Lasher Oh

"In short, what you think is perfectly acceptable, isn't to me, are you going to forbid me my opinion? Your post sounds like it." We'll agree to differ however please refer me to the line or statement that even hints that I would forbid your opinion! I What I do suggest is that you stay away from 'white' a notorious shade/colour to get right and will always disappoint someone - (just like using stripes in SL rarely work. And as you discovered on your backside the world is not black and white but various shades of grey - dirty or otherwise. ^L^

I've taken thousands of product photos and made tens of thousands of sales and have never had a single complaint about fidelity between the product shot and the item. The point of my statement is.... I do not and under normal conditions Would Not use Mid-day setting ever. It flattens everything out and reduces an image to bland mush which ultimately misrepresents the product. It's a designers duty to represent their products in the best possible light. A product photo is not just about showing the the seams are fitting it's about 'Brand' and market positioning and 'Feel' Indeed I have bought several outfits for myself from merchants who deliberately shot their products in Black & White because I believed in the quality of the brand. If I was ever dissapointed as a result of said purchases - that was between me and ego NOT between me and the designer. I made a bad purchase - buyer beware! Personally speaking I really can't see any real difference between the shots that you have provided and the original 'brand' pack shot which may possibly and legitmately have had the contrast boosted to bring out the white. White is a notoriously difficult colour to represent in world and even in out world. By it's very nature it will reflect and take on the hues of the environment around it. Try this for yourself with good quality studio that has a cove. Place a white object in the middle of the set with a white background all round and midday setting if you must (with object full bright turned off), - take the shot . save then shoot again with a black background all around, repeat exercise again with all round coloured background. Note that when compared the colour shade of the object changes each time - it's simple basic physics. And thats before we even start to take into account the infinite variations and subtleties within each viewer and computer setting. If you don't like the purchase then best I can advise is to let the Designer know that you are disappointed and ask for your money back rather than running a vendetta and throwing a hissy fit over a spurious claim of misrepresentation of product in a perfectly acceptable 'Brand' shot. ^L^

Sera Lok wrote: This. I researched some weeks ago with keywords, looking at all the keywords, feature list, and title of item, of listings that didn't seem to match up to the search I was doing. Some listings that show up in a certain search don't even contain the word I was searching for. Go figure. So if you are going to report, please do the extra step of checking keywords etc to make sure the merchant is actually doing it on purpose and deserves to be reported. Otherwise you need to report LL itself for having a crappy search engine on the marketplace. ^^ I wholeheartedly agree with this Sera. The search is borked. I've come across results that have been thrown up front that don't contain the search word anywhere either in the keywords, the title or the features. We are told that the description isn't included anymore but I'm not convinced about that either. It particularly annoys me when the first half dozen returns don't even hold the keyword in the title - wouldn't mind so much if they had given us similar filtering tools like we had with good old Xstreet. As for snitching on merchants who have been 'liberal' with their keywords - I don't snitch and won't snitch because there are always two sides to every case and most often it comes down to a judgement call such as a black evening gown also using the keyword 'goth' and if it happens to be a gown using a bit of fishnet on the upper bodice then deploying 'mesh' as a keyword also legitimate. Until LL give us search features that are actually accurate and can be better filtered then I urge folks not to do LLs job for them by acting as vigilante keyword agents. ^L^

I've also started getting failed delivery IMs again from customers. My first was on Friday. I mentioned it in here in forums on Couldbe's thread. As Stasi Linden has thrown me out of the Jira (which is the kind of blinkered behaviour I have come to expect from LL employees) I am unable to reports issues there as and when I find them. So far it is running at about 1 a day but the jury is still out because I think some folks are still unaware of the new 'Received Items' folder and claiming it hasn't been delivered because it ain't where it used to arrive. As DD does not require the clicking of an 'accept' button I can at least eliminate the good old mistaken declines as a reason for goods going awol. Back to the old familiar Marketplace SNAFUs I guess ^L^

I'm now getting daily failed delivery notes from customers, even though all my items have been converted to DD - it's not the unicode thing either. Just good ol MP failing to deliver. Perhaps the customers have looked in the wrong place but they assure me thats not the case. Oh well I always thought that the idea of no more deliverly failures was too good to be true *sigh* ^L^

A quick Sunday morning thanks to CLT for hearing us.... "Update (March 31, 2012): While we work to address current Marketplace issues, we will not require any Merchants to migrate listings away from Magic Boxes to Direct Delivery before June 1, 2012." ^L^

