Marketplace Search, boy is it quirky with a capital Q.

You know my rant about naming I did in my last post.  Well some of us (Hi Eclectic and Sasy) were discussing it, and some said they didn't know that connected/concatenated words were treated as one.

And in my head I was like:  "What, people don't know that?"

Then I realized, I'm a frickin nerd and stuff like that sticks out to me and I'm more likely to find it.  So in other words,people don't know that dotted names aren't marketplace search friendly.  So I was wrong to say "bad designer" in that instance.

Here's some quick notes;

1. Marketplace search in the past seemed to be case sensitive, but now it seems it isn't...most of the time.  That caused me problems with searches for items that used capitalization in the past:  For example if If I made a hair called say "CCwear Torley"  and I searched for "ccwear torley"  the search wouldn't have found it, even if I knew it was there.   But now it does, thank goodness, but to be safe, try to stick to lowercase... just in case.

2.  Marketplace search does not get along with special characters.  For example if my store name is CCwear and I put it (or the item name) in brackets or greater than or less than symbols " < >" or other characters, search won't find it.  Which  is contrary to how inventory search works.  Inventory search uses a "contains" type search and Marketplace seems to not do so, it's more literal.   So if I have a skirt named: "CCwear.classic.pencil.skirt.black or "CCwear_classic_pencil_skirt_black"  Marketplace treats that as one word.  So a search for CCwear pencil skirt wouldn't find it.   So if  you have special characters in your item names in inventory, they're not marketplace friendly.  Which is counter-intuitive.  So try to stick with spaces in store and item names.

3. As far as I can tell market place doesn't support boolean operations.  For example if I was search Marketplace for pencil skirts and didn't want CCwear pencil skirts to show up because I owned them all,  I couldn't use:  "pencil skirt -CCwear"  As far as I can tell it does a simple "AND" search,  In fact is you did use such a search you would ONLY get CCwear pencil skirts.

4. You cannot search within results....sigh.

5. Today I uploaded a couple of things to Marketplace to see the interface and whatnot and noticed things that could be better.  The interface could use some changes and rewording, and it really could use what I call "listing templates"

For example if you make hair, do you want to have to manually type or even past all that stuff in?  No, what you need is a standard template you can assign that you can choose for you uploaded item that has stuff filled in already!  I can see how maintaining and updating Marketplace listings would be a lot of work.

Another idea I had was for LL to create a "custmer service person" or "sales associate" role for marketplace.  So that a creator could assign a trusted person with limits on what they can do, to handle grunt work without fear of something bad happening.  It's probably not workable but something to think about.

If any reader has any Marketplace tricks or tips, let me know!