Future Projects and Features for the SL Marketplace
Posted by
Grant Linden on Sep 17, 2010 9:31:30 AM
The SL Marketplace is almost ready to come out of beta and replace XstreetSL as the primary shopping destination for Second Life. The launch of this new virtual goods platform is laying the foundation for the future of online commerce for Second Life and we will continue to build upon and improve the experience and offerings as time goes on. We have exciting feature milestones and future projects planned and look forward to our continued collaboration with the community to create an amazing online shopping experience. Here’s a peek into what’s ahead:
A Boxless Future
We are planning a new delivery service to make Magic Boxes a thing of the past. Instead of delivering purchased items inside of Magic Boxes, they will be delivered directly to a customer’s inventory without any need to rez before hand. This will solve a myriad of issues for merchants and create a much easier and seamless experience for shoppers.
Improved Gifting
We all know the importance of gifting and transferring items and recognize the current issues around gifting and delivery. Our goal is to provide a dependable and elegant solution for gifting that will include timed delivery and the ability for Residents to accept gifts so they will never miss a delivery.
Better Merchant Tools to save creators time
Merchants have been asking for tools that allow them to spend more time creating and less time managing listings. In the future we will be adding the ability for merchants to load images and listing descriptions in bulk, to combine color variations in single listings to simplify both search results and purchasing and to allow merchants to give other Residents permission to assistants working on their listings.
Features to increase sales
We have already heard positive feedback from customers saying that the new look and feel of the SL Marketplace as well as the ability to load up their shopping carts is creating a better shopping experience, which is gradually resulting in increased sales for merchants. However, there is much more we can do to add value. Merchants can look forward promoting their items with coupons and an integrated advertisement portal. Also, merchants and shoppers will be able to promote items on Facebook or Twitter automatically using their profile settings, which will create a broader audience for inworld shops and SL Marketplace items.
Wishlists to rule them all
Wishlist features that we are very excited about are lists that can include both SL Marketplace and inworld items and lists that can be kept private for personal use or publicized on profiles for friends to see.
What would you like to see?
We hope that this glimpse of some of our future plans gets you thinking about what you would like to see. We use your feedback to both build our features list and to help drive feature prioritization. Other features in the works that need your input include better reporting tools, new ways to display images and a robust personal messaging system.
We are looking forward to hearing your feedback. Please share your comments with us, I’ll be out of the office for the next few days and reviewing your input when I return.
Sincerely,
Grant and the Commerce Team
