AIS (Direct to Inventory) Delivery System Wishlist

[Darrius Gothly]

A brief interchange I had with Mr. Shepherd got me to thinking about the upcoming AIS and how it will impact both Merchants and Customers. I mentioned several uses for Magic Boxes in that other thread, but I will restate them here as well. What I'll do is comment on ways Magic Boxes are used now (including their ANS capability) and add or enhance how I'd like to see those features brought across into AIS.

1) Addition of 3rd Party Scripts to Magic Boxes - This ability has allowed many other vendor and sales tracking systems to capture XStreet and Marketplace deliveries and add those to their own proprietary database. For integrated vendor solutions, having a single location to review and analyze all sales data is a big plus. This can most likely be accomplished with a form of ANS, but those 3rd party systems will have to retool to accept ANS data in whatever format AIS provides it.

2) Use of Delivery Event to Register Customer or Send After-Sale Info - Again this is an ANS-based function that at present is handled by either an In-World object or a web site script. For those that are currently using web site scripts, it should be a fairly easy manner to modify them to suit the new ANS format, but those that are dependent on In-World Objects will also need ANS type support.

3) In-World Messaging Upon Delivery - At present the Magic Boxes can send an IM to the Merchant whenever a product is delivered. Since the sales notification emails are still unreliable, this has become a crucial function and should be continued in some fashion. It should also be extended so that each specific product can be configured to send or not send a delivery notification message.

4) Third-Party Access to AIS Delivery Mechanism - This does not currently exist with Magic Boxes, but would be a very useful extension to have. Using some form of validated command through a WebAPI, a Vendor System or even a homebrew system could cause delivery of a product from a Merchant's Delivery Inventory. Of course this would have to be protected in some secure fashion, but with careful design, that is not a tall order to meet.

These are just my initial ideas. If anyone else has some concepts or uses they would like to see, please add your comments. I realize the Commerce Dev Team is fairly close to finalizing their first roll out, but perhaps if we get some really stellar ideas, we can coerce them to include them in the system design.

(And yes, I will happily communicate to the Commerce Dev Team as needed to make sure our thoughts and ideas get put into their heads.)

[Toysoldier Thor]

I already went into great detail in a previous thread regarding my biggest concerns about AIS that I hope Brooke read and took back into your Development team. 

In that thread she ask me (3rd person) that she wanted to understand why some Merchants would want to be about to have the flexibility to have this AIS (whatever / however it will work as still not details published) execute SLM Sales from another Avatar Account then the Merchant's main SL account.

I think between my responding reasons and the several added value add reasons from you and a few others.... as well as the legit concerns we Merchants have on the impact of an AIS that goes wrong/rogue etc... that it would be a major design benefit to either have LL come up with a 2ndary Inventory OR from a MERCHANT Avatar.

For me, if LL does not want to consider designing a solution that creates a new SLM Inventory (one that an avatar could fully and freely transfer assets from their main inventory), then at least LL Development allow a Merchant like me instruct AIS to take my SLM products from :  ToysoldierThor-Merchant

In fact, what would be a good idea if this is the direction LL would offer Merchants is for them to create a new avatar LASTNAME of "MERCHANT"

I still think the best option with the largest number of additional benefits would be for SL Avatar Accounts to be able to create multiple Inventory with full perms inter-inventory transfer be the avatar account.

[Toysoldier Thor]

So in case anyone doesnt know the thread that had the full discussion as to why Merchants need the AIS to support drawing SLM slaes from a seperate INVENTORY or AVATAR.... here it is:

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Merchants/Marketplace-Update-March-2011/td-p/740185

As well as my initial post of reason to Brooke...

 

Hey Brooke,  

Thanks for the answers and being straight about them (even though I dont like the answers).  So my feedback to some of your Answers:

>>  Question: Has something changed recently with Magic Boxes?
I never asked that as I didnt think nor notice there was a change yet to the current magicbox system, but it was interesting to confirm the answer to that.  I must be one of the rare merchants that generally does not have a big issue with Magicboxes or part of the silent majority.  I also like the model of SLM Sales Transaction Isolation from my personal inventory (more details later).     

>> Question: Will merchants be able to opt-out of AIS delivery? ... There will be no explicit opt-out.   

Sadly I didnt think there would be an opt-out. 

 >>  Let's table the rest of this for the User Group, as I'd like to understand why a new account is desirable. 

#1 - Tabling any 2-way conversations at the User Group meetings is simply not viable as you know.  The crowd is too large and is just suited for you to post commerce updates to the crowd and answer a couple select questions.  So..... to answer yoru question... 

#2 - Since your team have no plans to allow us Merchants having serious concerns on LL performing automated sales transaction from our personal main inventory (that contains 10's of 1000's of non-SLM non-Merchant related content), we would like to have an "out-of-AIS-solution" alternative.  By creating a new SLM-Merchant Account exclusively for being the source for the new AIS, it will re-establish the SLM Sales Transaction isolation from my #1 priority main personal SL inventory. 

So Brooke, I am sure you are wanting to say to me:  "aww come on Toy you are being so paranoid.  LL has a history of developing perfect software where nothing has ever gone wrong.  As such, LL has developed a perfect coded AIS software solution and I can personally assure you Toy that the new AIS service will never encounter a bug that could in some way damage or affect your main personal inventory.  The AIS service will never accidently corrupt my inventory or expose a secruity weakness that would compromise your inventory.  Therefore, you dont need a seperate Merchant Account that only contains SLM sale Items.  Trust Us - You have no reasons from our past history of software deployment for you not to trust us!" 

