TaraSimone Sixpence

As a merchant I will say abusing keywords is a pain when you are looking for something. But people, please bear in mind that you have no idea what keywords the merchant is using, and it could be it is not the merchant's fault but that of the system that throws up unrelated material. Just because we type in a specific search parameter and get items that don't belong does not always mean it is coming from the merchant. It may be coming from the system itself. So you really have to be careful "reporting". The system as well is very puritan. For instance if you write "open top which covers up the nipples" you will probably have the system move that into a Mature or Adult category because of the use of the word nipples, even if this product is just a top. I have had this done with a collection which is called "Sexy Bi*ch" (the t is used in place of the star). It is a full jacket, pants and boots. But because of the name it was considered "Adult". So rememeber sometimes it is not the merchant but the system. But if you feel the keywords are totally misused by the merchant over and over again, then do report them.

Unlike others here I migrated over 4,500 items. I did this because of the original cutoff dates and since Passover starts on Friday and will not be able to do it for 2 -3 weeks I figured no matter what I need to get it done. It took a lot more time than it should due to the slowness of the web site. But due to a suggestion from Darrius Gothly and some, let us say, workarounds on my part I got it done. Everything is listed as DD and when people buy I do get paid now. The only thing that seems to happen, or happened, as it is not happened in a couple of days, is a customer bought an item, got it delivered and then got the exact same item delivered again and was charged again in the same minute. So I am pretty sure there are mess-ups with the LL payment system as well. I do not see any pictures borked, BUT I did not check 4,600 listings for this. It could be some are borked. I also have not seen any "failed deliveries" so I guess I am very lucky so far. Knock on wood. I did post however what everyone should do AFTER they migrate. Take a look, and my advice is make sure you do it. POST DD CHECK

I just had a customer complain she was charged twice for an item from MP. Sure enough I looked up orders and at the exact same minute the customer was charged twice for the exact same item. So I paid her back for one and told myself let LL have the comission rather than deal with it. Then I go look at my transactions and discover there is no payment to me for the item, and went back to look the day before for orders and discover the same thing. In other words LL is being paid and the Merchant is not. Also this is not a Unicode problem. You would think they could at least get that one right!

There is a real simple way around this. Artizan has a product, when you box an item, you put in a script with a config card. When the customer opens the box, it asks 1 time and 1 time only (script self-deletes once the box is rezzed) if the customer wants to join X group. Their is even a hook in for Smartbots so if they do join the group it is your SL group. The script self deletes so it is not spam, and the text of the message to the client is what you put in the config card. Works well. And gives the customer the chance to join. They do not want to join, they click Decline the script deletes anyways, and that is that.

I finished 4,500+ items to DD. But I will say here once more what ticked me off besides the slowness of the web site, which is inexcusable if good planning were done. The May 18th deadline. Passover is in 12 days and it lasts for 8 days. Many people, such as moi, do not have time before Passover or during the holiday and for a couple of days afterwards to fool with SL. That lops off at least 2-3 weeks. It would help if someone in LL looked at a frigging calendar and figured out that major religious holidays in any religion cause some delays. Then it would be nice to see a "realistic" cut-off date not one that was rammed down. March 21-May 18 after a year in development is simply put - stupid. And shows an incredible disregard for customers, which in this case are the merchants on the MP. Stupid and messed up. That is all I will say.

Gadget Portal wrote: Yes I'm talking about the ones that spam you without any opt in. You'd have to be an idiot.to sign up for a mailing list then complain about getting spam. As far as pop-up, I can handle those. I just rapid click ignore. What's annoying was the fad for a while to put something in there asking if you're a copybot, then getting booted because you ignored it with the others. (Bold and Italics above are mine) Actually to be honest, a lot of people do just what you said Gadget. Does not bother me. They opt in then send me an IM or NC to opt out. What annoys me is the word "spam". Because some people opt-in and then write "Why am I getting this spam?" yadda yadda yadda So I save every single date and time of the opt in's. Just in case someone does not remember. Any good merchant will certainly take any person off a list that asks to do so in a fairly swift manner. Some people though have a way of approaching merchants with "threats". So I say AR away or file your complaint. And I laugh and shrug. Ask nicely it gets you the exact same result as demanding or threatening. And what is worse is that most of the merchants can prove the people opted in to begin with. Spam is when you do not opt-in. Spam is when you have no clue what is coming at you and why. Opting-in and forgetting is fine. Just ask nicely to opt-out. Finished and done. And everyone walks away happy and satisfied.

You understood perfectly and that was the answer I guess. Now I understand how they are delivered. It seemed to imply we had to keep them into our inventory.

