Posted 13 years ago
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Author
katiemarie wrote:Our creator community has often indicated to us that unchanged derivations [products that are exact duplicates of their parent product] cause confusion for customers and potential loss of sales for the creator of the parent product. Thanks to some recent work that our team has been doing, we now have a way to identify products that are exact duplicates of their parent product within our catalog.
As a result, we are planning a change to the way exact duplicate products [aka unchanged derivations] are handled in the catalog. Going forward, we will not show these products in the catalog or in search results within the catalog. These products will not be removed from anyone’s inventory. If you have created exact duplicate products, you will still be able to find these in your product list.
This change will be implemented as early as next week and we will provide an update when it is done. We anticipate about 190,000 products to be affected by this change.
We hope this addresses your concerns regarding exact duplicate products. We anticipate that our change will help our mutual customers easily find what they are looking for in our catalog. We look forward to hearing your comments.
Thank you.
katiemarie wrote:Hi everyone,
Thanks for all of your feedback, including questions and concerns. Let me try to answer some of your concerns here:
--We will not go into details about how our process looks at exact duplicate products and sorts them from non-duplicates. Making this information available will undermine the project.
--In addition to the above, we have no plans to make wider communication available for example, via a homepage message. Once the change is in effect, we will make an update to Creator News.
--To be clear, such products will not be set to “hidden†by our process. They will just not be shown in the catalog unless you have the direct link to the product page. Such products will also be purchasable.
Thank you again for your comments.
katiemarie wrote:BelleMorte: we are doing our best to make sure that this new process does not affect derivations that have actually made changes. Again, I cannot go into details about the process. Since we are affecting less than 3% of our entire catalog of 6mil products, we don't anticipate many issues [but are sending such comments to the team].
Scarlet: This process will only affect individual products. Using your example, neither product would be visible since a) the mesher made its base product 'hidden' and b) the derivation of that base product would not be available in our new process since it is an unchanged derivation. If you owned the unchanged derivation however, you would be able to use it as normal.
Notorious: Exactly. You will be able to see & edit your own products even if they are exact duplicates.
Additionally, if it wasn't clear in my first post, this process will affect past and future products.
Source: http://www.imvu.com/catalog/modules.php ... sc&start=0
My reaction: This is going to help our members save ALLOT of credits when it comes to looking for the cheapest version of a product. I myself have accidentally purchased the same product twice due to duplicates, on more than one occasion.
Before anyone starts talking about how we may or may not be able to abuse this new feature, this topic is in the public off topic section.