Sheep Launch New Second Life Shopping Site
The Electric Sheep Company (which sponsors 3pointD) yesterday launched its new shopping site for the virtual world of
I’m probably not qualified to comment on the quality of the site itself (both because I don’t use Web-based SL shopping sites, and because I’m on the check-cashing end of a relationship with the Sheep), but I can try to tell you what I know. Located at shop.onrez.com, OnRez (which is more properly known as Shop OnRez, though not always referred to as such) looks to be the first in a suite of OnRez sites, judging from the domain. I found search.onrez.com, which is currently “coming soon to a metaverse near you” and could be a good place to put the experimental search engine the Sheep had running for a while, but wasn’t able to turn up any other working URLs.
The Sheep have put a lot of work into Shop OnRez, and the launch seems to have come off relatively smoothly. I suspect the real test, though, will not be how many users Shop garners, but how robustly the Sheep can continue to grow their Web-based services for Second Life, and how well they can expand those services to other virtual worlds. It’s hard to see how that latter task could be accomplished at the moment, since most spaces currently offer little in the way of scripting capabilities, but with the launch of platforms like Multiverse and Areae, new possibilities may open up.
In the meantime, a hearty congratz is due the Sheep, as they have clearly put a ton of work into the site, which looks much better than the old SLBoutique. Stay tuned to the OnRez blog for more updates. And start shopping.
Feeds
Fanfare? Me? Why? =)
And that it looks slick, I agree upon, and as I’m starting to discover some features (like the privat dropbox) I’m eager to test them, but ’smooth’ should be replaced by ‘more or less smooth’ I think.
All my category information disappeard from my items. I had only 10 items I had to reenter that information for, but lot’s of sellers have over 300 items on the site. Not a fun job to do.Search works, works not, works again, works not on items, works on items but not on sellers, … It’s overal very very very slow. Which makes updating the listings a pain.
And then some simple things that could have been added that they did not:
Better overview of the items you have sold. (SLExchange offers view numbers single items too, for instance)Comment enable the blog. (Or check on moderation cue regularely.
And I more complicated thing that I would have loved:
Custom seller’s page. So we can add a banner, some information on the store/brand/avatars behind, decide on the order in which our items appear, … .
Yes, it does look nice but there are 2 main sticking points.
1) The site is definately slow. It may just be a lot of people are updating their items. but it will definitely hurt business.
2) They are referring to the site as “Shop On Rez” yet the website is onrez.com. SLxchange made the brilliant move of registering shoponrez.com which redirects to thier site. Now they need to drop the “Shop” part and get people saying OnRez.
I’m also on the check cashing end for the sheep, but I was only involved in onrez during its very early alpha testing for about a night’s worth of feedback.
Apotheus from SLX says he didn’t register the shoponrez.com domain name:
http://www.slexchange.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=18652
…and I tend to believe him, since domain squatting is a pretty low maneuver and one that can quickly be taken care of by the original company.
One thing that I do like about this new setup is the ability to tie my inworld sales with the onrez sales records and charts using their customizable vendor system. The site was slow for me last night but I was also having some lag issues in SL at the same time so I can’t say for sure what the issue was.
We just view this as getting across the starting line, which is why we launched it so quietly. Shop is just one of many web services we will be providing, and an important one. We wanted to get it out the door but there are definitely some things we need to optimize and improve, and some features high on our list to add.
There was some confusion around shoponrez.com but that is being taken care of.
Vint, we are doing some index optimizations right now to improve speed in a number of different areas. Now that we have large numbers of people banging on it, it is easier to optimize.
There are custom seller pages where you can load your own banner — we should be putting up an FAQ on this shortly. The banner should be 724 x 130pixels and you can edit it if you go to My Home > Seller Tools > My Storefronts. It’s crude right now and we will be enhancing in future.
Am I blind or can I not pay by palpal? Argh. SLEX continues to win because of this. Most of the people who sell on OnRez -only-, I thought had stopped building because they only list in one place.
I’d probably have spent a ton more cash on people if I didn’t have to tp all over the grid to buy stuff.
Hopefully that feature will show up.