Zanara Zenovka

Profit margins alone tell you very little. Income of $200 a month + tier of $15 gets you 93% profit**, but it's barely going to buy you lunch each day. vs, say, $400 a month income +$195 for a sim -- 51% of $400 is still more than 93% of $200. Keeping expenses low is always nice, of course, but profit matters in terms of quantity, not proportion. **Assuming a oversimplified concept of profit based on income minus cash expenses.

My sales are still working fine, but my inventory keeps filling up with all these strange bits of rock...  ?

The scripts inside the magic boxes have not changed since the move from xstreet to SLM, so (without having tested myself) I assume the link still goes to XStreet. The easiest kludge would be to delete the magic box scripts and put a basic URL script in the box (or a sign) instead, that leads to your SLM store URL. If you don't have one, there's a free full perms script "Touch for URL" in my store at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Uzume/25/107/1801

Thanks Arwen. Hmmm - would be curious to know the date/location of the fix they're referring to

Sassy Romano wrote: Customer initiated redelivery Reduction in the deliver/refund delay from 8 hours to 15 minutes Emails on appropriate events (reviews/sales/flagged items) Three VERY low hanging fruits that a teenager could pick in an afternoon. I say that after reading a comment on a blender tutorial. Someone said "great, i've just been taught texturing by a 7 year old. When I was that age, I didn't know what a computer was." 1. Could be done as a tick-box option (or here's an idea - Global settings!) when setting up - that would get around innapropriate/incorrect perms/merchants who don't want it 2. 8 is excessive. Hard to pick a number tho when a 'successful delivery' can take up to 30 min. I'm still worried about the delays inherent in the s/ware itself and its ability to scale, even without the magic box communication issues/delays. 3. Yes. Please. Yesterday. Really.

Anaiya Arnold wrote: The whole buy as gift thing is a bit funky at the best of times. It will fail in every instance if the recieving account has not ever logged into the marketplace for instance. Ah ok I didn't know that - would explain some things (although...really...) The marketplace shouldn't rely on finding the user in its own records, but just poll one of the SL profile/user pages for the uuid (like every other scripted gadget doohicky does)

Gifts are one of the types of purchases that fail most often in my experience. I'd imagine it's something to do with the process of finding the correct avatar's UUID (oh btw I hate to ask, but you did use the SL user name? not their display name etc?)

Oh - and the inworld account balance not updating transactions immediately has been an ongoing issue of its own for ages

Pamela Galli wrote: I just got a bunch of emails received while I was inworld. Hmm - oh well so much for that theory - but maybe it might tie in with something else that helps track it down. I couldn't see how your online status in itself should affect whether email is sent or not, but I wondered if it might somehow get tangled up with the setting that decides to forward an IM to your email if you're offline. BTW (re Magent's post) the magic box doesn't send the notification email - it sends an IM (that may be forwarded to email if you have forwarding enabled), but it's the SLM s/ware that sends the email (from no-reply@marketplace.secondlife.com).

I noticed last night that I didn't get email notifications for two sales that were made when I was logged in to SL. But I received emails for sales made just before and after I was logged in just fine. I haven't missed many sales notifications recently, but then I haven't been logged in to SL for any long periods in that time either. I just did a test with two identical purchases of one of my own products, first logged out then logged in. 1 - Logged out - item delivered immediately, got IM from magic box. Received purchase notification email both as customer and merchant - all within 2 minutes. 2- Logged in - item delivered immediately, got IM from magic box. Still no emails received as customer or merchant after 40 minutes. I also just remembered that one of my friends who's had an ongoing problem with missing notification emails is usually logged in 24/7 Anyone else got any experience of this or want to test themselves? I've updated the Jira: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-4138 

If you use a mature term it's not deleted, it just doesn't show unless you have your SLM browsing preference set to mature.

Nice work - good to have info on some of these common problems stickied.

The SLX/XStreet stats page was pretty much perfect - gave you daily numbers of views and sales for each product in table and graph format. Was very easy to measure the effect of any enhancements or other advertising from just that.

