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Script to sell items on personal web site?


Maura Sahara
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I'm going to assume that you already have some kind of inworld store.

If you want to sell items on your webpage, what you'd need is a way to accept money. There are really two ways to approach this.

 

  1. Accept an outside payment like Paypal (for example)
  2. Allow the user to pay with L$.

If you're going to accept an outside payment, you'll need some way for your server to know when it's been paid. Email often works well for this, and there are processes you can use to identify a properly formatted "you've been paid" email from sites like paypal. From there it's a simple matter to automate delivery. Your mail processing script sees a "you've been paid" email, and then sends a separate email to a prim inworld. A script inside that prim then reads the information in the email, and delivers the product specified, to the person specified.

There are other variations on this theme, for example, instead of sending emails in to SL, you can utilize an inworld script to have it call a php script every few minutes, on your webserver. That php script could then tell the inworld script if any deliveries are pending, and the inworld script could act on that information.

If you're going to accept L$, you'll probably want to devise some sort of "terminal" where people can input L$ to their "accounts" and then withdraw any excess. So if I liked your products, I might put 1000L$ on account with your system. Then every time I "bought" an item on your site, you'd deliver the item, and deduct it's cost from my balance. At any point allowing me to withdraw the L$ I have left in the system.

The downside here (and why you don't see more of this) is twofold. Firstly, it requires you to keep ALL THE L$ ON HAND. The sum total of every balance of every user account. If you don't, won't, or can't keep that much liquidity on hand.. then you risk severe legal troubles should your account holders all decide to withdraw their funds while you're unable to comply.

Second, it requires that the customer "trusts" you with their deposited funds, upfront. That's something not at all easy to earn, especially with the number of people who have lost money over the years due to so-called "banks" and "stock markets".

While it sounds really cool and professional to offer products directly for sale on your website, you may find it much easier to simply list your items on the SL Marketplace, and then provide links from your site, to your listings. This way you can outsource all the money handling nonsense.. and you don't have to stress so much on getting all the scripts to work correctly.

The marketplace has been going through some technical issues over the last couple of months, and reliable delivery isn't what it once was. However it is still the "Go-To" place for out-of-sl shopping.

 

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I'm a noobie when it comes to stuff like this but.. Do you think there would be a way to use a sort of SLM API and then implement the add to cart button on your site, display what they're purchasing as if it's on your site while it really isnt, and then checkout & forward them to the SLM page or something?  Kind of like how paypal works on various websites - you click the link and you never -really- leave the website but it brings up an official paypal window.

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