Marketplace falsely claims delivery but items never actually arrive.

[Starlight Harbour]

I'm getting sporadic failures of marketplace delivery, DESPITE the items coming off the queue and showing on your end as "delivered."  They are not in inventory, and they never "arrive" with a notification (either.)   i know what it should look like, and I can search "magic box" in inventory quite well, thank you. It's just not there.  I've tried about ten times a day for the last 4 days.  It's getting worse.  If I "buy" other products,  some arrive, some don't, but money is deducted for them all.

I have about 3,000 hours in-world and have spent well over $5,000 (US) on merchants and know what this SHOULD look like.  I have entire classes of students waiting to buy things that i can't post in Marketplace. (Thank goodness for HippoVend, a product that works and maybe you guys should just use the services of.)

Other people are getting this a LOT, from what I hear. It's so bad many have simply stopped shopping at the Marketplace and stopped reporting the problem, so it may APPEAR to be much smaller than I believe it actually is. Every failure is costing Linden Labs and merchants cash!

Please do some sort of survey to determine, not from complaints, but from experience, what fraction of people are still having this problem, or would have it if they shopped in ther Marketplace instead of in-world.  I prefer the Marketplace ,well, I used to, since it was faster. Now it's a total waste of money and time, aside from possibly finding a vendor in-world to shop from.

Yes I filed a suppport ticket, several, and a bug report. I fear the inventory database structures may be corrupted or something, and there CERTAINLY is some kind of silent handshaking error going on here that needs to be fixed, not just idiosyncratic problems with "users".    My alt account works fine, by the way, but you can't TRANSFER the magic box, so that doesn't help me. (How come you can't transfer it?).

This seems to be a neglected stepchild. the magic box sitll says "XStreet" on it, but we know it's not.  There are vague comments that "we know this has problems and are working on a replacement", but I don't see much energy behind that either.   Does no one OWN the marketplace?   Why isn't delivery it's whole entire PROJECT in Jira? Isn't it important??

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Anyway,  this seems to be a database issue. I guess MySQL doesn't actually support REAL atomic transactions, like Oracle,  but that CAN be remedied using two-phase commits. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-phase_commit_protocol )

Then there would be one hundredth of these kinds of errors occurring, as EITHER both the marketplace and the asset database would AGREE that this transcation was complete, OR you would know to UNDO it, and LOG the fact that the transaction was attempted but failed, so that the OTHER software team could investigate why.

 

 

[Rolig Loon]

Thank you for the rant.  It is well deserved.  Unfortunately, we're all SL residents like you.  The Lindens don't come to this resident-to-resident help area, so it falls on deaf ears.  For what it's worth, they have been working since last winter to upgrade the entire system.  Each server upgrade moves them a little closer -- they made a few major changes last week, which is why Marketplace was off line much of Tuesday -- but it's apparently a more complex job than you or I can imagine.  The Magic Boxes are definitely the weakest link in the system.  When LL finally shifts over to the direct delivery system that they have had in beta all summer, those Magic Boxes will be history and a lot of merchants will be very happy.  Meanwhile, as a merchant and a fellow customer, all I can do is offer sympathy. 

[Fir Whitesong]

I am a buyer. Yesterday, I ordered 8 items through the marketplace ... each one paid for separately (not through the cart), and only recieved one of them. They are marked as delivered, but never was.

Today I ordered two freebies, and only recieved one.

 

Unfortunately, buying at the marketplace is more riskier than playing a slot machine lately. Guess I will also have to stop using the marketplace ....  and possibly leave my premium membership at SL, if things do not improve very quickly.