Linden CEO Acknowledges SL Marketplace Direct Delivery Problems, Announces Fixes

Linden Lab CEO acknowledged the problems direct delivery of SL items ordered on the web-based Marketplace are having via his Twitter account, telling content creator Sara Lok: "It was not an acceptable level of quality roll out. I will say the the team is crunching hard." In his latest Tweet, he points to this Linden update on the forum from late yesterday:

• [P]urchases are now delivered to recipients with the inventory name (which does not allow unicode characters). This will prevent future orders from getting stuck in the Being Delivered state due to this issue. In addition, all orders affected by this problem have been pushed through.
• [U[pdates have been made to support updating store search results, which we will process over the next week; we continue to work on the issue related to mismatched data on listings. We do know that this issue has existed since September 2010 (during the migration from Xstreet to the Second Life Marketplace).

Have you noticed both fixes, readers?

Comments

[Amanda Dallin]

I never had an issue with delivery from the Market Place but then I don't use Unicode characters in my name.

[Dartagan Shepherd]

Many thanks to Sera.

After years of bad decisions, LL competing with users, high prices, developing for you and not us, and buggy product users want Chuck Norris.

Chuck Norris is the holocaust that destroys the daycare center and the toys. If Chuck Norris says it's good, you can inscribe it in your holy book of choice.

Be Chuck Norris.

"Whoa" -- Keanu Reeves

[Kim]

Wow, a straightforward acknowledgment, with no BS, no spin. Rodvik's tweet is exactly the kind of move that is a sign of excellence, quality, and leadership. (Whether it's truly accompanied by the promised action is a different issue, I can only say that the team's "crunching" better fix the problem soon, and everyone should hold LL's feet to the fire on this regardless until it's fixed)

Kudos to Rodvik, may this act serve as an example for all of LL. This kind of forthcoming communication can make all the difference in the world in making SL live up to its full potential.

[Sera Lok]

I was very happy and appreciative to hear a straightforward answer from Rod, just as I was happy when a Linden posted in the forum about a week ago that they were sorry for some of the recent customer service issues and thanked the residents for contributing information about the problems occurring.

I'm looking forward to seeing things fall into place with the Marketplace. It's been a pretty rough ride for merchants and shoppers alike since Xstreet was bought, and many are simply tired and cranky and ready to have something that really works, and works well. I have not lost hope that this is possible, but it's a lot for the Lab to sort out, for sure.

I think a good portion of LL office lacks understanding of how important communication is to its users, particularly residents who are in Second Life daily and hear the panic and confusion of many residents when things go wrong. Often an update that takes two minutes or less to write will make most people feel better ("thank you, we're paying attention, no news yet but it's coming" etc), but stone cold silence from the Lab for days is torture when there are major issues that need to be dealt with.

The thing is, people in Second Life can tolerate change and hardship... many residents are developers themselves and understand things almost never unfold as planned. But we need communication about it! I am hopeful that straightforward and meaningful communications from the Lab will become more commonplace and I do believe it's entirely possible.

[Rusalka Writer]

Happy with and startled by an actual response. Makes a big difference. Lack of communication has been a huge problem over the years. I hope this is a trend.

[foneco zuzu]

The wonder of internet, any can makes the same mistakes over and over and seems nobody will get caught but the customers!
But just a tweet and it seems all is sorted and solved!
.

[Ajax Manatiso]

From these comments it seems that Rodvik can crap in your sandwich and if he has a wonderful apology, then everyone will say Well Done!!

[Dartagan Shepherd]

@Ajax Agree with you but I don't think anyone is being fooled.

Apologies themselves mean nothing when they can't care enough about basic ecommerce, the quality of their own product or their own customers funds to produce a shopping cart that works in the first place.

In this case, actions have spoken volumes over words for quite a long time.

They're either going to wake up and stop producing buggy software and develop this world for their customers or they're going to continue to run an amateur shop that's slowly declining.

Just the hope that Rod or the board finally realizes that we're more important than their own employees and that they need to take a firm hand in producing quality.

Their employees get free food and a pat on the back. We get mis-managed buggy software and funds and no refunds on their mistakes.

We get less polygons now with Land Impact and mesh than we used to with regular prims, they get to keep charging us for outdated hardware that has too many sims running on those machines, and so on.

They start investing more in their own quality and testing and pushing that off on their users or they don't.

It's a "you will or you won't" situation. Willing to take on good faith as long as the actions are there to back it up that we've finally got a CEO that might be able to turn this around.

There's not a heck of a lot of short vague answers and spin that even works these days.

It takes more than communication, but it has to start somewhere and be backed up by actions and communication is that starting point.

[Sera Lok]

It's obvious to most of us that things aren't sorted and solved.

Continually bashing a company into the ground because of its past, instead of recognizing and appreciating when good things (and needed communications) happen, is completely unproductive.

In addition to actively (and constructively) pointing out areas where improvement is needed, you must acknowledge the positives and encourage them to keep coming. It's called Positive Reinforcement. Basic animal psychology can actually work for corporations, too.

[Laetizia Coronet]

Rodvik continues to surprise - he once read my blog about age verification through Aristotle and it vanished not long after he acknowlegded it on his Twitter account.
I know some people are forever stuck in bash-and-lament-mode, but these are positive things and they need to be said as well.
If anything, he knows how to communicate. And he knows that communication is only half the work. He needs to walk the walk if he wants his words to continue to be credible.

[Rygel Weyland]

It's great to get a response from the CEO but the marketplace team shouldn't get a pass for that.

Go to the marketplace and sort any category by a-z. It's broken. Why? because it's doesn't handle non-alphanumeric characters correctly. You can put spaces in the item name and that will move it right to the top. This is a known bug that's been filed a few times months and months ago. They've not fixed it...and now, surprise, their new delivery system had a problem with characters.

It's taken them a month to fix two bugs in it, and that they've found a bug that's been around for TWO YEARS since they MIGRATED?, and now it's messing up listings doesn't exactly instill confidence.

They're not adding features (over a year since a new feature was added). They're not fixing old bugs, and the systems they are replacing, not adding, are just introducing new or different bugs.

The commerce team are as brief as possible with their posts because there is really nothing good they can say about it at this point. I'm sure they are working hard, but the results don't show it. It's a train wreck and they know it.