RubyTuesday70 posted at 11:24AM Tue, 25 April 2017 - #4303460

MattGreenfield posted at 12:18PM Tue, 25 April 2017 - #4303418

On a side note, did anyone else notice how many V4 characters from major vendors had hit the clearance rack this time around? Since clearance stuff no longer discounts like regular product, it has the stupid effect of making the slower selling stuff much more expensive than the new stuff, which is sure to be the kiss of death for a lot of it...]

I noticed that too, particularly in one vendor's case a lot of her newer V4 went on clearance whereas the older ones didn't. I would have imagined it being the other way around but then I don't know what the procedure for items going on clearance is.

The basic premise is pretty simple - if a product hasn't sold any units in 90 days, it goes into clearance. If it doesn't sell any units in the following 60 days, it's gone from the store. Officially, this is "to help with over crowding in the MarketPlace as well as to try and help spur sales of products that aren't currently selling well." Unfortunately, Renderosity's own policies effectively achieve pretty much 100% the opposite of that, since while Clearance products rarely go on sale for more than 35% off, it's hard to find a month where all of the major vendors aren't running sales at a much higher discount. As a result, once an item goes into Clearance, it gets stuck in a death spiral where the only time it sells is when they run one of these $3.50 specials, because otherwise it's usually much more expensive than the non-clearance items from the same vendor. It's stupid, but a lot of Rendo polices seem to have been cribbed from a 1960's K-Mart managers' guide built around a Brick and Mortar store with physical inventory and space limitations rather than a modern web-based business dealing with virtual product. The "space saving" idea, in particular, is especially ridiculous given that Rendo has to keep hosting everything except the product's actual store page even if it's discontinued, and even there most of the front "description" pages are still kept floating in the system. Mind you, there is a cost savings involved, but it's on the accounting end, though even that should be negligible if the store software is halfway decent...

Sigh...

Now, I should note that Prime members are SUPPOSED to get 55% off Clearance items, which I think was the one of the excuses for cutting Clearance items out of sales, but that's seemed pretty hit and miss thus far... As a test I just tried a dozen of the clearance items in my cart and not a single one had the additional Prime discount applied. And even when it does work, it doesn't show that discount anywhere except after you've put it in your cart, so when you're doing a product sort by $$$, Clearance Items are always shown way out of order from items that are actually comparably priced.