LOL It does seem to be a very short time period used for "recent sales figures that somehow magically make a search result more relevant than matching search terms alone"

I usually expect up to 5 days (but I don't check exactly)

A notification email is a no-brainer - one of the feature requests still outstanding from the SLM launch when all the beta jiras were marked inactive and the original SLM team skulked off in shame. If that were in place, the "failed delivery" reviews wouldn't be so troublesome as they could be identified and removed quickly. I must admit I do actually find them useful to a degree, esp when a number build up over time, to show when a merchant is no longer actively managing their business.

Ziggy21 Slade wrote: It wouldn't make any difference if you were there or not Josh, like all OH the majority of people would have no idea how to behave in a meeting, there would be half a dozen prolific whiners who would waste everyones time, while they went on and on about some issue that was unique to them and of no interest to the group (failed deliveries from an overloaded Magic Box For Instance), another half dozen Conspiracy Theorists who would waste time with their outlandish theories and a number of 'merchants' who you have never heard of before who think its ok to just hurl abuse. You see in the greater scheme of things you just ain't that special ROFL that's beautiful

Josh Susanto wrote: On the fact that orders are possible without it. OTOH, why don't you see if you can get Brooke to post an official denial of my claim. They're not, actually. "Buy now" just adds the item to your cart and takes you straight to the 2nd checkout page. The cart is integral to the Spree software package the SLM is created from.

I'm still getting mine (feel free to IM me to test) Maybe check your own email; contact mail provider if there's no local explanation? It certainly doesn't seem to be a global SL thing.

Mine are fine Pam

Josh Susanto wrote: I spotted some of these recent "bugs" even before they happened, and I was able to do so only by applying paranoid ideation. How many of the asymmetric transaction anomalies did you happen to anticipate by being NOT paranoid? Your implicit theory that people would not be getting robbed by now hasn't panned out particularly well. Didn't your mother ever tell you that just saying something doesn't make it true? Do feel free to provide supporting evidence for your above assertations (evidence is that stuff that involves facts, in case you've forgotten).

Josh Susanto wrote: For example, the shopping cart CAN be shut off until direct delivery is ready, but they won't do it. On what knowledge/evidence do you base this?

Domitan Redenblack wrote: Wait for the Magic Box to finish uploading the new inventory.  Step 4 does not finish. What you're waiting for there is for the magic box to return to its normal colour. If you're getting no response at all from the box when you add things (it should change colour - yellow or blue i think), reset the scripts via touch>menu, or else right click and select "reset scripts in selection" in tools menu. Then once the box has done its thing, follow on with the rest of the steps above, synching from webpage, etc.

WolfBaginski Bearsfoot wrote: I don't know just what the problem is, but I don't think anybody wants to fix it. And the support system seems to be built about weasel-wording their way out of responsibility. I doubt I shall bother to buy anything for a while. I pay, it doesn't get delivered, and bye-bye Linden dollars. A while back, I heard that they track every single Linden dollar, and can catch tax dodgers and credit-card fraud. But they don't know whether goods are delivered. That seems a piece of dreadful design. The original SLX/XStreet system was written from the ground up and worked, although there were still failed deliveries due to offline boxes/sims and the offline recipient+capped messages issue (which has worsened over the years due to an increase in the number of IMs etc received by the average avatar due to a proliferation of subscription/delivery devices without any increase in the IM cap of 25). The creation of the SLM used an pre-written software package (that included the shopping cart) and attempted to tie that in with the existing magic boxes, that have not been updated since, and new delivery issues have emerged from the mis-match of these two systems. This, along with a lack of understanding of how merchants used the system, commitment to design choices prior to adequate testing,and a wilful refusal of the then SLM developers (who have since left) to listen to the concerns of merchants, has led to the current less-than-ideal system. And the current SLM team are still trying to fix up the mess created in that process. It is hoped that direct delivery, which will be built specifically to work with the current web code, will solve the delivery issues. Hopefully then other issues with interface and reporting can be addressed. Knowing whether goods is delivered comes down to the fact that the relevant function - llGiveInventory - has no inbuilt confirmation (there are jiras). This may or may not change, but would not be relevant to direct delivery anyway.

Josh Susanto wrote: I warned people in mid August that they were being tested to see what sort of billing anomalies would go unnoticed so that those unnoticed could be more actively applied to divert funds. And I was riduculed for saying that. How funny does it seem when it's actually happening to you? There's a difference between identifying a bug, and coming up with irrational and paranoid explanations for its existence.