Should Merchants Ban Residents from Purchases?

[Velk Kerang]

Anytime I left a bad review and got a response if the vendor even cared at all it was to contact me and address my concerns. I gotta be honest every single time that has happened it has always with out fail ended in me leaving them a positive review even if I wasn't totally satisfied with the end result because I was always impressed by the quality of service and that speaks volumes to me and goes a long way.

On the matter of vendors banning residents I can see that system being abused. Some people act stupid and ain't got no type of common sense. To be honest if they add such a system then they need to add an up/down vote feature with a comment section even if you haven't purchased said products. If you up vote or down vote you have to explain why. It's only fair. 👍

I don't have a negative experience usually and when I do it's usually in world half the time anyway. My most memorable one was the time this lady who sells kid avatar gestures IM'ed me while I was afk while my SL wife and kids where shopping. I came back to find myself banned because she didn't like my auto message to non-friends. What if my SL kid IM'ed you she asks? My response since she took it there. Teach your kids not to message strangers and it wouldn't be a problem ma'am. lol Lady blocked and muted me. lol Ya'd think as a parent she'd have enough sense to understand the concept of stranger danger. Lmao!!!!😁😂👍🤣😜😎

Edited June 17, 2021 by Velk Kerang
Corrections.

[AnnabelleApocalypse]

8 hours ago, Quistessa said:

Also Etsy: (Edit NVM the Etsy block function isn't what it purports to be)

Fun fact: If you refund someone fully on Etsy (EDIT: Dont refund, cancel the entire order), they lose the ability to leave any form of review. They also don't allow you to leave a review immediately. 

So while you cant strictly speaking "block" someone, you can make it virtually impossible for them to get up to any shenanigan's. 

.......Not that I have an Etsy store or anything  please stay away!

Edited June 17, 2021 by AnnabelleApocalypse

[AnnabelleApocalypse]

8 hours ago, Velk Kerang said:

Anytime I left a bad review and got a response if the vendor even cared at all it was to contact me and address my concerns. I gotta be honest every single time that has happened it has always with out fail ended in me leaving them a positive review even if I wasn't totally satisfied with the end result because I was always impressed by the quality of service and that speaks volumes to me and goes a long way.

That's normally how it goes down for me too. 

I recently bought a top on the MP that had some clipping issues at the back. 

I could have review-bombed the seller. Like a jackass.

But I just messaged them, explained the problem, they apologized, were really nice, we had a chat, they took a look and fixed it.

Now I had a part in making the world better for me, for them and for their future customers. Zen moment for the day achieved.

And needless to say, I gave them a 5 star review, AFTER I had given them an opportunity to fix my issue. I always feel like a negative review is the "nuclear option" when all other options have gotten nowhere. 

Edited June 17, 2021 by AnnabelleApocalypse

[Tonk Tomcat]

Idk what the problem should be? Every "normal" user will probably never get banned. If someone gets banned, there most times are reasons. Yeah, if someone sells crap and want to get rid of negativ reviews, it's uncool to block ppl. But ppl are still able to flag and report stuff. If i as a creator decide to not listen stuff at the mp at all and block ppl from my sim, they are also not able to buy from me. And yes, blocking/banning is a good thing, especially if other creators buy your stuff to analyse and imitate your items. I had a a more or less known other creator who did that and even made his mp listing with my brand name in his keywords. Another thing is, fake accounts with stolen creditcard infos. I had that a lot, when LL take back huge amounts of LS, but all the stuff that was sent to other accounts will not come back. So banning those accounts gives you at least a minimal way to protect yourself.

[Artorius Constantine]

Banning someone from your land, for in world actions or whatever reasons, effectively bans them from your store.

So if a griefer sends flying willies after my customers and gets banned for it, they have just caused themselves to be banned from my store.

I am on the Autism Spectrum and really can't handle aggressive people. One stupid argument can cause me sleepless nights for years. For my own mental health I have to ban and block people who send me rude & demanding messages or threaten me with a negative review if I don't do something for them. I simply don't have to deal with it for a .25 cent profit. I used to just block, but since a particularly rude person started buying several products from my store just to leave negative reviews, I banned them. I've only banned like 7 people in 14 years (aside from silly griefers) so I really don't see it as a problem. I shouldn't have to deal with other peoples issues, just like they shouldn't have to deal with mine.

I'm also quick to refund in those cases, as in "Here's your money back, thx for your business, Goodbye forever.".

