Second life :Changes to Xstreet SL Listing Popularity Ranking
Based on your feedback we've decided to alter our approach to "The Most Popular Items" feed for XStreet SL that populates the Second Life Dashboard and is part of the shopping search algorithm. We're also making some minor changes to our navigation and XStreetSL.com and we want to keep you informed.
There will be some planned downtime and information about that is at the bottom of this message.
Here's what we heard:
The Popular items feed that is showing up on the secondlife.com dashboard and on the link to the Marketplace from the top Mega Menu unfairly gives an advantage to items that are 50L$ or less.
While ordinarily this shouldn't be a problem, some merchants appear to be placing a number of items in that price range to try to generate additional traffic. This creates a substandard experience for buyers who should see a variety of content and prices. This also creates a race to the bottom in price for merchants, making it harder to sell quality goods.
Merchants were concerned that the Featured Items link in the mega menu didn't bring enough attention to the Home Page Featured Enhancements
While the current "popular items" algorithm has been in place for several years successfully, with the growth of the number of listings and the increase in Xstreet SL transactions since the acquisition, we agree with you that it no longer meets the needs of today's marketplace.
Therefore:
On Wednesday September 23rd we will roll out the changes to the algorithm that will no longer provide an unfair advantage to lower priced items.
This change has an additional upside in that it should speed up search results, improving the shopping and finding experience.
We will change the link for "Featured Items" in the mega menu to point to the XStreet SL Home page, featuring home page featured enhancements. This should continue to increase traffic to these enhancements.
The feed on the Second Life dashboard will indicate that it is the "Most Popular Items" Feed.
In this release we are also making some additional changes and fixes:
Shopping Forums link on the mega menu will now take you to the new forums.
The profile link in each listing will be removed as the XStreet SL profiles will become obsolete. We would like to point this to the new blog profiles in the future, so here's a request to all our merchants to fill out their Second Life Blog profile.
XStreet SL TOS will be added to the Policies and Guideline section of secondlife.com
The New Item Feed displayed in the Commerce forums will now return the last 100 new items from Xstreet SL, not limited to 20 as it was previously.
Please Note: The release on Wednesday September 23 will require approximately one hour of down-time between 8am and 9am SLT.
If you have questions about the changes, please do join the discussion!