Sorry Brooke, but I want to maintain a clear seperation between the content I make available / accessible for SLM to process and my main SL personal account.  If other Merchants want to put their full trust in LL's software development and deployment, more power to them.  They either have no knowledge of LL's past software development Ooopsies or they do not have enough I.S. experience to know the risks of your AIS solution that performs direct automated asset transfers from their personal inventory. 

So all I am asking is for your AIS/SLM service to provide the flexibility to allow Merchants the ability to select which SL Account your AIS will execute upon.  We will figure out how to tranfer our SLM Items to our SLM Avatar. 

>>  Since the user experience and beta test plans are still in progress, I cannot give a hard date for communicating either piece of information. The goal for getting the Beta plan completed is mid April. There is no current private Beta group. 

That is interesting since there have been merchants that have mentioned in the inworld merchant group that have known what you just said and it was understood they had already been trying this AIS service as a beta.  Were they in the pre-beta beta or are you saying there was a beta group but its closed now? 

 >> Question: When will reporting match what we had on XStreet?
Answer: This is currently not planned. We are aware that there is much that can be done with reports, and we would like to address it. The “when” will be based upon company priorities and feedback from merchants. It will definitely not happen before Q3.

Well at least you are being honest.  Many Merchants have been screaming for the SLM to fix reporting since the day that SLM's reporting showed its lame ugly face and until this posting there has been no response from the Commerce team that it will be fixed.  Its utterly useless.  but based on the priority of the company needing to plug all the holes from the TEENIFICATION of the Grid strategy, I guess it makes sense that most Merchant priorities will not be seen on SLM till Q3. 

>> Answer: We are working on getting better logging in place for anlalysis of search results. We have identified a couple of small fixes that we would like to address over the next couple to a few months (as we can fit in with AIS work) that may help with problems (new item ranking, keyword stemming analysis). Additional issues we'll be addressing as we gather data and prioritize within the backlog of items we are working on. 

It is so shocking that all us Merchants can see the problem with the SLM SEARCH/SORT BY RELEVANCE issue.  Brooke, your statement that more study and research will be needed sounds just like a common strategy used by governments when they want to constantly push off addressing the problem.  The scary part is every time your team slaps in another tweek to the search engines, my sales get hurt more.  Please think twice before you implement these changes.... your team has already done enough major damage to the SLM market with all the Company's priorities on the TEENIFICATION maturity filters.  We dont need anymore half baked solutions.

[Blot Brickworks]

I have a bad feeling about this new change over. I just know it,s  going to be more work and sorting,isn't it always.

My inventory is 25K and is unsorted,I am too lazy , can't stand "paper work".

My biggest fears are wrong deliveries and keeping up with version changes,How will that work?.

I suspect we will have a sale folder in our inventory to use as an internal magic box.

I suppose the plus side is that you will no longer need to own land to sell stuff...Is that a plus? Or another step on the slippery slope to an empty world.

One hand hovers over the abandon tab LOL:smileywink:

[Toysoldier Thor]

 

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Blot Brickworks wrote:

I have a bad feeling about this new change over. I just know it,s  going to be more work and sorting,isn't it always.

My inventory is 25K and is unsorted,I am too lazy , can't stand "paper work".

My biggest fears are wrong deliveries and keeping up with version changes,How will that work?.

I suspect we will have a sale folder in our inventory to use as an internal magic box.

I suppose the plus side is that you will no longer need to own land to sell stuff...Is that a plus? Or another step on the slippery slope to an empty world.

One hand hovers over the abandon tab LOL:smileywink:

---

 

Blot, You never have ever needed to own land to sell something in SL.  Surely not because of the MAGICBOX.

Prove is me.  I have been in SL for over 3 years.  I have never owned land to this day.  I am not a premium account holder.  In fact, when I first started selling my first products in XSTREET in the summer of 2008, I didnt even have a store nor a rented land for personal use.  All I did was get a MagicBox and asked a friend that owned a sim if I could bury my MagicBox somewhere in a forest on her land where no one would see it.  I ran that way for almost 8 months before I finally decided to rent a store and start selling inworld.

As for your bad feelings about this AIS migration... I think they are justified.  I think there will be a lot of casual merchant or even serious large scale merchants that will look at the hassles of migrating all their SLM inventory from their magic box back into their inventory and having to properly organize it and not to mention the likely added issue of LL not properly testing AIS on a much larger scale (didnt think of things fully) that they will just throw up their hands and give up being a merchant.

I am more fearful of the risk of LL developing an automated process that interfaces with my personal SL Account's inventory on a daily basis to withdraw assets and send it to another account.  TOO MANY UNKNOWN PROBLEMS where they resulting impact is my entire inventory.

I LOVE THAT THE MAGICBOX KEEPS MY SLM TRANSACTIONS SEPARATE FROM MY MAIN INVENTORY.

I want LL to provide that same protection with AIS.  If not via a 2nd Inventory on my Avatar (which currently does not exist) then by letting me create a new MERCHANT ALT that I can then instruct AIS to take transactions from.

This is not a nice to have - this is a MUST HAVE in my opinion.

[Blot Brickworks]

Sure I know there have always been ways around owning land,like you did,or renting box space for a peppercorn.It,s just my way of expressing my feeling that sales are being pushed to the markrtplace to the detriment of inworld.

I agree with all your points about the new scheme and I am not at all confident that there won't be major c**k ups.