It's just not worth the aggravation for a 1 or 2 dollar item. Nor is is good for me mentally, so I'd rather block than spend night after sleepless night over-thinking every word of a pointless argument. Being Hyper-Obsessive is a PITA! And knowing your communication style is going to cause problems isn't a lot of fun either. That's also why I'm a hermit who lives off-grid in an isolated Yurt on a Mountaintop. So I don't have to deal with people and they don't have to deal with me.

One of the reasons I love SL so much, it has allowed me to make a living without the daily hassle of commuting and dealing with people, (I have a very small footprint and live on a very small amount of cash) with a store that I can work in from my Mountaintop. I can work and make a living for myself and not have to take Government handouts to survive. Banning people who would take that away from me is a tool I appreciate, but it is like a nuclear option. I've never "un-banned" anyone.

[Prokofy Neva]

On 6/17/2021 at 2:38 AM, Wulfie Reanimator said:

While selling through a distributor (Amazon/Ebay/Etsy/B2B) might have some practical differences, individual businesses are absolutely able (and willing) to ban individual customers in real life. It would be crazy if that wasn't the case; some customers are simply not worth the money they might bring in, and it's very easy to find stories of people getting barred as customers, especially in the US.

This is total edge-casing.

Just because E-bay enables the blocking of buyers doesn't mean that it's a good idea for the Metaverse as a whole.

In real life, if you make a mass produced item and send it to distributors, it's impossible to block some individual buyer because you don't like what he writes on his blog.

Perhaps Etsy or E-bay are blocking people who resell their craft items at considerable mark-up, I have no idea, I very rarely sell anything there, so it would be interesting to know what the use cases are.

But unless you are in some tiny general store in Vermont and you've decided you don't want to sell your maple syrup to someone and you shoulder them out of your store because they didn't vote for Sanders, I don't see how this is possible.

A baker deciding he doesn't want to make a certain kind of cake in response to an engineered request is not the same thing. If you make a product that is distributed on a mass basis -- and in SL that is exactly what happens to products you put out to sale -- you can't ban someone practically. It's only the electronic online world of SL that makes this possible. Once you see how this spreads, to the point that certain governments in power deny insulin to dissidents or ethnic groups they don't like, perhaps you'll grasp why it's a terrible idea.

Your need to defend it and pretend like it is some kind of frequent phenomenon -- a form of heckling -- is exactly why you're one of the very rare people ejected from my rentals, in addition to two griefers. 

Getting barred from service in a bar ("No Irish") or a club is not what we're talking about. We're talking about the ability to ban someone from buying a can of soup on a shelf. 

[Quistess Alpha]

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

We're talking about the ability to ban someone from buying a can of soup on a shelf.

Have you considered that a virtual can of soup is not a real one? You're demanding that your analogy is the only correct one, but no analogy is perfect.

 

[Prokofy Neva]

Just now, Quistessa said:

Have you considered that a virtual can of soup is not a real one? You're demanding that your analogy is the only correct one, but no analogy is perfect.

 

No, I'm not "demanding" anything, dear, nor do I imagine that my view is "the only correct one" just because...I express it (there is often confusion on that point from people who imagine an expression of a dissenting view is an imposition on them -- they can't seem to find any other way to object to it).

Real life has worked fairly well for thousands of years, and markets route around tyrants and obstructions, long before some coder thought to coin the phrase about the Internet routing around. And generally open markets where goods are sold freely are successful, and things like the Soviet beriozka which only certain people can shop in, or ration cards with different rations for different levels of people -- they fail. So to the extent that the Metaverse can avoid this petty parochialism and Sovietism, all the better!

[AnnabelleApocalypse]

15 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Real life has worked fairly well for thousands of years, and markets route around tyrants and obstructions, long before some coder thought to coin the phrase about the Internet routing around. And generally open markets where goods are sold freely are successful, and things like the Soviet beriozka which only certain people can shop in, or ration cards with different rations for different levels of people -- they fail. So to the extent that the Metaverse can avoid this petty parochialism and Sovietism, all the better!

Comparing an individual banning another individual from making purchases in their store is of course comparable to Soviet Russia. How silly for the rest of us not to have seen this breathtakingly obvious comparison sooner. 

Thankfully by your logic, these huge SL brands that practice such Stalinist banning's must be mere weeks or months away from total collapse. 

Edited June 21, 2021 by AnnabelleApocalypse

[Prokofy Neva]

1 hour ago, AnnabelleApocalypse said:

Comparing an individual banning another individual from making purchases in their store is of course comparable to Soviet Russia. How silly for the rest of us not to have seen this breathtakingly obvious comparison sooner. 

Thankfully by your logic, these huge SL brands that practice such Stalinist banning's must be mere weeks or months away from total collapse. 

