[RANT] Free Demo in our Inworld Store - STOP IT!

[Lysistrata Szapira]

2 hours ago, Ceka Cianci said:

I think the reason is, because a lot of times it doesn't get refunded as well and gives off the message that they are cheap.. I've had more not refunded than I have had them refunded over the years.

Like the day before yesterday, I was at the Cake Day event and decided to pay for a demo, it never got refunded..I took it home and tried on the top, then 2 minutes later the top went poof.. They had a 2 minute timer on a 1L demo.. The top poofed before I even got the rest of the outfit on..

I like to put things on an item at a time and look them over.. I think it went poof as I was looking for a hud in the folder, which there was no hud either..

But 1L or no 1L refund or no refund, a timer on a demo will lose them a sale and any future sales from me, every time..  I couldn't put their name on my note card of places I won't be doing business with, fast enough.. hehehe

My first line of thought about these "no refund/time limit" demos is that the seller has something to hide. They know their product is of poor quality, so they'll take every 1L they can get.  They don't want customers to have time to test their rigs with the customers' AOs and find them faulty. 

I also kind of have a beef with creators who only have one texture/color in a fatpack demo (or worse just a plain white or gray mesh).  Most of the time I want to see what the color/texture options look like on my screen. I've been burned too many times by textures/colors that look good on the vendor ad but actually suck once they go on my avatar.   I will purchase from stores that do great texture work consistently, but the rest of the bunch won't get my money.  

 

[xDancingStarx]

I sometimes TP from event to event and try to put together an outfit. Occasionally it happens that I stand there naked because the frikking thing detached after a period of time. And I'd have to get back to wherever I had gotten it in the first place. I'd like to know what's going on in their heads, to create time limited stuff. 

[Spiffy Voxel]

45 minutes ago, xDancingStarx said:

I sometimes TP from event to event and try to put together an outfit. Occasionally it happens that I stand there naked because the frikking thing detached after a period of time. And I'd have to get back to wherever I had gotten it in the first place. I'd like to know what's going on in their heads, to create time limited stuff. 

I share that frustration! I end up wearing the demo over an outfit that will keep me from becoming butt naked should the demo timeout and detach before I'm done checking it out. I can't see any good reason for putting a timer on demo items, and any store doing that won't be getting my custom in future.

[Orwar]

   Timed demos I'm really having trouble coming up with any kind of rational reasoning behind. 5 minutes to try out the colours available and to check the rig and materials? Nah. Most times I pop a demo on and see it telling me it'll come off by itself in a few minutes, I throw it off and chuck it in the bin immediately.

   Same with demos that don't come with the actual textures; how am I to make a decision based on looking like a ball of blank mesh? Or the ones that put red demo text all over the one available demo colour (presumably because uploading all texture assets one more time with demo watermarks and changing the UUIDs in a HUD would be too much work, hm?).

   Same with demos where there are alpha blended pieces and also a circle of alpha blended demo text bits floating around it. You want me to make a decision based on how your hair looks if I've got a big alpha square pressed up against my face clipping >70% of the hair from just about any given angle? Couldn't you at least have made the demo text bits alpha masked so, you know, I can see what I'm trying on?

[Lewis Luminos]

Having made a handful of items and put a few of them up for sale on the MP on my alt's account, I can safely say that making MP listings is a huge enormous royal pain in the derriere, and I am really not at all surprised that most creators would rather not put demos on the MP at all.

Setting up an item for sale takes as long as making the original piece, and then for a demo you have to do it twice for each size, with a whole different set of testure uploads (at an extra L$10 a pop, thats a lot of money if you are doing multiple colours), then you have to make a new HUD as well, with different UUIDs and make a second MP listing, and go back to link the original listing to it and.... yeah that's why I only have half a dozen things in my store and haven't made anything new in over a year.

It really doesnt surprise me that creators (a) want to charge for demos, (b) want to sell all their colours separately and (c) want to sell for only 2 or 3 bodies instead of the whole range.  

Honestly I'd rather skip doing demos altogether and sell everything for L$1 a piece, but the full perm template creators I want to use don't allow me to do that.

 

[CaithLynnSayes]

1 hour ago, Lewis Luminos said:

and then for a demo you have to do it twice for each size, with a whole different set of testure uploads (at an extra L$10 a pop, thats a lot of money if you are doing multiple colours), then you have to make a new HUD as well, with different UUIDs and make a second MP listing

I disagree. You don't have to upload your textures twice. The "demo floater" has been very effective. A rigged piece of mesh, usually a giant logo or the word demo, or even a couple of rings over the avatar have been used and i can totally live with those.