OK - I've just did my morning reconciliations with the two transaction histories (thanks be for tabbed browsing) The good news is that the items that I had not received payment for are now showing as payment received. Whether it was a case of all things come to those who wait or someone pushed a button I have no idea. So although this glitch is an annoying one I've gone down a notch from code Red to code Orange. Now that I can see that payments are being pushed through. The bad news is that out of 56 transactions yesterday 17 are showing as 'Delivery Partially Failed' Roughly 25% Hint to CLT - maybe you could let us display more than 15 transactions at a time without us having to jump to the csv download which is located on the 'Reports > Orders page. It is misleading to have this status displayed as it is not accurate and can lead to a lot of extra work for us all. There is still the unexplained phenomena I have observed that the more Magic Boxes I have converted the more Partially Failled deliveries I have recorded on a day to day basis. As one of your staff took apon themselves to lock me out of the jira system (which a portion of my premium fee helps pay for) without any explanation, please take it as read that my vote is going towards a fix. And I'll be watching ^L^

Snap ! I'm exiled from the jira because I encouraged folks to speak their minds. So all I can do is rattle the bars from the outside.

The crazy thing is that, day on day, the more boxes I have converted the more partial delivery failures reports I am seeing. I would have expected it the other way around as Magic Boxes were the villified devil incarnate. I now only have 1 box containing about 100 products left to convert and I'm reluctant do it now in case I trip the wire and end up all my goods goods going to customers 'no fail' and no payments being delivered to me *sigh* ^L^

The 'Failed' bit is that they are not passing on the payment to the merchants! ^L^

YES YES YES! The more Magic Boxes I have converted the more 'delivery partially failed' reports I am seeing. The customer is getting the products but we are not getting the payment - I guess thats what the partially failed bit is! Did someone say they had Beta Tested this system? ^L^

OK I have been steadily converting my 10 magic boxes over to DD. 1 a day. The first couple of days were fine apart from the broken MP website and the broken will to live as I struggled with the endless refresh times. Now I have just 1 box left to d. Problem is the more boxes I have migrated the more 'Delivery Partially Failed' messages have started showing up on my transaction history. 9 today so far and mostly on my higher priced items. Digging into this I see that the customer paid for and got the items. Linden Lab took the payment but have failed to pass any of it on to me, as those transactions are not showing on my main account history. This is now heading towards a couple of thousand of unpaid income. What are you doing about this CLT???? I would raise a Jira or even vote on one if a similar exists EXCEPT Stasi Linden has locked me out of the Jira process without so much as a warning or an explanation. So this is the kind of service we are buying with our premium membership! To sum up - the more Magic Boxes I have converted to your new half baked system the more Delivery Partially Failed messages I am getting only this time you are failing to deliver significant volumes of payments to the merchants. Please advise what you are doing to rectify this ridiculous situation. Heads up to all Merchants - Double check your Market place transaction histories and then cross check them with your Main Account transaction records you might be surprised to find that Delivery Failed is much more common than we were led to expect. ^L^

...and just to put some icing on the cake all the items in my unassociated box are now superglued in and none of the work arounds are even touching them... and then this BS..... So sorry to keep you waiting. We'll be right back! We've been notified about this issue and we'll take a look at it shortly.

LOL - It's long enough to almost make want to take up smoking again :-(

05-40am Pacific Time 12.40pm UK Time and it's taken 90 minutes to migrate less than 90 items with an average of 10 - 15 minutes for an inventory refresh - not exactly back to normal unless this is the new standard! ^L^

Hi Madeliefste, you said... "I have several reasons for this, but one of them is that in world you can often look in the box to see what the box exactly contains and see the permissions per article. This is really valuable information that was not available on the MP till now." However that is not quite accurate. It really depends on how much work individual merchants care to put into a listing on behalf of their customers. Itemising the contents and permissions in the description text is a fairly standard method but that is time consuming. OR - better still I make an in world screen grab of the box contents just as you would see it them if you were to inspect it yourself in the store. This picture is then placed along side the main listing shot. Not rocket science but easy and effective.I certainly do agree that it is valuable information, however it was always available if the merchants could be bothered to go the extra mile. Placing a screen grab of the box contents in a listing really doesn't take long and for several years I have always felt that it made good business sense to display the full box contents. As to the enhanced 'gift' boxes that some folks dislike. I personally box everything in a single branded prim using my own distinctive graphic style. The pre unpacked method is standardised and bland and lets face it not very creative even if the contents are. It's also a matter of style I really do believe that there is a role for nice packaging in SL just as there is in RL. As I commengted on the other thread. If you were making and selling wonderful expensive hand made chocolates would your customers appreciate them just being thrown into into plain old brown paper bag ? For many in RL and in SL one of the underlying joys of buying something nice is opening the box or packet (unless it's blister packed) ^L^