When you can't justify an action, see if you can exaggerate it to absurd proportions to discredit the criticism of it, that might work!  Except...that the original impulse does create a world of unfreedom when multiplied and it's more than fine to call it out.

I am now actually coming to see that this particular merchant may be acting because we bought a piece of abandoned land on a sim where evidently a friend of hers feels he has a veto on who should get this land. 

[AnnabelleApocalypse]

Your the one that brought up communism and made the original absurd exaggeration. I was just riffing on your ridiculousness. Don't blame me for what you started. Cheeky

Its only "unfreedom" for the customer. And the customer is still free to shop elsewhere. Its freedom from the merchants perspective. 

Freedom to associate and transact with whoever they please. Without threat or coercion.

You know.....Capitalism.

For something your so fond of, you seem to have a hard time identifying it. 

 

[drusilladarkwillow]

What LL needs to do is fix how merchants block customers. As it stand now, anyone on your ban list is blocked from purchasing from your store. There are those who I've banned (due to them attacking me, threatening me and using racial slurs) but I wouldn't care if they had purchased from me. In the other way, there are people who I want to ban from purchasing from me (they're known for copying items and just changing the color and scripting but everything else is pretty much the same or they are a stalker who I no longer want to see come across my screen). I've had a guy who was blasting my name around the group that I was mainly selling to but they would still purchase items from me. It became a hassle to block them from purchasing from me. Another problem with that is that the only way to block someone from purchasing from you inworld is if you use one of the many vendor systems out there, this is also a double edge sword if the item that you're selling is no copy to you and many don't trust no copy items within a vendor system as they can't see how many are actually it in clearly if the drop box also isn't on the same sim as the vendor (which is also harder as vendors are copy and can be placed at many different locations).

I do understand where you're coming from though. Most customer purchase bans are pretty legit while others are petty.

[drusilladarkwillow]

On 6/13/2021 at 5:59 PM, Female Winslet said:

In fairness, many things in SL are rather petty. Parcel bans, for example. I've been given lifetime bans by people I've never even met. Once in a while they post things in their land description to make clear they are mad at me for an opinion I stated on these forums--usually for saying something needs to be done about orb and ban line abuse. Other times I have no clue who the person is or why my name is on their ban list. 

I hate to say it, but why should retail transactions be any exception?

SL is a community full of all kinds of people. That's part of what makes it so great. Most people are pretty decent. But unfortunately, some people are petty jerks. That includes merchants too. I just wish we had better means of addressing it when people cross lines beyond being merely petty jerks.

My private residence has a parcel ban when it's on the ground level, otherwise it's a security orb when I'm in the sky (ban lines don't go up higher then around 300 or 500 meters). I use them due to having people just hang out and live in my home many different times on many different regions, which is a shame as I don't like getting in the way of those who are flying or walking around. The flip side of it is that technically you could fly up above the ban lines, over them then down onto the parcel itself. User ban lines, I'm not sure if there is a limit to how high those go to. (I've only banned my stalkers from my parcels) It always amuses me when someone has their building in the sky but they have parcel ban lines up. As for security orbs, I leave it with 3 or 5 minutes (due to ppl having dead LM's) and it just tp's them away from it (I don't use the ban or temp ban options). I also only do that with my private residence, otherwise it doesn't really matter to me unless it's a store that I'm working on and isn't yet open to the public.

[FreeToSL]

On 6/20/2021 at 6:20 PM, Prokofy Neva said:

No, I'm not "demanding" anything, dear, nor do I imagine that my view is "the only correct one" just because...I express it (there is often confusion on that point from people who imagine an expression of a dissenting view is an imposition on them -- they can't seem to find any other way to object to it).

Real life has worked fairly well for thousands of years, and markets route around tyrants and obstructions, long before some coder thought to coin the phrase about the Internet routing around. And generally open markets where goods are sold freely are successful, and things like the Soviet beriozka which only certain people can shop in, or ration cards with different rations for different levels of people -- they fail. So to the extent that the Metaverse can avoid this petty parochialism and Sovietism, all the better!

Thousands of years? Less than one hundred years ago there were segregated businesses IN A DEMOCRATIC CAPITALISM, and it gets worse the further back you look, so your "eternal free market" only has existed in your mind, and in the mind of libertarians. A shop owner in SL should definitely be able to refuse to sell to anyone, without the need to explain themselves why and as long the shop owner is not infringing in other parts of the TOS.  I think people have given enough reasons of why it´s a useful tool in previous posts.

