Take a peek at the SL Marketplace

The new Second Life Marketplace appears to be live, I say appears to be live because there's absolutely no mention of it on the blog, however it is there and you too can take a peek by going here: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/ and the bonus is that you don't have to sign a non disclosure agreement to take a look.

Now I did purchase a freebie and it did send it via an XStreet box, so it looks functional. The checkout process seems a little cumbersome but nothing outrageous, I think this is a matter of me being used to the old Xstreet system and finding the extra steps of adding an item to a shopping cart a few steps more than I'm used to, on many e-commerce sites the shopping cart is used, so it's not as if this is unfamiliar territory for many of us.

What I haven't done yet is edit my listings and seen how the new constraints pan out. I'm really not going to have much of an issue with the description fields as my Xstreet stores is one of few words, although I was pleased to see that the character limit for a description is being raised from two thousand characters to five thousand.

Not all the planned features will be ready yet and this is a beta product, hopefully there's no rush to take it out of beta. I'm not quite sure what's going on with the advertising for Second Life on that page though, "Find your favorite stores inworld" it says, which sounded promising, but then it says "Join Second Life now". Yes I am going to nitpick here, if I have favourite Second Life stores I'll already be signed up to Second Life. The link actually takes you to the Linden Lab homepage, which you can find here. Ah well, it is beta and they haven't officially told us we can use it yet but one complaint from people has been that Linden Lab promote the e-commerce site at the expense of inworld stores which receive little promotion, maybe they could find a way to make that link more useful, they should most definitely have a signup link there too though.

So it's early days and it feels a little naughty to be trying out before we've been told we can do so, but if you're a merchant on Xstreet, it's definitely worth taking a look. However if things don't look right to you, I'd be wary of making too many tweaks, LL haven't announced it's live yet so this has sort of been stumbled across and they're probably busy making fixes before announcing it's good to go.