Marketplace Switchover to Direct Delivery postponed "indefinitely"

[Innula Zenovka]

This post, by CommerceTeam Linden, has appeared in a thread in the Marketplace forum.   I reproduce it here in case people missed it:

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The transition from Magic Boxes to Direct Delivery has been extended indefinitely. We will be providing a 30-day warning before any shutdown actions are taken and will avoid doing this before peak holidays for the Marketplace (Halloween, Christmas/New Year's, Valentine's Day).

We are aware that some Merchants are still having problems with the Merchant Outbox. We are are working with TPVs and our internal development teams to address this issue.

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[Aaron225 Halostar]

They have been saying they were gonna do away with magic boxes for years now...

Sometime in August was the last I heard.

YEP, that sure happened.

 

[solstyse]

but direct delivery is available right now, and has been for some time.

[jwenting]

yup, and many merchants are abusing direct delivery to send the very same boxes they were sending anyway. So people still need to unpack those boxes, something direct delivery was intended to do away with.

May start making a list of lazy merchants doing that and reporting them all.

[Darkness Anubis]

I haven't looked into the direct delivery thing since it went live. I seem to remember back then hearing merchants saying htere were problems with it and non delivery of stuff. Does anyone know if it is working properly now?

[ImaTest1488314069]

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jwenting wrote:

yup, and many merchants are abusing direct delivery to send the very same boxes they were sending anyway. So people still need to unpack those boxes, something direct delivery was intended to do away with.

May start making a list of lazy merchants doing that and reporting them all.

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That's not actually true. DD was created to get away from magicboxes. This is why merchants have the option(when it works correctly, which it does not always do right now) to inform customers if the item still needs to be unpacked or not. If the intent was to eliminate the need to unpack entirely, merchants would not have this option. Of course, as I said, this option as we have it now, is not optimal, because it doesn't always function correctly. The options merchants can choose don't always actually fit the scenario for any particular item.(like for instance stating that you need land to use the product when in fact it may not be an item that requires land at all). Or, as in many instances, the option changing after a merchant has listed an item. I've seen several complaints of that, and before JIRAs were closed, tons of them went unanswered because LL couldn't explain why it was happening.

I don't consider it lazy at all for a merchant to sell a boxed item-that needs unpacking-via DD. For one, merchants were semi-rushed to transfer their stuff to DD because of warnings that the mbs would soon no longer work. Of course that never happened, but merchants had no way to know this beforehand. So of COURSE a lot of things are still boxed. I don't blame merchants one little bit. How difficult is it to unpack a box anyway? It really takes no time at all. It's more laziness on the part of the consumer complaining about having to unpack.

DD is not ideal because it wasn't thought out very well. It could be better, and probably eventually it will. For the time being however I believe offering more wiggle room for merchants (and not calling them all lazy, or worse "abusing DD" simply because you're choosing to be lazy about unpacking-general you of course) is ideal. It's not the merchants' fault that LL can't get their stuff straight.

[Sassy Romano]

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jwenting wrote:

yup, and many merchants are abusing direct delivery to send the very same boxes they were sending anyway. So people still need to unpack those boxes, something direct delivery was intended to do away with.

May start making a list of lazy merchants doing that and reporting them all.

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While merchants also sell inworld, where a vending system can only sell a boxed item, this is quite understandable.  Some products are more complex than others and the increase in workload for both listing the product, providing alternate unpack/use instructions and subequent customer support is not to be underestimated.

"How do I use this?" would have to be prefaced with "where did you buy it?".  It's far easier to create one set of instructions and it's simpler for the customer not to have to jump between different instruction sets.

Delivery of folders is purely an option with DD, not an intention to replace them.  There is the opportunity for some complex outfits to have sensible folder structures delivered but i'm not sure how many merchants are even doing that yet?

Please feel free to add me to your list of "lazy merchants" though and I won't change.  What i'd prefer is the same folder options available to inworld vending systems and "buy prim content" methods.

[Crim Mip]

All the direct delivery does is get rid of magic boxes. How do you figure sending a box requiring unpacking is abusing the system? I prefer getting the box since then I can unpack a new copy as needed. Also, if the merchant is also selling inworld where items are boxed, why should they have to come up with an entirely new packaging for the marketplace.

