Kitely Mentors Group Meeting, 9 Jan 2013: summary

[Ohn Lang]

We had new residents attend the meeting, Anita Hawks and Alan Hawks. Welcome to you both!

New forums
Ilan noted that the new forums are growing nicely and encouraged people to visit if they hadn’t already.

Website improvements
Ilan said that they are working on preliminary website improvements before marketplace programming begins. One of the things you'll notice once the changes are rolled out is that the website reacts faster, especially when navigating between Public Worlds / My Worlds and World Pages.

Marketplace Development
Ilan provided development status: they’ve spent a lot of time on design and usability of the marketplace. The design phase is complete. It will be something between the SL marketplace and the Amazon website, with categories, filtering by attributes, sorting options, and search capabilities. Purchases will be delivered directly to Inventory on the Kitely grid. For each item, merchants will be able to choose whether the item can be exported or must be kept within the Kitely grid.

The category tree somewhat resembles that of the SL marketplace but with improvements.

The attributes will make the Kitely marketplace more manageable. There are attributes that are applicable to many categories, and other attributes that are category-specific. Color (such as red) and Material (such as leather) are examples of attributes. The goal is to enable people a lot more flexibility in homing in on what they are looking for.

Marketplace Fees
In past meetings, we discussed listing fees for posting new items in the marketplace, as well as a percentage fee from each sale. In determining appropriate costs, Ilan said the fees are being calculated so that the merchant’s take-home amount will be about what you get in SL once you consider all the money the buyer spent and the money the seller eventually gets in their PayPal account.

(In past meetings it was determined that in the marketplace, merchants will be able to choose to set product pricing in KCs or in real currency. In-world sales can only be in KCs. KCs are not going to be exchangeable, but can be used to pay for Kitely services.) Ilan said that people will be encouraged to set their PayPal accounts to accept microtransactions in order to reduce their PayPal fees. Kitely plans to use a PayPal API that allows splitting a transaction payment between two or more parties - so Kitely can take its fee and the rest goes directly to the merchant’s PayPal account. If a customer charges back, Kitely isn’t shafted with having given sellers’ money out of pocket. PayPal will simply take back their fee and the money from the seller. This is the main reason (other than various legal ones) why Kitely are avoiding an exchange. A benefit of this system is that Kitely will be able to delete the item (and any copies made of the item, even if given away) from the customer’s inventory in Kitely if payment is charged back.

Ilan indicated today that a time-limited discount on the listing fees will be offered to people who set up a store before the marketplace opens.

Part of the reason for implementing listing fees is to discourage low-quality items flooding the market, but Ilan pointed out that the fee must be low enough so as not to prevent people from placing less frequently sold items of good quality as well. In the Kitely marketplace, Ilan reminded us that each listing can contain multiple product variations, each with different pricing, attributes, pictures, etc. with all sharing the same title and description in the listing.

Ilan asks for feedback on marketplace fees
Ilan asked: How much do you think we should charge now/after lunch for item listing? And how much for adding a variation to an existing listing? (Reminder: in past meetings it was determined that the minimum price for an item sold for real currency will be $1 USD.) Ilan also reminded us that unlike in SL, in Kitely merchants don’t have any presale upload costs, such as the costs to upload textures and mesh builds. Ilan followed up asking: when you consider no upload fees, is 50KC for listing fee too high/too low?

We had some discussion and questions (some of us aren’t familiar with how PayPal fees work). Ilan explained that lower priced items will see a larger total percentage being taken in Kitely and Paypal fees than higher priced items. He gave the following example of how much SL charge: Checking out $1: $0.93 (7% fee), $0.83 after PayPal (17% fee). Checking out $10: $9.30 (7% fee), $8.79 after PayPal (12.7% fee). Checking out $100: $93 (7% fee), $90 after PayPal (10% fee). For example, 1$ spent by the buyer ends up as $0.83 cents in the seller's PayPal account after all the fees. This is when the seller just earned 1$ worth of L$. The more he/she exchanges and withdraws the lower the total fee becomes. Kitely’s plan is to structure the fees so the total merchants get is about the same (or more) than what they get when selling in the SL marketplace.

To answer Ilan’s question, the group provided their preferred charges for listing fee and variation fee:

Dot Macchi: 50KC listing fee/25KC variation fee

Anita Hawks: 100KC listing fee/25KC variation fee

Ohn Lang: 100KC listing fee/0KC variation fee

Alan Hawks: 100KC listing fee/25KC variation fee

Anthro Pola: 50KC listing fee/25KC variation fee

Stiofain MacTomais: 100KC listing fee/25KC variation fee


Ilan asks for feedback on Color attribute values
Ilan asked: Would you expect to search for hair color as "blond" or "Color: yellow"?

The group had a fair amount of discussion, and most felt that blond was a color and not the same as yellow, in the context of hair.

Ilan asked: what about avatar race/skin color, should we have race or is it okay to have skin color? The group tended toward no race option as it is a touchy subject. Dot said, besides, what about zombie, vamire, goth, sith, etc. [what would you do with those]

Ilan asked: what would all the options for skin color be?

Between Anita Hawks and Dot Macchi came a suggestion of “Dark, Light, Pale, Fair, tan, bronze, specialty” with “specialty” meaning things like zombie, vampire, were, neko, alien, green-blue, etc.

For general purposes, Ilan said they had defined the following colors: Black, Blue, Brown, Grey, Green, Orange, Pink, Purple, Red, White, Yellow, Other. So, as an example, if someone were looking for an item that was Gold in color, they would need to choose Yellow. It looks like skin and hair may need their own set of colors.

Ilan asks what category should NPCs be in
An NPC is a non-player character, or scripted avatar bots. Ilan asked what marketplace category NPCs should be placed in. The group went through a number of options, such as Gadgets, Creatures, AI, and other options. Most agreed that it should be placed in Gadgets.

Side discussion popped up about Hair category and attributes
A couple of us thought it belonged in body parts, Ilan suggested under Avatar Appearance.

Ilan said: Currently we have a Hair Subcategory under Avatar Appearance with the attributes: Color, Department, Hair Type, Avatar Type. <Department>: Boys, Girls, Men, Women, Unisex. <AvatarType>: Animal, Anime, Fantasy, Furry, Human, Robot, Other. <HairType>: Facial, Long, Short.

Dot asked about Medium/shoulder hair length. Ilan replied that different people would rate hair length differently if there are 3 hair length options but if there are just two then most would agree whether hair was short or not short, if there is no option for medium it would be rated as long.

Anthropola Anthropola suggested to add an "Other" option to every category. Ilan indicated that an Other choice encourages people to be very literal in definitions thus, for example, putting Gold things in Other rather than in Yellow, or not putting various shades of red in Red.

At this point the meeting had gone on for 2 hours and people needed to leave. The marketplace discussion is to resume in the forum once the meeting notes are posted. If you have any feedback about what was discussed please post it as a comment in this thread.

Other
Stiofain MacTomais had to leave early, but gave us a link to a “vid we made parts in virtual detroit in kitely” The link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEzUMFlhSZ8

[Marstol Nitely]

Lots of good info. Thanks Ohn!

[Constance Peregrine]

very good info-)) nothing stood out as any particular issue to me..looking forward to participating when you bring it 'live'.