Delivery Failures Peaking - Is it Just me?

[Lasher Oh]

Is it just me or are other merchants experiencing a higher than normal delivery failure ratio during the past week. I'm having about 2 or three a day whereas before I was having 1 or 2 a week. Now as the summer is traditionally a quiet season for me sales are lower than normal yet failed deliveries are higher than they have ever been. Doesn't bode well for the end of the holiday season I fear.

^L^

PS interesting that almost without exception the failures have come from the customers whose shopping cart contained items from several other merchants at the same time. Hardly any sigle purchased items have failed.

[Claireschen Hesten]

i sell a modest amount of stuff daily i had a failed delivery yesterday which i didn't get paid for and i'm assuming the customer didn't get charged which brings my failed deliveries up to 8 since september last year i do get orders that are part failed usually the customer has several items in the cart not just something of mine that did deliver

[Chelsea Malibu]

I almost never have delivery issues. Maybe one in the past year? Not sure why I don't as everyone else seems to.  I feel left out. 

 

[Heath Pevensey]

I have a backup of my xstreet box. We keep one on our main sim, and a copy of each at our Linden house. I get maybe 1 failed delivery a month, if that. Not that failures should happen at all, but i think alot of it has to do with the lag on the sim where your box is located.

[Josh Susanto]

I've got so many delivery failures today that I'm considering cashing out, closing up, and doing any possible kind of volunteer work for any and all of LL's competitors.

The part of me that keeps expecting this $hit is becoming less and less amenable to admonitions of good faith.

As much as I would really, really like to keep giving LL the benefit of a doubt, they seem to be perpetually, stubbornly pushing my hand as a scientific thinker on the question of whether there yet can, possibly, be any point.

[Chelsea Malibu]

Perhaps this new delivery system will fix this.  Anyone hear when it's supposed to be released?

[Darrius Gothly]

Keep in mind that Sim Rolling Restarts just completed yesterday and Magic Boxes may have gotten .. ummm .. brain-baked.

Take up your Magic Box, rez it again and let it reset. Then go into the Marketplace Merchant Dashboard, go to Inventory > Magic Box Status and double check that your Magic Box is listed properly. If necessary, manually force a reset.

[Dakota Linden]

Greetings!

Any disruption in communications on the grid can cause issues with the Magic Boxes.

If the Grid Status Report web site shows warnings against doing transactions, saving builds, or rolling restarts, then deliveries will be impacted.

It shouldn't be necessary to actually pick up the Magic Box and re-rezz it, just click on the Magic Box and choose Reset from the pop up.

Then go to your Manage Inventory page and click on the Sync Marketplace to Magic Boxes button.

 

[Josh Susanto]

And exactly how many times am I supposed to do that before we can agree that it's not really the solution?

[Zanara Zenovka]

I haven't had a delivery failure for months - maybe 3 all year.

[Dakota Linden]

Hello Josh,

Your sales are failing with the following message:  "Sale failed: Second Life communications timeout"

This means that the system is timing out trying to contact your Magic Boxes in world.

You can see this message on the Xstreet SL web site since that site still records all sales and transactions.

You have 726 active items on the SLM web site.

You have 4 Magic Boxes showing as being rezzed in world.

So let's try a couple of things and yes, I know this is a pain in the butt for you, but instead of ranting, let's see if the Magic Boxes are in fact the problem and if we can do something here to try to fix the issue.

1. Have both regions where your Magic Boxes are located restarted.

2. Place a maximum of 100 items into each Magic Box, meaning you will need at least 8 Magic Boxes rezzed in world. I would also recomment downloading new Magic Boxes from the SLM web site.

3. After restarting the regions and setting up the Magic Boxes, go to your Magic Box Status page and remove all of the Magic Boxes that are showing up under the Registered Servers column.

4. Reset each of the Magic Boxes in world by clicking on them and choosing reset from the pop up.

5. Go to your Manage Inventory page and click on the Sync Marketplace to Magic Boxes button.

6. Let's see on Monday what, if any, impact the above has on your sale completion rate to see if there has been any change.

 

[Josh Susanto]

I can do some of that  and I am doing some of it already.

But I don't control region resetting.

Also, I do not have 4 boxes rezzed. I have 2.

Also, I hope to be basically out of here by Monday.

I appreciate the effort you take to explain how you imagine things work in here, but it's effort that would probably be better spent looking for a different job.

LL is driving itself into the ground and the sooner you get out, the better for you.

[Dakota Linden]

Hey Josh,

Your Magic Box status page says 4.

That right there may be the problem.

If the system sees Magic Boxes that are not rezzed in world, it may be trying to contact those non-existent boxes and since the web site isn't getting a reply, it times out the order.

Try deleteing those extra boxes from your Magic Box Status page.

[Pamela Galli]

Very kind (and enlightening) of you to devote time to answering questions in the forum, Dakota -- just wanted to say thank you.