[phaedra Exonar]

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Darkness Anubis wrote:

I haven't looked into the direct delivery thing since it went live. I seem to remember back then hearing merchants saying htere were problems with it and non delivery of stuff. Does anyone know if it is working properly now?

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I've been 100% DD since the first day it came out I've had no failed deliveries, but some people are still having problems with switching to DD, it seams to depend on what perms your items are, what viewer, and OS your computer run on.  There are other MP issues that LL is claiming are database related and not a DD issue.  As with most things in SL, the MP and DD fallows the rule of works for some not for others.

 

 

[Rolig Loon]

I got rid of my Magic Boxes and moved over to Direct Delivery very soon after it went live on the main grid, and I've had absolutely no delivery issues with it.  I do have an in-world shop as well, and everything there is boxed for delivery.  When I post new items in Marketplace, I have been going to the trouble of uploading them unboxed, but I'm darned if I am going to go to all the work of repackaging items that used to be in Magic Boxes.  There's almost no incentive for me to do that just to save customers the very minor inconvenience of unboxing things themselves. 

[Kenbro Utu]

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jwenting wrote:

May start making a list of lazy merchants doing that and reporting them all.

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Reporting to who and for what?  It is not an infraction, and no one will care if you report it. 

[Czari Zenovka]

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phaedra Exonar wrote:

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Darkness Anubis wrote:

I haven't looked into the direct delivery thing since it went live. I seem to remember back then hearing merchants saying htere were problems with it and non delivery of stuff. Does anyone know if it is working properly now?

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I've been 100% DD since the first day it came out I've had no failed deliveries, but some people are still having problems with switching to DD, it seams to depend on what perms your items are, what viewer, and OS your computer run on.  There are other MP issues that LL is claiming are database related and not a DD issue.  As with most things in SL, the MP and DD fallows the rule of works for some not for others.

 

 

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One of the huge issues why MBs are still in use is that DD cannot handle no-copy items for some reason.  The niche I hear about this affecting the most on a wide-scale basis is breedables.  There were reports of merchants who did list no-copy items on DD having the permissions changed upon delivery.

Then there are the various hot jira issues, that no one can now see, about the mixed listings fiasco which many in the know are saying was not caused by DD, but somehow the institution of DD "exposed" already messed up listings.  Still trying to understand that when these mixed listings were not showing up prior to DD.  This is a fairly widespread issue and seems to primarily hit merchants who listed on Xstreet prior to it being bought out by LL and eventually changed to The Marketplace, which included another time-consuming migration in the process.

Other issues affecting merchants that also had ongoing jiras were customers making a purchase -> lindens taken from customers accounts for said purchase -> customers receiving purchase BUT merchant never received payment for the purchase and the purchase does not show up on the merchant transaction record.  This was first discoverd (or at least reported in the forums) by the friend of a merchant purchasing a product and mentioning it to merchant later, as well as a customer who contacted a merchant with a question on their purchase - neither merchant had a clue the item had been sold to the individuals in these cases.  A support ticket to LL that one such merchant filed came back saying, in essence, "The TOS states we do not guarantee all services will work all the time" (paraphrased) and no money paid to merchant.  This was still happening prior to the jiras being shut down.

In short...DD, while perhaps working well for some merchants and in some situations, is overall....a mess.

[Perrie Juran]

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Crim Mip wrote:

All the direct delivery does is get rid of magic boxes. How do you figure sending a box requiring unpacking is abusing the system? I prefer getting the box since then I can unpack a new copy as needed. Also, if the merchant is also selling inworld where items are boxed, why should they have to come up with an entirely new packaging for the marketplace.

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I agree with this.  I do prefer receiving my items packaged.

As I understood it, the push for folders was to make things more newbie friendly.

But as far as that goes, the best system IMO is the one that allows you to unpack (or unpacks for you) when you wear the box.  That takes care of all the birds with one stone.

