Update 5th October: Please read here for a further update on the listing enhancements situation, and the Marketplace in general.

Following recent updates with listing enhancements, as reported on this blog earlier this week (Run silent, run deep: the SL Marketplace and eroding merchant trust), the Commerce Team have issued the following post on the Merchant’s forum:

SUBJECT: PLE Update

Merchants,

As some of you are aware, we have been giving away free listing enhancements to many of you for the past 2 months. We recently deployed a fix that was supposed to just start billing again. Unfortunately, it back-billed the free enhancements. We apologize for doing this without warning.

To show our appreciation for your patience with this mix-up, we will be doing the following:

Giving everyone free listing enhancement renewals* for the period between August 7, 2012 and today. This means all listing enhancements billed during this time will be refunded before end of day today (October 4, 2012). Once the refunds have completed, we will begin billing those enhancements again.

For full details of today’s release, please see the Marketplace Release Notes on the wiki.

Thank you for your patience.

The Commerce Team

*If you created a new listing enhancement after August 7, 2012, that listing enhancement is not eligible for this refund.

While it is interesting that the post presents the suspension of listing payments as being a part of a “free listing enhancements” offer – an offer merchants appear to have been unaware was actually being made (I also can’t remember having seen any notification, but then I could easily miss an elephant walking by unless it happened to tread on my foot in passing).

There has been some connection between my earlier post on the matter and the above announcement from LL. While I’m sincerely flattered that such connections have been made, I’m nevertheless sure the timing was little more than coincidental.

Hopefully, once the round of refunds has been completed, this matter at least can be pout to bed where the Marketplace is concerned. Hopefully, there will be more communications on the status of the remaining issues in the near future.

With thanks to Toysoldier Thor for notifying me of the LL forum post