Okay. I did all the DD. I checked. I then deleted every single Box that came from my magic boxes. That should of course "break" the system or so I thought. I did not put them into folders. No ty on that one. Left them in boxes. Then I went to test delivery. No box in my inventory right? So it should not be delivered. Correct? Or so I was led to believe. No magic boxes either. BUT the system does deliver the boxes. It delivers them to my Recieved folders. Tested on a bunch of different things. OKAY. Someone want to explain how this is working?

if you read what i wrote....the last paragraph "The only possiblity of calling it spam is when you were not asked to join." That is spam I agree, if that was what the OP was talking about. But any other case is simply not spam.

Good Lord! It really is impossible to please everyone. There are basically 3 types of systems outside of the normal SL group structure. Hippo Group structure. This is an opt in basis which you have to click to opt in. But by going to the Hippo web site you can opt out as well by yourself. If you do not know how to do it a simple IM to most owners will do the trick. You opt in to a group that is outside of SL structure. Artizan and others have such groups. And yes most of the time you need to drop a NC or IM the owner of the group to opt out. And any merchant will gladly do it for you within a normal period of 24-48 hours. The Smartbots system which puts you in SL groups where you can remove yourself at anytime because it is the SL Group. So if you feel the messages from these groups are "spam" why did you opt-in? And if you did opt-in and want out any merchant I know will happily take you out of the group. This is not spam. This is the way people do business in SL. It is the way to keep in contact with customers. You do not want to be a customer, that is cool. Just ask to be removed in a non SL group or remove yourself from the SL group. What is the big deal here? No one forces you to opt in. I run both types of groups SL and non-SL. I have over 7k in people together in both groups. If someone wants out, I take them out. If they want of the SL group they do it themselves. I have many customers, who join the SL group get the 10% discount on clothing that is given them because of the tag then leave the group and go through that process everytime they shop. I have others who opt-in to the non SL group and ask to be removed. I do that as fast as possible. But to complain this is "spam" when indeed you opted-in to the group is a bit over the top. The only possiblity of calling it spam is when you were not asked to join. But if you were asked to join and did so, then dont call it spam. Don't like it .. leave the group. Simple.

Yep, that is about it. You can open for support and hope they get back to you. I was hoping for something I may have missed to do this fairly normally and easily. Too much to expect I guess. Unless someone else has a workaround.

A definite LL GOTCHA! As I went through my listing i caught like 15 which had been removed for Incorrect Listing and 2 for not being in the right "maturity" category. I ran my mouse over the links to the name and there is a link. So I figure okay, go to the item, edit it, make sure the category is correct and that is that. Right? WRONG! As you can see under "Actions" there is no ability to do anything. If you click on the link to the item, you land at the main marketplace page. Which means the item has been removed. OKAY. FINE. I made a mistake LL removed the item. Though what that mistake is was not too clear. I cannot Delist the item, I cannot delete it, it does not show up in "Unlisted" or in "Unavailable" but it appears in my listings. In other words there is absolutely nothing I can do to fix the problem or even delete it. On top of that it is against TOS to delist and the list an item again. So LL has in its infinite wisdom, left something up in my listing in pretty yellow or pink background, which I cannot fix, I cannot delete, I cannot touch. In other words there is NOTHING I CAN DO TO FIX THE WRONG CATEGORY OR THE MATURITY RATING OF SOME OF THE ITEMS. You cannot even get to it from your own store. And it wont let you activate the item so you can change it. As it has been "removed" even though there is an active URL to the item, but you cannot get to it. So does anyone have some sort of solution to this? Or are these items destined to remain there in that list, without any ability to fix them?

After finishing some 4500 items and using also a suggestion from Darrius, which I thank him for, though this took at least 10X the amount of time it should due to the snail pace of the Web Site, I decided to check my listings, which was a good thing I did. I set it to 100 per page and had 46 pages to check. In approximately 200 items (they seem to come in batches and I think I know why this happened but it is not important), everything was okay except the Green Active Check was greyed out. When I clicked to go to the item it said on top "Item Not Available". So I went to the list page by page, and looked down to make sure everything was "Direct" and all appeared as "Active". As I said I found quite a few which had moved over correctly but were not active. The simple thing to do in this case is to simply check the greyed out area. A small circle will appear and the item will be activated. A very important hint: If you have more than one item on the page that is "inactive" you can click on each greyed out check one after the other, and you do not have to do this one at at time. The system will activate every item you clicked on, usually without timing out. I strongly suggest all that have done the DD upgrade to check their listings for this. It can be a long process due to the snail's pace of the web site, but you may discover items all listed correctly but not active. To activate them just use the instructions above. And again you need not do one a at time. You can do all that appear on a page together in one swoop. These items do NOT appear in Unlisted or Unavailable, so you will have to check with the ALL column to make sure.