Absolutely Rya - and should sales start to drift downwards or customers complain then I would of course look at it again. My feeling is, that just as in RL we do still have a need for packaging even in virtual worlds. For instance in RL would you be inclined to give a gift of some lovely hand made chocolates all clumped together in an old paper bag - or some jewelery in a plain brown cardboard box? Although undoubtably practical for some - the pre-opened folder is just one more step towards bland standardisation. Some would argue that it is a digital environment and that there is no need to emmulate RL standards, to whom I would then ask back why on earth do people put roofs on their houses in SL when it never rains? And perhaps I'm right out on a limb on my own but when I buy a new computer or something techy I actually enjoy the process of unwrapping and discovering whats inside - especially when they are wrapped by Apple :-) ^L^

"Unfortunately, they will miss out on the advantages of content display and customer convenience.' Sorry Rya - I have to stick up for good old Boxed products, especially where the box itself has a marketing and presentation purpose. Eg finely crafted creative gift boxes and shopping bags which convey brand values and often amuse and delight. Also is the benefit of pop-up notecards and other alerts we may wish to utilise in order to draw a customers attention to something important. These are just a few advantages you are giving up by opting for pre-opened folders As for missing out on content display, it doesn't need to be. - I have always put in a little extra work on my listings to show a picture of the actual box contents. I personally don't believe that delivering items in already opened folders is more or less convenient for either merchant or customer. There are strong pros and cons for both. If merchants continue to send boxed items (and there are a lot of us) to their customers they will have weighed up 'the advantages and disadvantages'. Yes they may well be missing out on one benefit, mainly the highly questionable customer convenience, in favour of what I and many other believe to be the better more pragmatic whole. In the end it's horses for courses and really comes down to what you are selling and how you choose to interact with your customers. ^L^

All Good steps Darrius however some folks might need to add a 9th if the unassociated items will not budge. Which has been my experience with every box so far. 9: Mainly log out of Marketplace altogether and then back in. When you navigate back to your inventory the list should be cleared. Another problem that sometimes arises is that some listings seem to get stuck in purgatory. This has happened to me a few times and always with the second tranch of uploads from a magic box that holds more than 100 items. They appear in the managed list but the tick is greyed out and the tick box for for bulk editing can't be activated. The only solution then is to activate them 1 by one using the actions drop down on the right and just choose list. When it refreshes and you do three click through on the sort list to get back to where you were then you can see that it is active after which you can progress to the next one. With the snails pace of the site it takes approximately 5 - 10 minute to reactivate each individual 'lost in the ether' listing. By the time we get to put questions about DD to the commerce team on the 2nd of April they will be answering back with all the solutions we already handed them on a plate. ^L^

Also watching from afar as per your other jira thread as Stasi Linden has removed my jira voice without notice or any explanation. Well I know why buts that's another story. ^L^

I can read it but since I have been unofficially disenfranchised I cant vote or watch - but I'm there in spirit :-) ^L^

Easily Solved - Just push back the deadline for eradicating the Magic Boxes and that way you will divert the stampede that you created which has almost ground the market place to a halt. The words Eat, Humble and Pie come to mind ! PS why another 9 days (April 2nd) before you will even answers questions? ^L^

At first I thought it was my ISP, dodgy broadband and time of day but it soon became clear that the MP servers just can't handle the load. I suspect this great freeze is a result of the law of unintended consequences. Many like me had not planned to rush into migration but when they announced those crazy drop dead dates they also started a stampede. My sales are down at least 75% over the last 2 days - I'm wouldn't be surprised if quite a few others are hurting too. I use the wait time to get on with other things for instance I washed up all the supper dishes and brewed a cup of tea in the time it took complete my last refresh. I'm not going to touch my inventory over the weekend and maybe come Monday they will have added a few extra gears to the machine. ^L^

Fantastic document Darius everyone unsure of what the udate process involves, should grab this. Worth reading just for being aware of Step 3 alone. There quite a few stumbling points in the process now that you have brilliantly demonstrated here Many Thanks ^L^

Don't worry - in 3 or 4 years from now when all the current DD devs have long gone and the commerce team as we know have all been 'let go' or have done a runner from the stress of it all. Someone will come up with a bright new idea that what we really need is some kind folder or box that works magically across all viewer versions and can hold our items which can then be easily updated by simple drag and drop. Yet another reason why I will not be offering customers pre-opened folders. ^L^