vMTV and IMVU majorly sucking

vMTV and IMVU are both causing me problems right now. Yesterday I spent hours relisting my vMTV auctions...since there is no listing tool, and no way to really know if your auctions are expired, the experience is a rather traumatic one. If you go to the Galleria (ooh la la) there is a link you can click to see all (but not really all once a certain amount of time has passed and you have a certain number of them) your past and present auctions. In one big long list. One. Big. Long. List. Current and expired auctions all jumbled together. Let's say I have a pair of black hightop tennis shoes...it will show all the times I have listed them in auctions (without actually showing me any more specifics, like was that the men's or the women's black hightops?) jumbled in with EVERYTHING ELSE.

Fortunately for me, almost all of my auctions were expired, so I could go through and relist pretty much everything. NOW, though, the old expired auctions and the current auctions are all jumbled together, and the 20 items still to expire in the next week...not only will I not be notified when they expire (that would be really nice, an email to let you know your auction expired) but I won't know WHAT ended. The thing to do is to cancel all your auctions at once (using Clobber Auctions) so you can just spend 8 hours or so relisting them all at the same time, but I didn't do that (curses!) It's sooooo frustrating and so totally not what I wanted to be doing with my time. It's insane that There and vMTV have never fixed their lousy systems. With There at least you have a third party listing tool (jinXplorer), but with vMTV there is NOTHING. It majorly sucketh.

If there were a small silver lining, I guess it would be that this forced me to spend a lot of time looking at each individual listing (which at the same time is the worst part about it) and do some price adjusting. Of course, a good listing tool should allow me to do this as well, but more easily.

It's sad, you know halloween is about three weeks away and there are only 8 pages of featured auctions on vMTV. I think that number would be MUCH higher if people (developers) could actually take vMTV seriously. Like, there is actually a humane way to relist your auctions, and of course vMTV would let people advertise their vMTV$ sales (and actually allow them to sell vMTV). Because, seriously, why would any devs want to submit stuff to vMTV if they can't make any money doing it? (And if they have to spend a whole day trying to relist?) People do sell vMTV$, even though it is against TOS, and that is the only reason most if not all of the experienced developers keep developing and relisting...so they can sell vMTV$ on what I suppose you could call "the black market".

It took me until 2am last night to finish listing my auctions...I still did yoga after that, though. Geez, I had to because I felt so kinked up from hunching over my desk for a zillion hours and not getting any exercise. If I had to do my There auctions manually like that, I'd cry.

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So let's talk about how IMVU majorly sucketh...

IMVU recently made a new rule whereby credit resellers can't advertise off-site credit sales in their shoutouts. At least um...I don't think they can. They seem to be tweaking the rules on the fly, which is horrible for resellers since nobody knows what they can and can't say in a shoutout. First they say you have to be creative about what you can say...you can't say "cheaper" or "discounted" or even say that you sell credits. You can only say you have INFORMATION about credits, and you can then link people to a page on the IMVU site, like your homepage or a catalog page. But the rules seems to be changing, daily if not hourly. And you look at the shoutouts that are running and you say "heybutwaitaminute..." as you see another reseller with something in their shoutout that you thought wasn't allowed..and you don't know if they just got through with something they are going to be chastised for later, or if there is a new policy and now they simply have a better shoutout than you.

The effect in general, though, of not being able to link offsite, is devastating. It seems like the rules have settled down to be "you can post most of the stuff you were posting before, but you still can't link offsite." But, to get people to click one time and then buy credits is one thing...to get them to click twice to get to the ordering is harder. Like, multitudes of harder. Personally, my sales have dropped like a stone. Of course, this is the slowest time of week generally, but really...sales are really, really bad. It doesn't exactly help that IMVU is running a special where you get your avatar name and 15,000 credits for $9.95. That's just cruel. Why not offer your avatar name plus 10,000 credits for $9.95? Still a great deal, but doesn't damage resellers so much.

Argh.