Sales Tracking Without Vendor

[Deja Letov]

I own a couple of the popular sales systems but I've never implemented them due to the fact that I really don't sell via a "poster" or "Vendor". As a furniture maker, most of my sales happen from the items on display.  Yes I have some vendors, with my "packaged" suites, but I get lots of individual items sales. I also have an outdoor area where people can buy fountains, cemetery items, etc. I'm not about to have boxes laying around in a cemetery to buy from. Part of why people shop with me I imagine is because they can envision what it will look like on their own sim and vendors would junk it up.

Anyway, these sales systems have the abilty to import Marketplace data and to use vendor scripts to track sales instantly via vendors. But is there really no way to track regular old in world "buy" rom a right click? I've asked if importing transaction history was an option and have met road blocks from everyone I've asked. Honestly, I find this odd because even people who use a ton of vendors in their place of business, they still have actual products set out for sale so are people just not tracking these sales?

Has anyone found a system that would let you track sales without using vendors and just using your SL transaction history files?

[Morgaine Christensen]

Maybe I am confused here, which is often the case, but you should be able to download your SL transactions files (I think it downloads as a .cvs file)  and open it up in say Excel (Open Office has a version that is free and open source) spreadsheet and manally track it that way.  Any sales you make should show up in your SL transations. Although, you need to make sure you do this on a schedule since you are only able to access the transactions I believe for 90 day.  You can do the same with MP transactions.

 

Ooops, just checked the Transactions history and it is 30 days not 90 days the transactions are held.  So, definately would need to download monthly, maybe weekly depending on how often you do analysis

[Czari Zenovka]

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Deja Letov wrote:

I own a couple of the popular sales systems but I've never implemented them due to the fact that I really don't sell via a "poster" or "Vendor". As a furniture maker, most of my sales happen from the items on display.  Yes I have some vendors, with my "packaged" suites, but I get lots of individual items sales. I also have an outdoor area where people can buy fountains, cemetery items, etc. I'm not about to have boxes laying around in a cemetery to buy from. Part of why people shop with me I imagine is because they can envision what it will look like on their own sim and vendors would junk it up.

Anyway, these sales systems have the abilty to import Marketplace data and to use vendor scripts to track sales instantly via vendors. But is there really no way to track regular old in world "buy" rom a right click? I've asked if importing transaction history was an option and have met road blocks from everyone I've asked. Honestly, I find this odd because even people who use a ton of vendors in their place of business, they still have actual products set out for sale so are people just not tracking these sales?

Has anyone found a system that would let you track sales without using vendors and just using your SL transaction history files?

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Morning Deja

I have a very small business so what I do is DL my Transaction History from the main SL website as an .xls file and use it as my in-store tracker.  Merchants who are good with Exel/spreadsheets have indicated they can manipulate the data in all kinds of ways from the transaction history.  For me, it verifies what I sold on the MP and is my record of what I sold in-world.

[Czari Zenovka]

LOL, we were responding at the same time.

[Deja Letov]

Yup and I do that now, in fact I have 2 years worth of excel shets I downloaded from transaction history. But if I want to implement a lot of their cool features, such as a customer rewards system for example, I need to do more than just track them. I need to be able to get them into some sort of system, such as Caper of BSM. Right now, they allow import of Marketplace sales items it looks like but not in world sales. I just can't imagine I am the first person who has needed to import sales data into a system that didn't come from a vendor script.

[Darrius Gothly]

I download the XLS file for the day, usually just after midnight SLT .. not because I have that many sales, but because I like having the day by day recap. I then paste that onto the end of a larger full year spreadsheet. The spreadsheet has a couple of macros I wrote that recognize business transactions vs. the personal stuff then copies just the business transactions to a second sheet and charts the daily sales amount. That way I can spot trends pretty rapidly.

From time to time I copy out the "new" transactions and import them into a MySQL table that contains all my SL transactions since I first came to SL, both business and personal. I also have a table that contains just the ANS transactions from MP. Then I have a MySQL query that combines the two tables, produces a third table and sorts it by product ID (including a translation lookup table that cross refs the product name sold with the product ID). I also have a variant of the query that removes from the query results anyone that has requested to be left out of product updates, advertising notices and miscellaneous notices.

So with a few quick keystrokes, I can get a complete list of everyone that's purchased one of my products, whether purchased on MP or in-world. I can then C&P just the section for a specific product and drop it into ArtiZan's PostMaster device and send out updates or important notices to customers of that product. (I did one to all of my SEO product customers when LL switched over to the new search engine, letting them know that the whole world was about to change. The responses I got were overwhelmingly grateful for letting them know.)