[Prokofy Neva]

17 hours ago, FreeToSL said:

Thousands of years? Less than one hundred years ago there were segregated businesses IN A DEMOCRATIC CAPITALISM, and it gets worse the further back you look, so your "eternal free market" only has existed in your mind, and in the mind of libertarians. A shop owner in SL should definitely be able to refuse to sell to anyone, without the need to explain themselves why and as long the shop owner is not infringing in other parts of the TOS.  I think people have given enough reasons of why it´s a useful tool in previous posts.

That's a good argument to make, that indeed free markets were not free historically for Blacks and Native Americans and immigrants, and in Europe you can find of course the Pale of Settlement where Jews were restricted from various businesses and not allowed to buy land, and there are examples all through history, i.e. only privileged Communist Party members could shop at the well-stocked beriozka stores.

But the point is that my point holds, markets route around tyrants and obstructions, Blacks in the US suffering under the Jim Crow laws created the Green Book of services and hotels where they could be accepted and spread the word. Social movements fought against this discrimination and succeeded in getting laws passed.  Blacks were redlined out of neighbourhoods and not allowed to buy homes and thus could not acquire equity, and civil rights lawyers fought this and restored their rights.  And so you rightly call out such practices as wrong, although your motivation is merely to "trip me up" or "show me up" to be forgetful of our own terrible history. What's operative here is that *this was wrong, and you admit it was wrong, to bar Blacks and others from business based on race or ethnicity*. It's against the law *now*.

Yet a second later you go and justify such restrictions on the basis of nothing. You don't want "segregated businesses IN A DEMOCRATIC CAPITALISM," or worse, yet you turn around and say it's ok for a shop owner in SL to refuse a sale to anyone for no reason. 

Now how do you square that hypocrisy?

People rightly fight such restrictions, they don't justify them. We've heard from newbies distressed at the 30-day restrictions they find on clubs. I can testify to vendors locked to me for my critical opinions; we all know that furries and tiny avatars and such can be barred on the basis of appearance not behaviour.

In a liberal democratic country (which we don't have in SL), the ideal is not to have such restrictions barring people from the economy. It doesn't matter if the TOS doesn't ban it; the TOS is not an arbiter of morality in many respects. It doesn't ban capture rape roleplay either, yet I'm not allow in finding this reprehensible.

In this troubled economy of RL, we should find more ways to include people in the virtual economy, not obstruct them.

[Prokofy Neva]

18 hours ago, FreeToSL said:

Thousands of years? Less than one hundred years ago there were segregated businesses IN A DEMOCRATIC CAPITALISM, and it gets worse the further back you look, so your "eternal free market" only has existed in your mind, and in the mind of libertarians. A shop owner in SL should definitely be able to refuse to sell to anyone, without the need to explain themselves why and as long the shop owner is not infringing in other parts of the TOS.  I think people have given enough reasons of why it´s a useful tool in previous posts.

So you rightly condemn such segregation as wrong in "A DEMOCRATIC CAPITALISM" and your purport to call me out for hypocrisy, yet you turn around and then justify such segregation for any reason or no reason in a virtual economy. It's only a useful tool to keep certain parties in power just as segregation is.

[Theresa Tennyson]

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

So you rightly condemn such segregation as wrong in "A DEMOCRATIC CAPITALISM" and your purport to call me out for hypocrisy, yet you turn around and then justify such segregation for any reason or no reason in a virtual economy. It's only a useful tool to keep certain parties in power just as segregation is.

Unless there is an entire identifiable class of multiple people called "Prokofy Nevas", and shopkeepers are excluding all members of the "Prokofy Neva" class beforehand without considering the actions of an individual class member, what you're whingeing about isn't segregation.

[Finite]

You could be blocked for anything and it applies to everything. So if you annoy someone and they block you then that same block will also apply to your ability to purchase things from them. It's a wide net. I think a quick fix would be to stop annoying people.

Edited July 19, 2021 by Finite

[Love Zhaoying]

On 6/21/2021 at 8:54 AM, AnnabelleApocalypse said:

Comparing an individual banning another individual from making purchases in their store is of course comparable to Soviet Russia

In Mother Russia, comparisons ban you!

[Prokofy Neva]

55 minutes ago, Finite said:

You could be blocked for anything and it applies to everything. So if you annoy someone and they block you then that same block will also apply to your ability to purchase things from them. It's a wide net. I think a quick fix would be to stop annoying people.

I think when you find yourself blocked you might re-think this.

@Theresa Tennyson It's not about one person but the generic concept of banning someone for speech, or for subjective reasons. Then the category rapidly fills up.

 

[Finite]

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

I think when you find yourself blocked you might re-think this.

@Theresa Tennyson It's not about one person but the generic concept of banning someone for speech, or for subjective reasons. Then the category rapidly fills up.