I have said this in other blog posts will say it here...even with the workarounds that Darrius supplied and what I also tried.. the DD system is horrendous if you have a large amount of items to do. It has so far caused me untold amount of waste of time waiting for pages to refresh, resynching inventory, waiting and then clicking again. The sad thing about it all it does not even surprise me anymore. LL has a crazy time out in the Delete. The web site is working like a turtle. The time it takes to do things on the merchant web side is absolutely ridiculous. Again, like I said and will continue to say, one massive screw up as usual. Why cant the LL tech team just get one thing right before they release it? Absolutely amazing. Any CTO worth anything would have fired these people on the spot. Shows a total disregard for people and their time and so typical of the way LL handles things. For years this has been going on and just repeats itself over and over again no matter what promises are made. Merchants who have 20 or even 100 items are tickled pink. Go over that number, and you are up the creek without a paddle. Just sad. Really sad. That is all one can say about this DD update. Truly sad.

Darrius I do appreciate the help. BUT...once again the loading even of 100 in FS works fine. It is the step of unassociated inventory delete that is impossible in any normal time span. The magic boxes i have almost all have MORE than 100 items in them. After 100 you cannot load without getting import failure. Then you have to delete before loading more. If you try delete it is snail's pace. It is absolutely horrendous! But i will try the extra step of deleting from the magic box. However, you make one mistake there it is also a pain. the point is we should not be forced to work like this in a system. Delete should take 2 seconds even 100 items not 1 hour to get rid of a few. LL knew this was coming for months. It was up to them to build enough server and cloud space not to slow this process to a crawl. This is a major screw-up and is a freaking waste of time for any merchant. That is the point. I should not be forced to do crazy workarounds because LL did not plan correctly. I can only imagine FB or Twitter or LinkedIN telling users to use workarounds to post or like on their pages. Ridiculous and right in the spirit of all LL upgrades.

That did NOT work for me. Sorry. I tried that.

It is a good idea and I already tried it ... BUT if you have more than 100 items in a magic box, even if you move them to the upload, and then delete the magic box and resynch, you will have to click "List" them again which also takes loads of time. And I have 36 magic boxes with 4.5k of items. So this is not something I can use.

This is a workaround I tried BUT if you have more than 100 items in a magic box, even if you move them to the upload, and then delete the magic box, you will have to click "List" them again which also takes loads of time. And I have 36 magic boxes with 4.5k of items. So this is not something I can use.

It is absolutely impossible to work on the merchant side no matter what LL claims to have done. Maybe people with 10 listings can get this done fast. But if you have 4.5K in listings and have to deal with 100 at a time and then delete from the Unassociated Inventory (before picking up the magic box)...you are stuck in hell. This really is completely unacceptable and must be fixed asap, since in their ultimate widsom LL made May 18 as a cutoff date, and there are holidays inbetween. I am not going to spend hours trying to delete 100 items when it should take at the most 3 seconds. Another total complete screw-up. Why am I not surprised?

I am really hoping someone at LL is reading these posts. OK. Your schedule lists as follows: April 18, 2012: All listings priced L$10 and lower must use Direct Delivery May 16, 2012: Magic Boxes no longer allowed for any Marketplace listing Did ANYONE IN LL take into account that Passover an 8 day holiday is at the beginning of April and that many people are away for 8-14 days? Did anyone in LL take into account that if you have 4500+ items in the MP no matter how fast this is, and even it works without flaws, that it still is a time-consumming process, and some of us do have other things to do in life besides MP and SL? Did anyone in LL take into account that this amount of leeway for something first implemented on March 21st is absolutely ludicrous? Tell me please. Is there any sort of calendar hanging on a wall in the LL office? Or do you throw darts to pick dates and times and schedules? For goodness sakes...GET REAL!

I still cannot believe there is no step-by-step instructions on what to do, how it will be implemented, and where those special folders are and how they will appear. A post telling us something is going live in a week, and not one doc on how to implement it in real time. In my book, sad to say, LL has done it again, even if this thing works smoothly. With over 4K of items in the MP, I have a feeling this is going to be a nightmare of major proportions. I am just getting hives at the amount of time I will have to waste switching over to a new system and then dealing with the bugs in the new one. The last disaster was incredible and took months to fix the bugs in it. Sorry, my faith that LL will roll out something half-decent first, second or third time around has long been shattered. DD may be a good idea, but from idea to implementation - is a very long, and I have a feeling very twisted path. Call me an optimist

Maybe I am missing something here...does anyone have these folders that Direct Delivery requires in their Inventory? And are there any instructions on MP on how this all works and what merchants are supposed to do? I am totally lost. Where are the step by step instructions for Merchants? And if you are using FS does FS have to be updated to handle these things or is this a server side issue? Too much in the air, way too little documentation to comment on good or bad. Anyone have any specific links to step by step instructions and a how to? Or is this just another LL announcement without any backup?

