Major problem with products failing to deliver!! HELP!

[firstdesigns Milos]

I am a seller on the SL Marketplace and I am currently having a lot of trouble with delivery failures of my products. In the last week I have had a material amount of product sales come up as failing and I am not too sure why. I thought it was to do with me having quite a lot of products and needing more magic boxes, but I have now placed more boxes down and the problem still continues. Could somebody please help me as it is so frustrating to see potential sales failing to go through. Please either contact me here or email milosdesigns@gmail.com or via skype (Milosdesigns) Kind Regards Firstdesigns Milos

[JubJub Forder]

I think it happens to all of us intermittantly. Here's a post of mine showing 22  failed transactions on  same day, i know others who have had similar experiences of bad days.
Most of the time, most of the transactions go through. 

I am aware the Xstreet team are trying to address the problem - by changing the way magic boxes work.
 Its been coming for months tho'. Like a lot of the major changes/fixes that seem to have been delayed by the major ebb n flow of staff changes in their team.

One other thought... do you have a copy of all your servers/boxes on another sim? It pays to - in case its your main sim acting up.

[YT Upsilon]

It might be because there has been a high demand for the Linden Bears to help the Red Cross in Japan.  I've been trying to buy one, but I can't.

[Catwise Yoshikawa]

Try to have magic boxes in other sim. I stopped having that problem when I duplicate my boxes in different sims. Still have some failing deliveries, but  just on weekends and not much.

[Clarke Kondor]

I had a similar experience but from the customer side.  I recently created an alt and went to outfit him by using the gift capability in the Market place.  I purchased multiple items from 4 or 5 merchants. Over 80% of the deliveries failed at least twice! Then I trasferred the $L to the alt, logged him into the Marketplace and had him purchase the items directlty.... everything was delivered within a few minutes

Maybe one of the major causes of these delivery problems lies in the code that handles delivery of gifts.

 

- Clarke

[Mitzi Verne]

I have found most of the fails come when buyers purchase more than one item, from more than one seller in a single transaction.

I infact, have a tip on my items for sale recommending people to buy from one seller at a time.

I could be wrong, but my report statistics tell me not.

P.S. I dont have an inworld store, just the marketplace. 

 

Cheers to all

[Toxxic Rhiannyr]

So I guess no one really knows whats going on? Bummer, a solution would be awesome, its weird I had my friend but some stuff from my store, she purchased 5 items only 3 went thru... its makin me a little upset, bc i sell more on the marketplace then i do inworld, a release notice letting us know that they know about the problem and are working on it would comforting. Im just telling customers to shop inworld for a while, same products same prices, til this major glitch clears. :smileyhappy:

[Toxxic Rhiannyr]

I wanted to come back and make a post, I just talked to another designer, to see if she was having the same issue. 

Try checking your Magic Box Status! My Marketplace > Merchant Home > On the left side Magic Box Status

Scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page and you will see : Registered Servers

Now I just moved sims, so when I pulled this up I had 3 locations for my one box. I removed the 2 locations that were incorrect, and only left the one where my box is located now. I am testing this method to see if the problems clear up. Ive noticed if you move that box, its going to record every movement, and some of those need to be deleted bc the Marketplace cant communicate with a box that isnt there. I dont know if this works, granted I just got off IM with the other owner. Maybe it will and maybe it wont. I have like 200 something items loaded to the MP, she also suggested using multiple boxes. Also if it doesnt help, maybe taking the box back shutting off and then dropping it again, and resetting the box. 

Ive dont all of the above, and will post tomorrow if the failed deliveries stop to give some feedback. Its an annoying issue, and I hope this helps anyone out there as frustrated as I was. 

 

[Mitzi Verne]

 

Whenever I put new items into my magic box, I let it sync through the colors. Wait a minute or 2, then go to my 'inventory/manage inventory ' on marketplace. Top right is a " Sync Marketplace with Magic Boxes" button. I always use this, which pretty much does what Toxxic Rhiannyr above has suggested, just another way to do the same thing. Toxxic's suggestion is a great way to double check all is working ok.

Basically though, we are all flying blind on this matter and an 'official' response from one of the Linden Gods would be nice to confirm that they are at least aware off the problem.

I haven't had a failed delivery for a few weeks now btw. 

 

[BabyDoll LaFontaine]

This is getting a big THUMBS down from me.

 

Marketplace is taking money from my customers, the boxes are not delivering, my customers DON'T GET refunded, and I"m expected to give them their packages for FREE. My most active box keeps going offline, probably from overuse, and this is ridiculous.  It should automatically refund the people.  NOT keep the money. They are making FREE MONEY off us.

