Kitely Marketplace launched

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The Kitely Marketplace is now open for business to residents of the Kitely grid with over 700 items listed. The web-based platform allows users to buy items for either Kitely Credits or real money, using PayPal.

Payments made via Kitely Credits help preserve the anonymity of the buyers, while PayPal payments result in real money being paid to the vendors. Currently, Kitely does not allow users or merchants to redeem Kitely Credits for cash, in order to comply with virtual currency regulations. Kitely takes a cut of each transaction — see this page for more details.

The single largest category is art, with 189 items, followed by animations, which had 133 items as of today.

The avatar appearance category, which includes skins, shapes, tattoos, eyes and hair, had 111 items. Clothing had 79 items.

The Kitely Marketplace allows merchants to set any of four permissions — copy, transfer, modify, and export. The export permission allows buyers to save those items as part of their OAR files, or take them with them to other grids once Kitely is hypergrid-enabled. Currently, over 200 items are marked as available for export.

(Image courtesy Kitely Ltd.)
(Image courtesy Kitely Ltd.)

For more information about how the Kitely Marketplace works, check out today’s announcement.

The Kitely Marketplace is currently small compared to those on the larger grids. The inBiz marketplace, for example, which serves the InWorldz grid, has over 2,000 items of clothing alone. SpotOn3D’s Synergy marketplace has over 700 apparel listings.

However, this is the first day for the Kitely Marketplace. Unlike other marketplaces, Kitely also counts all the different variations of an item, such as different colors, as a single item. Counting all the variations as well, gives a total count of almost 1,000 items, said Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner.

In addition, Kitely promises to be a multi-grid market, with delivery to any hypergrid-enabled grid.

There are two other multi-grid marketplaces — HGExchange and Cariama.

However, despite having been launched more than two years ago, HGExchange currently lists less than 30 items in its clothing category. It also seems to be poorly maintained — it’s grid list includes the Nova grid, which shut down a year and a half ago.

Meanwhile, the Cariama website has been down for at least two months now.

The only other multi-grid marketplace is SpotON3D’s Synergy, which allows merchants to deliver into Second Life, but not to any other OpenSim grids.

Maria Korolov
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