 

[Darrius Gothly]

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Czari Zenovka wrote:

(snip) ... Then there are the various hot jira issues, that no one can now see, about the mixed listings fiasco which many in the know are saying was not caused by DD, but somehow the institution of DD "exposed" already messed up listings.  (snip)

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When the Marketplace went live with the initial Direct Delivery release the resulting load on the database management code caused already existing problems to compound astronomically. It's a form of "race condition" that causes errors to occur when database updates happen out of order. Well-written code is aware of such situations and is designed to prevent such problems, but because of the way the Marketplace's base code (adapted from a third-party package called "Spree") was modified for use with the Second Life systems, the already existing problem exploded like a wildfire.

To further exacerbate the problem, because the errors introduced essentially random data into otherwise valid listings, there is no simple way to unwind the problems and fix the listings. Now that the problem listings have existed for so long, I personally doubt there is any reasonable automated way to fix the listings. This of course means that someone with admin level access to the database must manually track down and repair all the corrupted listings. Not only will this be a monumental investment of time, but there is no incentive for LL to invest this amount of effort thus I strongly suspect we will never see this issue resolved. It's safely under the carpet and the more time that goes by, the safer LL is in just pretending it's not a problem.

The error in the Marketplace code that caused the corrupted listings is ... to the best of my knowledge ... still in place. Given another incident of heavier-than-normal load, we could very well see another explosion of corrupted listings. Thus I always recommend people go slow, be patient and don't attempt to rush any edits on any products, new or old. If the Marketplace seems to be misbehaving, stop what you're doing and wait for a later time when the load is not so extreme. It may seem counterproductive to delay or go slow, but trust me, it's far less disruptive than permanently corrupting an otherwise valid listing .. especially when the corruption renders the listing immutable and thus permanently fubar.

[Czari Zenovka]

/points to Darrius

Person in the know.

 

[Darrius Gothly]

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jwenting wrote:

yup, and many merchants are abusing direct delivery to send the very same boxes they were sending anyway. So people still need to unpack those boxes, something direct delivery was intended to do away with.

May start making a list of lazy merchants doing that and reporting them all.

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Delivery of a product folder removes several advantages that are provided by a boxed product. Depending on the Merchant's  preference and the specific product, delivery as a single boxed product may in fact be the better choice. This is not an indication of laziness or abuse by the Merchant, but is instead an indication of a rational choice between the available options.

Most of my products are delivered as folders, however they also include an "Info Box" that contains all the various landmarks, info notecards and other marketing materials that are generally included with a product. I chose to put all of those items into a single box because it results in a cleaner product folder and provides a single item the customer can open and investigate when they want more information about my other products, my company, etc.

Direct Delivery provides the Option to deliver a single box and in fact delivering a product in a single box is exactly the same as if the product only had one item, so there really isn't a way to prevent delivering boxed products even if that was the intention of Direct Delivery.

DD was intended as a way to shorten the delivery mechanism and remove its dependence on in-world scripted devices to assure delivery. In that goal, Direct Delivery has been a phenomenal success. I have only had one failed delivery incident for a DD product, and that was due to an outage within the Marketplace's database sub-system .. something that can happen to any automated process of any type on any other platform anywhere.

Calling Merchants "lazy" because they have chosen to deliver their products as a single boxed item not only misunderstands the way DD functions but indicates a level of laziness on your part .. and a rush to judgement. You may wish to rethink your statement a bit before pursuing your goal of reporting them all.

[Innula Zenovka]

I certainly prefer receiving clothes and other wear ables boxed, since that means (at least if they are copyable, and almost wearable item I buy is copyable) I've got a handy back-up copy.

[Perrie Juran]

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Innula Zenovka wrote:

I certainly prefer receiving clothes and other wear ables boxed, since that means (at least if they are copyable, and almost wearable item I buy is copyable) I've got a handy back-up copy.

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It reduces inventory clutter to the nth degree that way.

I did a quick scan recently and figure I have around 400 boxes that are my back ups.  This includes clothes, Avatars, Furniture sets, etc.  If they averaged 10 items per box, and my back ups were all unpacked, that would be 4000 additional items to manage. 

 

[Amethyst Jetaime]

Thanks for the joke about lazy merchants.:smileyvery-happy: 

It actually takes more work to box things than to just put them in a folder.

I prefer things boxed actually.  For clothes it gives me a backup.  For other things I have the option for keeping it in the box and only pull out what I need when I need it, thus reducing my inventory.  If I get it in a folder, I'll box them or put them in an organizer.