[Jarnz Dench]

With all the reports about items failing to deliver, and our own experience at our shop and having to close down a small part of it, I wonder how much of all these issues would be from:

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-6403

I'm sure Magic Boxes would use llGiveInventory, no other scripting way I can think of.

[Zanara Zenovka]

 

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Clarke Kondor wrote:

I had a similar experience but from the customer side.  I recently created an alt and went to outfit him by using the gift capability in the Market place.  I purchased multiple items from 4 or 5 merchants. Over 80% of the deliveries failed at least twice! Then I trasferred the $L to the alt, logged him into the Marketplace and had him purchase the items directlty.... everything was delivered within a few minutes

Maybe one of the major causes of these delivery problems lies in the code that handles delivery of gifts.

 

- Clarke

---

Interesting. I don't get many failures, but I'd say quite a few are gifts.

 

The other common cause is just people not being logged in when they buy and losing the delivery to capped messages.

As Minxi pointed out, multiple orders in cart can be a problem. This is not just because of any cart bugs, but because of the intrinsic time delays in the way that items are delivered.

Each delivery keeps your magic box busy and unable to process any more orders until finished the first. This is one reason why multiple boxes are important. As well as sending messages to you and the buyer, the scripts are sending email and http requests back and forth with the marketplace website. These communications can be queued, but the more there are, the more chance of timeouts and failures. Add to that the fact that llEmail has been a bit buggier than usual of late because of server software updates in some regions.

Test it yourself - go order a shopping cart of your own stuff from SLM then watch your inworld chat and see which boxes are working when, and the time between deliveries. Ideally you would test this with only one box rezzed, then with several to see the difference.

Putting all your freebies in boxes of their own can also help with this, so that freebies don't keep the box occupied when a paid purchase is trying to get through.

I have 6 boxes in 3 sims, and most of my purchases are singles. If you make the sort of things that people will fill up a cart with, I'd suggest even more boxes than this.

[Toysoldier Thor]

---

Zanara Zenovka wrote:

 

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Clarke Kondor wrote:

I had a similar experience but from the customer side.  I recently created an alt and went to outfit him by using the gift capability in the Market place.  I purchased multiple items from 4 or 5 merchants. Over 80% of the deliveries failed at least twice! Then I trasferred the $L to the alt, logged him into the Marketplace and had him purchase the items directlty.... everything was delivered within a few minutes

Maybe one of the major causes of these delivery problems lies in the code that handles delivery of gifts.

 

- Clarke

---

Interesting. I don't get many failures, but I'd say quite a few are gifts.

 

The other common cause is just people not being logged in when they buy and losing the delivery to capped messages.

As Minxi pointed out, multiple orders in cart can be a problem. This is not just because of any cart bugs, but because of the intrinsic time delays in the way that items are delivered.

Each delivery keeps your magic box busy and unable to process any more orders until finished the first. This is one reason why multiple boxes are important. As well as sending messages to you and the buyer, the scripts are sending email and http requests back and forth with the marketplace website. These communications can be queued, but the more there are, the more chance of timeouts and failures. Add to that the fact that llEmail has been a bit buggier than usual of late because of server software updates in some regions.

Test it yourself - go order a shopping cart of your own stuff from SLM then watch your inworld chat and see which boxes are working when, and the time between deliveries. Ideally you would test this with only one box rezzed, then with several to see the difference.

Putting all your freebies in boxes of their own can also help with this, so that freebies don't keep the box occupied when a paid purchase is trying to get through.

I have 6 boxes in 3 sims, and most of my purchases are singles. If you make the sort of things that people will fill up a cart with, I'd suggest even more boxes than this.

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Zanara,

This was good deepdive info on how the Magicboxes work.  Is this technically how the MagicBoxes intereact with SLM, Buyer's inventory and RL Buyer/Seller notifications?  Is there a LL whitepaper on the actual sales transaction process?  Being a systems designer geek in RL, I would be REALLY interested to get the LL deepdive explanation on how it works.

The reason I want to know is because I am not 100% convinced that more magicboxes are "THE" solution to a Merchant that is experiencing high delivery failure rates.  Maybe its because these merchants and yourself as well process a lot of daily transactions and the merchants that generally dont have magicbox problems (like me) are those that have relatively low transactions per day.

With 3 magicboxes, how many transactions does your SLM process a day?  Do you know how many per hour?  How many SLM items do you keep in each of your MagicBoxes?