[Josh Susanto]

I just did that, thanks, but the problem you've got on your hands at LL is way bigger than Josh having extra boxes.

If people stop buying my products, that's disappointing.

If they stop viewing them, that's discouraging.

But when they stop doing searches that turn them up, that's a pretty grim indicator for the market as a whole.

You can do your job and pretend you don't know what I'm talking about, but at some point that will no longer be possible.

I wouldn't wait for that.

 

[Dakota Linden]

Hey Josh,

Just a quick update.

I verified that the system is no longer showing the extra Magic Boxes then I did 3 orders for your products.

SLM Order Numbers 15422567, 1278414945, and 1278414958.

The first order delivered just fine, although there was some lag between the time I placed the order and got the item.

The next 2 orders are still in the Being Delivered status. 1 order has only 1 product and the other order has 10 products just to test to see if there is a difference betwen ordering only 1 item and order 10 items at a time.

My shift normally ends in about 3 minutes, but I am going to hang around for about another 15 minutes to see if the orders process through correctly.

I am also monitoring your sales at the same time since there are other sales orders for your items that are also showing as Being Delivered.

 

[Darrius Gothly]

Yup, I'm gonna echo Pamela ... Thank you Dakota!

(Now, can we infect everyone else with that "willing to go the extra mile" virus you've contracted please?)

[Dakota Linden]

Hey Josh,

Please add those extra Magic Boxes.

It seems like there is just too much lag with only having the 2 Magic Boxes trying to process your sales.

If you are able to split your items down to less than 100 per box, we can check again on Monday to see how everything did over the weekend.

[Darrius Gothly]

Just to summarize the essence of this post from you Dakota ...

If you are having problems with deliveries failing, take the following steps first:

1. Go to the Merchant's Dashboard in Marketplace then use Inventory > Magic Box Status to view your currently registered Magic Boxes.

2. Delete all the Magic Boxes you see there.

3. Visit each and every one of your Magic Boxes in-world and use the menu to "Reset" each one. Wait until it completes the full color cycle and returns to white before moving to the next box.

4. Go to the Merchant's Dashboard in Marketplace then open the Inventory > Manage Inventory page. Click the button near the top right that says "Sync Marketplace with Magic Boxes". Wait a few minutes then refresh the page.

Is that an accurate summary of the "WAEF" procedure? (WAEF = When All Else Fails)

[Pamela Galli]

Is this on a sticky someplace?  I remember a couple of years ago a notecard by Ghanie Lane with this info was passed around and it helped. (Although a few months ago when my stuff was not being delivered, it didn't.)

[Josh Susanto]

I'll add the additional boxes, sure.

Partly as matter of good form, and parly as a matter of courtesy to people who still want to get stuff delivered from them, and who also probably think it will help.

But something more than delivery rates is going to have to change around here to convince me that SL can sustain itself any much further with its current way of doing things more generally.

[Josh Susanto]

My stuff is now in 8 different boxes, and I'm seeing absolutely no improvement in the delivery rate.

In fact, I'm seeing fewer multi-item orders today, possibly due to my use of the notice "NO USE SHOPPING CART. SHOPPING CART MAKE DELIVERY FAIL.", and yet the same frequency of order failures seems to be distributed over single-item orders.

I realize that what I might be seeing is my part of a shopping cart order that includes other people's products, rather than orders for single items from me.

Either way on that point, I think I've now done as prescribed everything that's in my power to do as prescibed, and the problem is continuing, if not escalating.

When I was on Xstreet, I had way more than 100 items in my one box and I was easily processing 200 or more orders a day without any problems.

So now that I'm processing fewer orders and I have fewer items per box, I should probably have ZERO delivery problems, except for those attributable to one of the other differences in the situation.

Those other differences are:

1) increased total number of items, not per box, but per user account

2) change from Xstreet to SLM

3) deteriorated rapport with The Lindens

 

If the total number of items, itself, is a problem, LL should know that and they should have been able to tell me that by now.

If the problem is simply that SLM doesn't work as well as Xstreet, LL should know that by now and they should have done at least something to resolve the deficiencies of SLM (rather than compounding them, for example, which they seem to have done recently).

If the problem is that someone among the Lindens just has it in for me at this point, they should find that person and be rid of him or her; nothing I have done so far could ethically warrant intentionally providing me with the kinds of SLM results I'm seeing at this point. 

Item 4 (not shown in the above list), that there's just way more traffic than before, is not shown because it's just not true. My prices are lower than ever, and I'm getting a tiny fraction of the number of orders I was getting on Xstreet; the implications of which are further supported by an almost total non-movement of the numbers showing how many times my items are popping in searches of the site.

Is the whole market tanking, or am I somehow being systematically sandbagged?

Assuming there's some 3rd possibility, what would that be, exactly?

[Lasher Oh]

@ Dakota - Thanks  for the insightful and useful  info re the magic boxes - very much appreciated!

 

^L^