However I do sell in-world out of vendors, but since they're not scripted vendors (just sell from prim stuff), I use the SL Transactions as the source of my in-world sales info. The real magic happens in the MySQL query where I merge the two tables.

It's definitely rough, not meant for casual users, purely data and SQL geek fodder. But for what I need it to do, it's exactly perfect. (yet another reason I wrote it myself, it's exactly what I need it to be.)

[Sassy Romano]

I would *love* the equivalent of ANS for normal SL transactions.  It would only have to send data when it's a financial transaction, wouldn't need to include inventory offers between avatars.

[Deja Letov]

That's about what I'm doing now, just my own personal SQL database of my transactions. It's nice because I can run anything I can possibly think of like who are my top customers, what are my top products based on price or qty sold. anything and everything. And mine is not based on vendors at all. It's 100% from transaction logs and MP ans. But that's where it ends. I don't have anything to do customer rewards. Anyway, I'm on the lookout, so we shall see what works for me. Thanks guys!

[Czari Zenovka]

That's the kind of manipulations to which I referred earlier.  Being a word-type person, number crunching makes my head hurt, but I would so love to learn how to do some of those types of things.  I need a "SL Tracker for Dummies."

[Sassy Romano]

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Deja Letov wrote:

That's about what I'm doing now, just my own personal SQL database of my transactions. It's nice because I can run anything I can possibly think of like who are my top customers, what are my top products based on price or qty sold. anything and everything. And mine is not based on vendors at all. It's 100% from transaction logs and MP ans. But that's where it ends. I don't have anything to do customer rewards. Anyway, I'm on the lookout, so we shall see what works for me. Thanks guys!

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Yes but I meant a direct API from the LL transaction history that inserted into external SQL for the main SL transaction history, like ANS does for MP.  Would be nice to have it there, then "buy" would be easy to log externally.

[Deja Letov]

That would be lovely!

[Zanara Zenovka]

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Deja Letov wrote:Honestly, I find this odd because even people who use a ton of vendors in their place of business, they still have actual products set out for sale so are people just not tracking these sales?

 

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Just to address one assumption here, there's nothing to stop you putting a script (+boxed copy) in an item rezzed for sale to turn it into a vendor to do whatever you want. And if you wanted to use a vendor system like BSM that has a rewards program, you could find ways to use that with rezzed objects.

Depending how it's scripted, you could (a) just drag the vendor scripts into your rezzed item, or, if the vendor script does something you don't want, like automatically apply a texture, and you can't find a way to hide that on an insignificant prim, you could (b) rez the vendor, make it invisible and link it (as root) to your rezzed item, to turn the whole thing into a vendor without affecting its outward appearance.

[Ela Talaj]

The "Pay" option of object menu raises the LSL "money" event processed by a vendor script. The "Buy" option does not have an associated event and there is nothing for a script to process, as it is unaware that the "Buy" button was clicked... Or so it seems...

In reality however if a user clicks the "Buy" button to buy a copy of an object, the LSL "changed" event is raised with change = CHANGED_OWNER. It is raised in the original object even though a copy of it is the one actually changing ownership. So whatever sales information is collected on "Pay", it can also be collected on "Buy" (excluding the price paid but you know the price paid because you set the object to be sold for this amount). This only works if an object is set to buy a copy, not to buy the content.

Call me in-world and I'd be happy to write you a script to collect such info... for a price of course

 

[Deja Letov]

Well I was specifically hoping for a solution to not use a vendor script but instead just import transaction logs, but it doesn't appear that's an option with any of the systems out there.

However, I actually did have some luck. After viewing the top 2 systems available, I found out that CasperVend has a script you can drop into any item, and it DOES NOT have to be a poster style object and it will still deliver the product from the server and track the sale. So I'm pretty excited that I found a solution and so far the setup is pretty easy.

[Calamari]

Here's a bit of a crazy idea I'm experimenting with,  I set up several posters (could all so work with objects) at my shop to instead of selling the item they open up the URL for the marketplace listing.  The advantage for the customer is that this way they see the full product description and additional images and can all so buy as a gift or add to it their favorites list.  The advantages for me are all my sales records are in one place, and are not limited to 30 days, I only have to create a new listing, up date an item or change price in one place.  The other advantage of this is that sales starting from inworld now help my marketplace search placement too. I only started testing this system yesterday and even with all the DD roll out mess I'm all ready getting sales using this new selling system.  Too soon to tell if I'll keep using it but so far it looks like it's working.