I only process about 5 to 20 a day - most of them on a daily basis (at or over 50%) are my Freebie/Demo pack.  I have only ever had 1 MagicBox that contains ALL my SLM items - about a total of 50 items.  Generally - I rarely get Delivery failures (maybe 1 a month of sales) with the exception when LL is tinkering with SLM and causes a blast of delivery failures.  I seem to be one of the Lucky SLM Merchants regarding delivery.  And I want to mention that my MagicBox is in my store which is on a sim that is notoriously known to be BADDDD for lagging most days (my customers often complain about it).  So my Magicbox tends to operate quite will even on a badly lagging sim.

So... I would love to get more facts / info from you and others that say they do encounter a ton of SLM delivery failures... and more importantly, I want to see the transaction system flow from an LL source.

Does anyone know where I could get this system flow?

[Zanara Zenovka]

Brodesky did describe the process in a forum reply back during "The Troubles". something like:

SLM: Hey box! You there? We gotta send x to y!

Box: Sure thing, man. I can do that.

SLM: OK! Let's do it. Let me know when it's done. (takes buyer's money, marks order as pending)

Box: (sends stuff and IM to buyer, sends IM to owner)

Box: OK, done it!

SLM: (marks order as delivered, pays merchant, sends email to owner)

You might find it with a bit of goggling.

While trying to find it myself, I did find a blog post from DG that describes/theorises the SLM/shopping cart side of the process: http://www.dgp4sl.com/wp/?p=107

 

[Pamela Galli]

Now I am up to FIVE failed MP deliveries in a row! I am at my wits end. I have done everything I can think of -- synced, reset, restarted sims, fixed the marketplace box page, etc.

[Darrius Gothly]

About two months ago I did some testing with Sonya Haight. She would fill up a shopping cart with one of my freebies then purchase it all at once. For the tests, I removed it from all but one of my Magic Boxes, refreshed etc. then she made another cart full purchase. What we found was that the SLM had a fairly regular 13 second delay between deliveries. Here are the logs from that test:

[2011-02-07 23:39:41]  DGP4SL Doom Server: Xstreet SL - Delivered item DG Telepad Freebie BOX.
[2011-02-07 23:39:54]  DGP4SL Doom Server: Xstreet SL - Delivered item DG Telepad Freebie BOX.
[2011-02-07 23:40:07]  DGP4SL Doom Server: Xstreet SL - Delivered item DG Telepad Freebie BOX.

In some of my discussions with Brodesky over the issue, he mentioned that they use the same mechanism (read the same exact code still in place on XStreet) to send out the delivery orders, but they use an additional timer to slow down the delivery orders. That would lead me to believe their timer is set at (approximately) 13 seconds.

I'm willing to bet that the delay is too small for some Magic Boxes though. I will routinely see my deliveries succeed yet other items within the (cartfull) order fail. Since SLM will "rotate" between Magic Boxes when possible, I have been recommending people put out multiple boxes. However .. SLM does not always rotate. Here are logs from the same test but with the freebie in both boxes:

[2011-02-07 23:23:52]  DGP4SL Doom Server: Xstreet SL - Delivered item DG Telepad Freebie BOX.
[2011-02-07 23:24:03]  DGP4SL Doom Server B: Xstreet SL - Delivered item DG Telepad Freebie BOX.
[2011-02-07 23:24:16]  DGP4SL Doom Server B: Xstreet SL - Delivered item DG Telepad Freebie BOX.

So, my conclusion is .. they could fix the problem by extending the delivery delay to some larger number .. something large enough to account for the absolute reasonable maximum that a Magic Box can take to make one delivery (for example 20 seconds).

The above also argues against the "put all your freebies in a single box" advice. Instead it argues for "spread your freebies (and other high delivery items) out across many boxes so that each box contains at most ONE of those items."

[Pamela Galli]

Okay now I am thinking, based on the thread about inworld GiveInventory problems, that the problem is related to me being in an adjoining sim when the deliveries fail. I have moved my boxes to non-adjacent sims and am staying clear of the sim that is adjacent to the two others.

[Rya Nitely]

Pamela, it probably is the multiple adjoining sim problem affecting magic box deliveries. It's affecting us and we need to make sure we stay in the same sim as our magic box when we are online. Not very convenient when I have to work in the other sims.

Also, we found that the sim doesn't have to be right next to the one containing the magic box or vendors, it can be attched at a corner and it will still have the same effect. For instance we have 3 sims and all show the same behaviour. 

[Pamela Galli]

Thanks -- I also have three sims (in a kind of L shape) and am finding that even after moving the magic boxes, things are still not being delivered.