I do get it that some creators might want to watermark textures because of copybotting but i don't think this is a major issue. Correct me if i'm wrong but i don't think creations are being stolen left and right and resold in masses. I think people are generally familiar with a creator's work and see a fake when they encounter one and report it to the original creator. I know i did a few times.

So the texture watermarking isn't a great argument in my view, and it isn't done all that often.

[Rick Nightingale]

6 hours ago, CaithLynnSayes said:

...or even a couple of rings over the avatar...

That's my standard demo-making practice for attachables. If I can be bothered it might even get a rotating "this is a demo" texture around it to be extra flashy. I'm fine with trying out other makers demos similary equipped. The only ones that irk me are where they put the demo prims over what you are trying to see, making it hard to tell if you like it or not. Just put it over the head. If someone is daft enough to walk around wearing a demo with a big red glowing ring around their head... let everyone laugh at them. I'm OK with that.

Yeah, I despise those timed demos, except for very specific reasons. Likewise 1L$ demos... just no*. Neither I nor my wife has ever paid for a demo and had it refunded, although getting a 'gift' that sold for 1L$ in-world refunded seems common. My wife once bought six demos from one store, after finding them on the MP and having to go in-world to find the demos. The clothes looked amazing... and every demo proved them to be at best badly weighted, possibly not even weighted at all to the body they claimed to be. She felt scammed, and probably was! Might only be L$6... but it was her L$6.

*I sell two demos for my products; the rest are of course free and almost everything I sell has a demo. In both instances it's because the item is fully functional, not marked in any way, and actually useful... someone could just get endless free demos and never need the full product. I also state clearly that I'll refund the demo cost (once!), full purchase made or not, and always do.

As to the OP's point... I fully agree. Well over half of the things we find on the MP that require an inworld visit for a demo, we don't find one. Only yesterday I was looking for a demo... the inworld store had three locations and not one had the promised demo. Waste of time (yet again) and that store goes on my blacklist along with the rest that do that to me. Not to mention the ones that land you at a rental sign on an empty plot and you immediately get jumped on by a sales rep trying to rent you some land. My usual response is unprintable.

Edited December 19, 2022 by Rick Daylight

[CaithLynnSayes]

@Rick Daylight You say you charge for demos and you always refund. Don't mind me saying, but why charge in the first place?

[EliseAnne85]

11 hours ago, Orwar said:

Timed demos I'm really having trouble coming up with any kind of rational reasoning behind. 5 minutes to try out the colours available and to check the rig and materials? Nah. Most times I pop a demo on and see it telling me it'll come off by itself in a few minutes, I throw it off and chuck it in the bin immediately.

Like most have said, I hate the timed demos too.  But, recently (just a few weeks) I got some hair demos from a new store that had so many rings it was near impossible to see how the hair looked and this is way worse than those timed demos.  Oh my gosh, it was bad!   Then, just wanting to look at a bit more from this new hair store I'd never seen someone gave a review with one star saying with all those rings one cannot even see the hair.  And, that was the truth.

So, to creator's please don't put so many rings that we cannot even see your creations.  Two rings is enough, not 10!  And, the hair was so cute in the picture but I ended up buying none.  

I want to add, {monso} a hair store I had bought a few hairs from sent me a bunch of free hair for Christmas.  I was really touched that someone would do that for me and give me these beautiful free gifts.  Creator's can be as different as night and day.  

Edited December 19, 2022 by EliseAnne85

[Rowan Amore]

1 hour ago, CaithLynnSayes said:

@Rick Daylight You say you charge for demos and you always refund. Don't mind me saying, but why charge in the first place?

Charging for demos in the MP allows you to gift them to alts or whomever you'd like.  You can't gift 0L items.  

[CaithLynnSayes]

Just now, Rowan Amore said:

Charging for demos in the MP allows you to gift them to alts or whomever you'd like.  You can't gift 0L items.  

Right. So it's a long standing LL limitation people had to work around. Got it.

@Linden Lab When are you planning on fixing that? 2035? 😉

[Rowan Amore]

13 minutes ago, CaithLynnSayes said:

Right. So it's a long standing LL limitation people had to work around. Got it.

