached modified templates for the purpose of promoting Kitely’s services in all formats and on or through any media.

Items included in the ad:

URL to Product 1
URL to Product 2

Etc.

For example:

I, Ilan Tochner, hereby grant to Kitely Ltd. the non-exclusive, unrestricted, unconditional, unlimited, worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual, and cost-free right and license to use any and all parts of the images sent in the attached modified templates for the purpose of promoting Kitely’s services in all formats and on or through any media.

Items included in the ad:

https://www.kitely.com/market/product/123456/Beachball

https://www.kitely.com/market/product/123456/Plastic-Bucket

Email Attachments:

Rename each modified template file to Your NameProduct Names (WidthxHeight).psd . Attach these files to the email.

For example (in this example only 3 of the 4 ad sizes were used):

Ilan Tochner – Beachball, Plastic Bucket (728×90).psd
Ilan Tochner – Beachball, Plastic Bucket (160×600).psd
Ilan Tochner – Beachball, Plastic Bucket (300×250).psd

It Takes a Village

Several people from the Kitely community volunteered their time to help develop this campaign. We want to give special thanks to Dot Matrix, who helped modify our company logo to create the Kitely Market logo, and to Tocy Sweet, who helped create the templates’ graphical design and the example ads shown above. We also wish to thank the various other people who participated in the Kitely Community Meetings during which we discussed how to best present Kitely’s benefits to potential merchants and buyers.

Kitely Market Presented in OpenSim Community Conference 2014

Virtual Reality is coming and it’s kickstarting the Metaverse. By the nature of the Metaverse, multiple virtual world platforms will compete for market share. This means that the Metaverse will be based on many technologies, which will make it difficult for content creators to reach and support all of their potential customers. Mass-market end users will need content delivered directly to their avatars on whatever virtual environment they are using, instead of being sold downloadable files that they have to install themselves, as other 3D content marketplaces do.

This is where Kitely Market comes in. Kitely Market is a virtual goods marketplace that is designed to enable content creators to serve avatars from all across the Metaverse from a single online store. Its mission is to create a critical mass of content, merchants and buyers to help the Metaverse evolve from a collection of separate systems to a unified market that can attract more merchants, buyers, money, activity, and interest for everyone.

The following presentation introduces Kitely Market, discusses its many benefits for merchants, consumers and businesses across the Metaverse, and concludes with some insights gained from Kitely Market’s first year in business.

Here is the video:

Here are my slides:

Related Products and Improved Management Tools in Kitely Market

We updated Kitely Market today with improvements that help merchants manage a large collection of products more easily. Merchants can now use the Manage Products page to quickly find the products they’re looking for, organize them into groups and then perform operations on those groups of products. We also added a “Related Products” feature, which uses this new grouping functionality.

Improved Management Tools

For merchants, one of the most important parts of Kitely Market is the “Manage Products” page. This is where merchants can view all of their products, edit them, and add new products. Previously this page always showed the merchant’s products in reverse chronological order, with no ability to search or filter the products. We’ve now added the ability to search and filter using:

  • Text search
  • Category
  • Group (groups are explained later in this post)
  • Status (Active, Inactive, etc.)
  • Different sort orders (Newest, Best Selling, etc.)

Manage Products

We also added a new sort order, “Name”, which sorts results alphabetically by the product name. This sort order is available in the main search page, too (where regular users can use it).

Another improvement to this page is the addition of a “Select All” checkbox, which selects all of the products in the page. Previously merchants that wanted to select all the products had to click the checkbox next to each product individually.

And finally, in addition to all of these features, the new page works much faster than before!

Product Groups

We’re introducing a new feature today: “Product Groups”. Groups are a way for merchants to organize their products: merchants define groups, and then assign products to these groups. As mentioned in the previous section, the Manage Products page now allows filtering products by group.

Groups aren’t user-visible: they’re for the merchant’s use only.

There are two places where products can be assigned to groups:

1. In the Edit Product page. Click “Change Groups” to open a dialog where you can choose which groups the product belongs to.

View Groups (One Product)

This is the Change Groups dialog:

Change Groups (One Product)

As usual when making changes in the Edit Product page, this change will only take effect once you click “Accept changes”.

2. You can also assign products to groups in the Manage Products page. This page lets you select multiple products and change their groups at once. To do so, select some products, and then select from the Actions menu: “Change Groups”. The changes you make in the Change Groups dialog will affect all of the selected products.

Batch Change Groups

Unlike the Edit Product page, changes you make in the Manage Products page affect the products immediately (there’s no need to click “Accept changes”).

Managing Groups

The Manage Groups page lets you add, rename and delete groups. You get to the Manage Groups page by clicking on a link in the Manage Store page:

Link to Manage Groups

This is what the Manage Groups page looks like:

Manage Groups

Related Products

When users view a product in Kitely Market, the product page now optionally shows a section called “Related Products”. This section displays up to six products, which are chosen randomly from among all of the groups that the viewed product belongs to. For example:

Related Products

Thanks to Groups, the Related Products feature is very easy to use. For example, suppose a merchant has a group called “Patio Furniture”, which contains all of their patio furniture products. When the merchant creates a new product of this type, they only have to add that one product to the group. This single action automatically causes the new product to appear as a “Related Product” in all of the other products in the group, and vice-versa. There’s no need to explicitly mark each of the products in the group as a “Related Product” of the new product.

We’ve integrated Related Products into Kitely Market Analytics: there’s a new channel type called “Related Products”. When users click on a product that they see in the “Related Products” section, and later possibly buy that product, the sale is attributed to the Related Products channel.

Related Products - Analytics