Lindens Hate Her! This Designer's One Weird Trick for More Efficient SL Marketplace Listings

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

Second Life designers know just how dull and arduous it can be to list items on the marketplace, especially when you're listing items that come in several different colors or variations. Making sure that customers can easily navigate to the other items in the set via the Related Items panel is an easy way to ensure you get at least one (if not multiple) sales, but it can also be time consuming. The pop-up window will automatically close after one item is selected, meaning that for an item with 8 variations, you'll need to repeat the process 8 times... And then of course multiply by 8 again for each of the other listings. Exhausting.

Unless you're clever about it, as many merchants (including Maylee Oh) are...

I'll admit that I've mentioned The Secret Store designer Maylee Oh quite a lot lately, but I couldn't miss the opportunity to highlight a gif and a clever tip she shared earlier today on Plurk, later confirmed by several other designers. Apparently if you click several items in quick succession in the Related Items pop-up, they will all be added simultaneously when it closes. This means that with a good mouse and a little practice, you should be able to streamline your listing process significantly. This does make me wonder why it has to close so swiftly in the first place, but it's just one more thing to add to the list of usability issues concerning the Second Life Marketplace.

Thanks again to Maylee Oh (who I'm sure the Lindens don't actually hate but, you know, jokes.)

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Janine Hawkins (@bleatingheart on Twitter, Iris Ophelia in Second Life) has been writing about virtual worlds and video games for nearly a decade, and has had her work featured on Kotaku, Jezebel, and The Mary Sue.

Comments

[Pussycat Catnap]

It closes to quickly to save you the hassle of clicking to close it.

This is an example of 'enhancing usability' without properly considering alternate use case - such as a case where a person might have a whole bunch of entries they wants to make all at once.

[Richard C]

Good tip, and thanks for highlighting the poor state of the marketplace. If a seller has 8 colors, they need to relate each individually, which can only be done after they've all been uploaded. It's a ton of clicking. A smallish shop with 10 designs in eight colors needs 80 listings too which clutters up the marketplace.

I can only assume they don't have any developers for the web marketplace as it's been this way for years.

[Ilan Tochner]

Hi Richard,

I just want to point out that Kitely Market already has support for multiple product variations (and their demos) in the same product listing. See for example:

http://www.kitely.com/market/product/4434095/Cordelia-Rigged-Mesh-Hair

Our marketplace also supports product attributes so you can filter items by things such as Color, Department, etc.

You can see a presentation about Kitely Market here: http://www.kitely.com/virtual-world-news/2013/09/08/kitely-market-presented-in-opensim-community-conference-2013/

(The marketplace already has many more features that aren't listed in this presentation and some big ones that will be rolled out in the next few weeks)

[2014]

great tip, I'll have to try it on my next listings.

[Tiffy Vella]

This is indeed one of those annoying issues with the MP. With practise over the years, I can now get 5 out of 7 related items selected in one epic flurry of clicking. However, successfully recalling which ones actually loaded when going back for a second pass has and avoiding all the error messages still evades me.

[Carlos Loff]

Whoever wants to seek stuff will be dominant if he comes now to Kitely Market .- Community is growing fast and we need about everything to buy

[Carlos Loff]

sell, not seek - Isn't there and EDIT button for comments ?

[Pierre Ceriano]

Hum... This is going to be THE information of the year :)
I Know and practice this trick for years. I think I'm not the first or last. Wearing a caffeine perfusion, I can go up 6 files at a time.