Recent MP Redelivery Feature Question

[Annie Nova]

19 minutes ago, Ela Talaj said:

Have you ever heard the word  "inflation"?

If I return something in RL because it was defective, I expect them to give me the same item for the same price and I have done this in RL and while the price may have gone up, I still got the item for the same price I paid for it, so inflation has nothing to do with it

[bigmoe Whitfield]

5 hours ago, Ela Talaj said:

Have you ever heard the word  "inflation"?

how to lose customers on pre existing items, do that. 

[Da5id Weatherwax]

6 hours ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

how to lose customers on pre existing items, do that. 

This.

There's a thing I've been working on, on and off, for literally years. It's actually "almost ready" to hit the MP and I'm equally "almost ready" to climb back on the treadmill of being a serious SL merchant again. After it does go on sale I have no doubt I'll continue working on it, might even add features that justify the price going up a bit.

Before reading this thread I'd already decided that redelivery was going to be a good thing for it. It will be mod perm, apart from the scripts, but is complex enough that breaking it while modding it will be easy. That's no problem because it will also be copy-perm and folks that break it can rez a new one. That complexity also means that as a fallible mortal it's quite possible there might be bugs I need to fix. I can try and build in an auto-update system to get those bug fixes out to my customers or I can just say "Check the marketplace for a newer version and redeliver it to yourself before reporting a bug" which saves unnecessary script activity in an already-complex object and is another area where I'd much rather not worry about bugs (not that there won't be any, it's just that if there's a bug in redelivery it's not on me to code the fix as it would be if the bug was in my update protocol!)

So what if the price has gone up?

I don't care what price you bought your original copy at. You'll get the latest, most fixed version on redelivery with whatever new features I've added. Call it a "thank you" for buying it when it was a "less established" product. I'll still keep my own copies of the earlier versions around of course, so on the (hopefully) rare occasions where I've changed something and and the customer prefers the old way they can contact me and I'll get them a new one of that version, with the understanding that I only support the most current. Until LL change something on the grid that breaks the old ones they don't HAVE to redeliver an update if they don't want it. I like this. It puts updating via redelivery in the owners control rather than trusting to whatever auto-update code I might write.

These are things I would appreciate as a customer, so they will be there for customers of mine. Penny pinching and chiseling every last cent out of your customers pockets may seem to be good for your bottom line in the short term but it's almost never good business.

[Ela Talaj]

On 4/28/2019 at 3:16 PM, anniepany said:

If I return something in RL because it was defective, I expect them to give me the same item for the same price and I have done this in RL and while the price may have gone up, I still got the item for the same price I paid for it, so inflation has nothing to do with it

We are not talking about defective items (whatever it might mean in SL). It has nothing to do with the subject. 

[Ela Talaj]

20 hours ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

how to lose customers on pre existing items, do that. 

When The Lab goes from a maximum Lindex fee of 3USD per transaction to 3.5% per transaction with no upper limit, that's SL "inflation." At that time, I felt entirely justified in raising prices on almost all of my products and I didn't notice any measurable loss of customers. But if I did lose, so be it.

[Ela Talaj]

13 hours ago, Da5id Weatherwax said:

I don't care what price you bought your original copy at. You'll get the latest, most fixed version on redelivery with whatever new features I've added.

Basically I do the same thing as is done in RL. There are always bugs in the first release of a complex product. Sometimes they reveal themselves many months or even years later when a specific customer does something unexpected. In any case bug fixes are always free regardless of how many hours it takes me to reproduce the bug, find its cause and implement the fix (and it might take quite a few to put it mildly). New features are usually suggested by customers. They are always smarter than I am and wish for things I haven't even thought about. When contacting me they almost always add that they are willing to pay extra. Sometimes I can't implement their wishes because it would require a totally different design but when I can I release an upgrade and in most cases the price goes up. Existing customers need to pay only the difference.

[bigmoe Whitfield]

3 hours ago, Ela Talaj said:

When The Lab goes from a maximum Lindex fee of 3USD per transaction to 3.5% per transaction with no upper limit, that's SL "inflation." At that time, I felt entirely justified in raising prices on almost all of my products and I didn't notice any measurable loss of customers. But if I did lose, so be it.

 

add me to the list of lost potential sales.  

[Kyrah Abattoir]

I still wish the redelivery system actually evaluated the permissions of the different items. Redelivered the parts that are copy, but not the parts that aren't.

I guess I'm a bit of a very rare case where my products are notransfer but come with some bonus accessories hat are nocopy/trans, and it would be nice if the MP didn't redeliver those too.

In the meantime, and as much as I dislike it, I disable re-delivery on the products that have a mixed content, at least until I find a solution, or until LL does.