Half Man Half Dog

When I first started selling things in Second Life there were two websites that offered a storefront, SLExchange (Now XStreetSL) and SLBoutique (later OnRez). SLExchange was certainly the larger of the two, but often plagued by delivery errors and the listings were (and still are at the time of writing) full of freebie resellers. SLBoutique was smaller but far easier to use, you could set up a personalised storefront, group items for easier management and they even provided free, efficient vendors for use in world.

Under the guise of  “Improving the Shopping & Selling Experience on Xstreet SL”, Linden Lab have decided to monetize freebies sold on XStreet as explained on this page .   Granted, they have to host the site and receive no revenue from free items, but the traffic generated by freebies is enormous and some shoppers must eventually purchase an item that costs more than 1L$.  New residents can no longer be sent to XStreet, sign in with their SL credentials and have instant access to a wealth of quality items to start them off in SL. This seems like a self defeating move by LL; if people don’t have that convenient way to get a free taste of what’s possible, far fewer are likely to stick around to become long term residents.

It appears that instead of fixing the XStreet search and providing a way to tag/filter out demos (the curse of XStreet freebies!) it’s far better to ‘declutter’ by only keeping high sales listings. Who needs these crappy little creators with their unusual items and wishes to give stuff away for free, anyway? They only give back to the community, they do nothing to increase LL’s profits. {Insert vague anti communist propaganda here}

Fortunately there are other web based merchant sites, though none rivals the immense popularity of XStreet. I’ve tried both metaLIFE and Metaverse Exchange but sales are as yet very low compared to XStreet. Both have very good customer support and an easily navigated interface. metaLIFE is the more comprehensive of the two, with free vendors, voting stations and a HUD attachment that allows user to shop from anywhere on the grid. MVX has a slightly more intuitive product setup system and an easy way of listing multiple colours under one listing as show here .

Other well known options are the well established Apez.biz (whose product listing interface could be described as confusing at best) and Slapt.me which looks good, but pages take far too long to load for me so it isn’t a pleasant shopping experience. I may try it when it seems to be faster. There seem to be only two others, Vitty and Cariama, neither of which I’ve looked at in detail.

Are there other merchant sites I’ve missed or grave errors in my brief descriptions?

Perhaps you think I’m being too harsh on LL, mistaking their earnest efforts to improve out second lives with rampant corporate avarice? >_>

Please leave a comment if you feel it’s worth the effort.