@Linden Lab When are you planning on fixing that? 2035? 😉

It's actually not a bad idea on the MP.  It keeps shady people from sending you 5739375 demos in batches of 10.  A long shot it would happen but you know...people.

[Orwar]

4 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

It's actually not a bad idea on the MP.  It keeps shady people from sending you 5739375 demos in batches of 10.  A long shot it would happen but you know...people.

   To me, it feels as if the effort of putting 2,000 items in your cart in batches of 10 at a time, gifting each one of them, feels worse than paying the L$2,000 to do it. It also seems to me that it would make a lot more sense if that's an occurring issue, that LL implement a way to reject gifts sent by people you've blocked.

[Rick Nightingale]

1 hour ago, CaithLynnSayes said:

@Rick Daylight You say you charge for demos and you always refund. Don't mind me saying, but why charge in the first place?

I thought I made it clear in my post... I said I charge for only two demos (actually three, I forgot one), and as I said it's because they are fully functional and people could simply obtain hundreds of them and use them, just like the full product. They are a fully valid product in their own right.

One, for instance, is a cigar. It's cheap, smokes once for the same length of time as the full product to demonstrate it, and I sell quite a lot as 'giftables' rather than demos. It's also a demo for the full product which comes boxed with more extensive options, and provides infinite cigars.

Another is a sea mine, for target practice. Again, a valid single-use product in its own right as well as a demo. The full product is copyable and can auto-rerez after being destroyed. No matter what I did to that to make it a 'free' demo, it would still be perfectly usable as a target practice mine unless I removed the ability to see it destroyed - not much of a demo then.

Every rule has some valid exclusions.

Edit: In a nutshell: The reason to charge and then refund (once) is to prevent people using what is a perfectly usable, but single-use, product (because that's the best way to demo that particular thing) by 'buying' loads of them for L$0 instead of paying for the full product. By offering the refund on request, while I'm sure it puts some purchasers off (due to the ridiculously high proportion of unreliable adverts/sellers on the MP) it's the best compromise I can come up with.

Edit 2: Some years ago I made my own vendor system that gave demos, some of which were restricted to one per avatar in case like the above. Then they were free. For various reasons I gave up on that though, the main one being it didn't fit in with putting demos on the MP, and I didn't like telling people on the MP they had to come inworld for a demo any more than I like that myself.

Edited December 19, 2022 by Rick Daylight

[Flea Yatsenko]

You should be able to verify your in world store on the marketplace and get a bonus for providing an in world store with demos. If you lose your parcel and the link to the in world demo no longer brings you to your parcel you verified, it penalizes you in ranking.

[Ceka Cianci]

2 hours ago, EliseAnne85 said:

I want to add, {monso} a hair store I had bought a few hairs from sent me a bunch of free hair for Christmas.  I was really touched that someone would do that for me and give me these beautiful free gifts.  Creator's can be as different as night and day.  

Monso is always updating their hair, so you may have gotten a few updates from them.. I get those all the time myself from them..  You may want to check them against the ones you already have or have purchased in the past..

I think they just sent out some updates for mine like yesterday or the day before.. It seems like I'm getting updates from them every week with as much hair of theirs that i have.. hehehe

 

[ValKalAstra]

As a new creator, I'm always a bit overwhelmed with some of the hardline stances. As a customer myself I get most of them though. If a demo is just too much of a pain, it's a product to be skipped.

Wanting me to head into an in world store for a demo is almost always a lost sale with only a few exceptions (above mentioned houses would be a legit one for me). Demo rings and markers if limited are okay.
Like if one leg of a pair of pants is marked as demo but I can still see everything else clearly? Cool by me. Yet clothes slapped with enough demo markers to bury the textures are not.

Timed demos for clothes are also one of those demo crimes to me but I happily accept them for tools, vehicles and such or items that don't need extensive setup.

[Maitimo]

I don't mind timed demos tbh, as long as they're actually free and not L$1.  Picking up a spare or two is trivial. But a timed demo that is not free, is an instant no-buy.

For a lot of non-clothing items, where the demo is effectively a fully functional product, I don't really see any alternative. I tested a bunch of Bandit boats a while back, before making up my mind, and each one poofed after 10 minutes. I had a fun afternoon hopping back and trying them again and again before finally deciding on the 55.

