Zanara Zenovka

For starters you need focus and brand identity. What is your brand about? What do you do? What is your USP (unique selling proposition)? How would you describe your business in a few words? Why would someone think of your store when they want to buy "x"? Are your products the best? the cheapest? the quirkiest? The store name "tragic" is cool but it doesn't tell us anything. Looks like you're doing a few things. Pick one and focus on that to start with. Say you want to focus on the T-shirts. Call it "Tragic T-shirts" (for example) then design a heap more cool shirts, enough to fill a shop. Then think about how you can add value to make your T-shirts stand out - what can you do to make people want to buy your shirts rather than anyone else's? ? great fabric textures. ? a colour change HUD. (I have no idea - I'm not in the clothing business.) Then think about your customers. Who are the people who will buy your stuff? Where do you find them? Eg amusing T-shirts are worn to be seen - so maybe social areas where people stand around and look at each other, clubs, pubs are good places to look for shop locations. Then think how you can promote to that demographic, eg contact some clubs and offer them some shirts to give away as competition prizes. See if they'll give you free ad space in exchange. Then think about what people wear with T-shirts - eg jeans. So maybe a shop next to a jeans shop would be a good choice. Or approach a jeans shop (that doesn't sell T-shirts) and see if you can put up a vendor display in a corner and give them a 50% cut. Then in the process of all this you're making contact with other business owners, learning about SL business and what gaps there are in the market. Then once your T-shirt business is established you can expand horizontally - what else do your T-shirt customers buy? Start making/selling those too, etc. By then "Tragic tT-shirts" will have brand presence and you can make a new line of "tragic X" and eventually "Tragic" will be a whole brand of whatever it is you end up doing. Start focused then expand. These are just a few examples to demonstrate the thought processes to get you started. It's just marketing. I've got a reading area in my inworld store with some good articles on marketing fundamentals and how to build a business that you might find useful.

Wow, an XStreeter! I don't know whether to feel sympathy that you have to learn the new MP, or envy that you managed to completely avoid the initial XStreet> MP migration fiasco! Anyway welcome back! I find it easiest to just R click on the product in inventory and select "Copy to MP" then it will appear in "MP listings" and you can create a listing from there. Sometimes certain words will set off a profanity filter or something too - eg it could object to 'junk' - ? There are some seemingly innocuous words it doesn't like. Good luck!

Not that I've been able to find. You do get a notification email, but the redelivery is not recorded in MP Transaction History or Reports>Orders

I very much doubt that anyone would consider that spamming. Rather it's good customer service and pretty standard. As a scripter who's been in business for 13 years I've sent many updates/upgrades, as have some of my customers (I've created devices specifically for that purpose) and have yet to hear of anyone objecting to receiving a new version. Plenty of people say thanks or get in touch to ask about something else. I quite like update days, I get to catch up with old customers.

Thanks Jenna - I'll have a look. Mostly because I can (well maybe) and it might be a nice feature. It's just for avi to avi communication - I'm using unique identifiers internally but thought I'd try to make display names work. I figure if people go to the trouble of making them, that they'd prefer to be referred to by them.

Thanks for that, Dakota. Good to get the full picture.

Same. I can stay logged into https://accounts.secondlife.com/ forever but going to MP page logs me out more often than not. Anyone noticing a drop in MP sales since this started?

Thanks guys. NP I'll just have to work around it. Horrible @#$#%#@%$ display names. @Mollie thanks I saw Sasun mentioned that in the jira. Unfortunately I won't have control at client end. @Nova thanks, so that explains how the two email functions can be different. I just found that code snippet you posted in an old thread - StringUTF8Size(string). If != llStringLength, I can send just the username in email instead.

Thank you Nova and Wulfie - you just saved my sanity! (Hate to necro an old post, but just had to say

Hello. Is there any reliable way to make non-ASCII characters (eg from display names) show correctly in email sent from SL? Currently they: show correctly in the body of offline IMs from scripted objects (llInstantMessage) forwarded to email using llEmail they show correctly in subject but as ??s in body, and using llTargetedEmail they are replaced by ? in both subject and body. I've found https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-4059 and https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-391 which are a decade old and offer no hints of resolution. Does anyone know more about this issue?

I'm sure if you went to the marketplace and typed "hunt" in search and restricted it to "gadgets" you'd find something that would let you type part of a prim's name in chat and get a teleport link to its location.

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Second_Life_Marketplace_Direct_Delivery_FAQ

Dear LL, You make money from people shopping on marketplace. You may find it's in your best interests to make it easier for them to spend money, not harder. sincerely, Zanara.

Ah ok that makes sense. Thanks for that background, Rya.

Thanks for the info everyone. Appreciate it.

I've had some customers comment about my prices being the same on MP and in-world and saying most merchants now adjust their pricing for the 10% MP commission. Is this correct? As an X-Street veteran (and migration survivor - Vale Darrius) I remember there once being a rule against this, but is that still the case? Should I be offering an in-world discount? (but then again - tier isn't free). What do you all do?

Hey Oz, all the best. Enjoy your Third Life. Thanks for not nuking llRequestAgentData()

Darrius Gothly wrote: CommerceTeam Linden wrote: As many of you noticed, we did shorten the time line to get Merchants migrated to VMM. This is due primarily to the need to get Merchants off of Xstreet, as it was down for a weekend in early July, forcing us to accerate our dates. CTL: Thank you for the explanation as to the rushed migration date. It certainly does make sense to minimize use of a system that is well known to be buggy, unstable and mostly unrepairable. However ... The process chain from XStreet technology through the Marketplace, Direct Delivery, End-Customers and the Merchants consists of much more than a single link. While it is accepted that VMM had to be pushed ahead for fear of the whole house of cards tumbling catastrophically, the failure to prepare all the other inter-related links has essentially created the same condition. We humans that run the Avatars that are the Merchants are prone to hesitation, trepidation, and refutation .. especially when our money is messed with against our will. I thought this "cart before (or absent) the horse" behavior had ended a few months ago. I am sad to see it has not. plus ca change, plus c'est la même chose...

Hi Chloe As Freya said, it's default SL behaviour to transmit the device location. The way I managed this for my own store was to create a small parcel for my servers, with a forced landing point at the store entrance. This way people land where they need to, to shop or unsub, but don't suddenly appear in my workshop to scare the crap out of me while scripting, etc.

Do the jpg conversion yourself first (and if necessary reduce size to <= 512 across). Photoshop (or Gimp or whatever) will do a better job of this than MP.

Try making a new listing for the demo and then change the linkon the main to that.

Assuming you own the holovend, and that the buyer is just activating it with touch/menu, the sim considers you to be the rezzer, since you own the object doing the rezzing.

Hunt fee? So now you have to pay to give stuff away?

Item name was requested during SLM beta over four years ago. IIRC, getting the purchaser's name was a bonus...

Cute, huh? For more details you need to go to https://marketplace.secondlife.com/merchants/<your_merchant_number>/reports/orders Download CSV from there as well as the transaction page for your records.