 

Rethink what? I'm confused. Not sure when LL implemented it but whenever someone blocks you it applies to everything associated with that person. I think this was a result of people continuing to harass people who blocked them via the marketplace somehow. Guessing reviews or unwanted gifts. I think if I gave someone reason enough to block me I probably don't have high enough opinion of them myself and likely wouldn't want to buy things from them anyways.

Edited July 19, 2021 by Finite

[Prokofy Neva]

7 hours ago, Finite said:

Rethink what? I'm confused. Not sure when LL implemented it but whenever someone blocks you it applies to everything associated with that person. I think this was a result of people continuing to harass people who blocked them via the marketplace somehow. Guessing reviews or unwanted gifts. I think if I gave someone reason enough to block me I probably don't have high enough opinion of them myself and likely wouldn't want to buy things from them anyways.

No, that's not how it works. I'm talking about people who use the block option on vendors and the marketplace, not on land. And it has nothing to do with reviews at all, that's the point, and nothing to do with unwanted gifts or spam or anything. It's about opinions this merchant doesn't like, and criticism of bad behaviour unrelated to the marketplace. That's the point.

[Finite]

2 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

No, that's not how it works. I'm talking about people who use the block option on vendors and the marketplace, not on land. And it has nothing to do with reviews at all, that's the point, and nothing to do with unwanted gifts or spam or anything. It's about opinions this merchant doesn't like, and criticism of bad behaviour unrelated to the marketplace. That's the point.

I didn't mean land. I mean in game like from your profile. If i block you you wouldnt be able to buy anything from me in the marketplace. I wouldn't need to also do something in marketplace to block you there. But as for blocking people for bad reviews, I agree that's pretty petty but to each their own. It's likely a vendor I wouldn't go to again anyways.

[FreeToSL]

On 7/19/2021 at 6:49 AM, Prokofy Neva said:

So you rightly condemn such segregation as wrong in "A DEMOCRATIC CAPITALISM" and your purport to call me out for hypocrisy, yet you turn around and then justify such segregation for any reason or no reason in a virtual economy. It's only a useful tool to keep certain parties in power just as segregation is.

Just to summarize, individual control: good,  discrimination: bad.  I hope that clears up any misunderstandings.

[Prokofy Neva]

22 minutes ago, FreeToSL said:

Just to summarize, individual control: good,  discrimination: bad.  I hope that clears up any misunderstandings.

So you believe that the individual cake baker can refuse to make a cake for gays. Well, the higher courts agree with you, in a way, although they didn't use religious freedom as the argument but selective prosecution. I actually think in a world where there are many cake bakers, this particular born-again Christian should refuse an order consistent with his beliefs, although they are archaic. But on the whole, it's better to be open to everyone and make a cake for anyone who orders one. That's how I approach my rentals and I think it's better for the economy.

In RL, these issues can be grounded in real-life situations with deep detail and beliefs whereas the automation of virtual life is what disturbs me. This happened with certain banning systems, where people would import entire lists of bans based on arbitrary or localized or out-of-date concerns. So naturally if I criticized this system, that owner put me in the ban list, then it spread. I think ban lists that important data like this are abusive. I think bans should be made in local situations based on facts according to the rule of the TOS or the landlord's fair, public rules. So if some furry was expelled from the Shelter merely for carrying a weapon, that shouldn't be grounds for him to be banned from my rentals if he is not using that weapon.

So as I mentioned, the monopolistic maker of a vending and related TP systems put me as a "sample griefer" in *all teleporters* meaning many stores had me banned, even if I was among their top customer, so I had to undo these one by one. This is before I asked this particular person some hard questions about his monopoly, and in a situation where I had never blogged about it; it was "just because". Arbitrary rulings become blanket rulings quickly in a virtual world.

A person who bans you for a bad review, or a complaint about the non-functioning of a product, even a polite one, or for other reasons that I now see have to do with a person who must be their friend on a sim where I bought abandoned land they may have had their eye on -- they are not good for business. Not their own business. Not the economy. The reasons aren't justified.

I boycott certain merchants for bad behaviour but a boycott is hard to spread and enforce in SL and is not the same as a ban on purchases. And I don't even adhere to my boycott which began as a protest against $100 gatchas, in one case. I think you have to be willing to review situations periodically -- they change.

I am not for merchants, who control the virtual society in a number of ways already, and who enjoy favour with the platform makers certainly, acquiring more power by reaching out their arms into the economy further and blocking people. What's to stop somebody who doesn't like furries collecting automatically all the names of members of furry groups and banning them automatically from a vendor? And so on. Putting no-mod on your product already is that kind of un

welcome overreach.