On 12/19/2022 at 4:23 AM, Lysistrata Szapira said:

My first line of thought about these "no refund/time limit" demos is that the seller has something to hide. They know their product is of poor quality, so they'll take every 1L they can get.  They don't want customers to have time to test their rigs with the customers' AOs and find them faulty. 

This, I swear, is the real reason.Especially those dreadful stores where demos cost more than L$1.

[EliseAnne85]

16 hours ago, Ceka Cianci said:

Monso is always updating their hair, so you may have gotten a few updates from them.. I get those all the time myself from them..  You may want to check them against the ones you already have or have purchased in the past..

I think they just sent out some updates for mine like yesterday or the day before.. It seems like I'm getting updates from them every week with as much hair of theirs that i have.. hehehe

 

At first, I received updates of the ones I bought but then as the days passed, Monso started sending me hairs I never bought.  These are new hairs I did not have.  I think it was some kind of thank you.  I may have been an early purchaser of Monso hair when they only had a but a few hairs and perhaps she/he remembered that and sent me some hairs I did not have which I thought was pretty awesome.  Made me want to buy hairs to now thank them.  

I wanted to say something about the go to the inworld store to get a demo.  I just don't get that.  If I go to the store and get a demo, I would probably buy in the store then.  So, MP is just a showcase to those kinds of creator's then not a serious MP where people use MP to save time.  Those creator's don't get that; that's it's not a showcase, it saves us time.

Edited December 20, 2022 by EliseAnne85

[Ceka Cianci]

Just now, EliseAnne85 said:

At first, I received updates of the ones I bought but then as the days passed, Monso started sending me hairs I never bought.  These are new hairs I did not have.  I think it was some kind of thank you.  I may have been an early purchaser of Monso hair when they only had a but a few hairs and perhaps she/he remembered that and sent me some hairs I did not have which I thought was pretty awesome.  Made me want to buy hairs to now thank them.  

I'll have to double check mine.. There may be more down the list..

[Dakota Linden]

On 12/18/2022 at 6:59 AM, CaithLynnSayes said:

By the way LL, feel free to streamline this so all links on one's MP store can be changed in a single go...

Greetings!

This already exists. 

Sellers can update their main Store location SLurl through their Edit Store Information.  

SLurls on individual listings is for sellers to include an exact landing point for the item itself so that buyers and potential buyers can land at the exact location of the item in world. 

Those cannot be truly updated in bulk because each of those Slurl location coordinates are different. 

If or when a seller moves the item in world, if they have an SLurl on the listing for the item, they should update the Slurl on the listing itself. 

If the seller uses their main store location SLurl on individual listing, the seller can bulk update that SLurl so that they can change/update up to 100 listings at a time, through their Manage Listings page on the Marketplace web site. 

[CaithLynnSayes]

1 hour ago, Dakota Linden said:

This already exists. 

Thanks. Someone already said it here. I didn't know that. Good things.

[EnCore Mayne]

On 12/18/2022 at 7:59 AM, CaithLynnSayes said:

... I have a couple of theories as to why some people do this. First one could be laziness, i don't know. Second one could be because they want the traffic to an inworld store.

you answered your own question.

being that i have a marketplace store and an inworld location i can say from my experience that it amounts to balancing the needs of the masses against the continued pleasure one benefits from actually bringing your avatar into the messy complicated adventure we call Second Life.

far be it for me to lecture you as to how you wish to live your second life. you do you. i have my preferences just like countless others living in SL. Lord love em and serve them well.

being that all the marketplace creators are individuals with no standards or best practices manual to follow, we're lucky to have as good of experiences as we have now. i'm not complaining. (at least not in a public setting.)

minor setbacks determining your continued like or dislike for the platform just goes to show that something needs to be done for you to improve your chosen lifestyle. in response, refer back to my earlier statement regarding one's choice to live with whatever peculiarites you currently adopt. i feel for ya, really i do. i hope you overcome these transgressions.

for me, i  abandoned having any presence in SL for some time. who needs an inworld presence when "anyone" can sell their wares on the marketplace? do you remember the days when there weren't any such thing as demos at all? have you been around enough to remember when there wasn't even a marketplace?

and you want to complain about not being able to tp off your platform? you poor thing.

[Crim Mip]

If see item inworld takes me to a no longer valid location, the chances I'll buy that item goes down to near zero.

 

[Ardy Lay]

You talk funny, too.