Sassy Romano wrote: The fact that the script is no mod does not make the OBJECT no modify, you know this right? Resize does NOT work, the word is RE-SIZE. Customers are different S H A P E S. It's really quite simple! Size change is not the same as shape change and again, same answer as I gave to Monti, if I wear something that doesn't fit right because it can't be properly fitted... guess whose name is on the creation?... So like I said. If you want someone to sell you something that is totally Mod and totally Copy, and you need it to fit your shape, and you want to have total control over it from textures to size of prims to sizing to everything else that you can think of, and you need to change that creation - then there are tons of excellent Template Creators in SL. And again, demos are a good idea. They are mostly not feasible on clothing sets. When you buy clothing, if you are not sure contact the designer. I am sure that over 80% of them would happily give you somehthing to try out in that collection. Like I said like it after you tried it - buy it. Dont like - delete it. But I am sure not making something for a customer to color and texture and enlarge one prim here and one prim there they way the deem fit for their own use. Why make it then? Let the customer make it as their own unique design. If you want that I repeat - tons of great template designers in SL. Then do your own texturing, uploading checking fixing until it is perfect for you. I thank you for the spelling correction though.

Sassy Romano wrote: I'm trying to understand this. First, that resize script is no replacement for the ability to correctly fit an item. They rarely permit proper adjustment and just change size, not shape. Here's my suggestion, from the ground up, build the item using the move and size options of that resize script, then convince me that it's a valid substitute for the SL edit facility Second, you stopped offering modify because ... it's modify and customers were confused? Yes if it's Modify, exactly they can change the colours and textures, that's the point no? Typically, the reason that most creators do this is to sell multiple sets of the same thing in different texture styles and tones, that's fair enough for layer clothing but the moment it has prims... MODIFY ALL THE WAY for the prim parts at minimum. The reason to make the items no modify in your post appear contraditory to the benefit of the customer. Nope that is not the point. I think most of the established designers will say that we do not want our texturing and techniques used to be changed. If I produce a collection, and I always work in collections, say of a dress, and I apply texturing techniques to it, outside of SL, and you buy the dress, and then go ahead and texture it the way you desire, be it your taste or not...that is not my creation. It is yours. And I do not want, nor does any other designer want, customers making their own designs. In that case, you may as well visit the Template shops, buy a template, and create exactly what you want with your own textures. If you are talking about using SL colors to use for an item of clothing, well, then, sorry I have only one collection out of over 250 that will allow that and uses SL coloring. I would never even consider using SL coloring these days. That is just well, it is just not what designers do. They use serious texturing techniques outside of SL with textures they created or purchased and change them in different ways to create unique clothing items. So why would I want someone to change the texturing on an item of mine? They dont like it, I can understand that. They do not like any of the colors in the collection I can understand that as well. But designers do not produce templates (at least not the ones that have been established in SL.) And even when they do use templates to create they change them around to suit what they are making in their own unique way. So again NO. I have no desire for someone to take a dress I made apply their own colors and textures and then walk around with it with my name on it as the creator. It is not what a designer does nor is it a road to being viable in SL. The No Modify is a perm issue in SL Not a choice of desingers. The script for resize is always no modify, even if you made it yourself, as you are not going to let customers open up a script and take it or mess with it. so the object comes out as No Modify. Resize works. And then using a pose stand for some finicky items and moving the items around such as a hat or scarf to best suit your tastes and what you wear works as well.

You need to make a differentiation here, and understand what it all means. Prim clothing such as dresses, gowns and sculpties can be made with Demo. Just like the hair has a "demo" sign on it when you take Demos. But here is the rub. 1. Take just a simple dress. So you put the demo sign on it. Fine and good. 2. Take a gown or a complete set. There could be as many as 8 different prim and sculpted pieces in there all with resize (which you will need to demo). That is attaching 8 demo signs to 8 different pieces, some of which are not large. Such a thing is usually unfeasable. 3. Boots and shoes - you could to it with boots and shoes. One demo for a color. Attach a large sign to it. Again leaving them out of proportion with no perms would not solve the problem. So it must be added. 4. The worst problem is when you are dealing with an item or a set that contains SL layers. Say you have a set. Top, shorts, socks and shoes. The top, shorts and socks are in SL Layers. So what a designer needs to do is splash the word demo on EACH of those upload, and then create a demo set. All the above is a great deal of work. A great deal of work. Especially adding it all the time of actually creating, packaging and putting in a vendor a collection. There is something else that you should be aware of. A lot of designers, and I am one of them, have ceased to mark clothing Modify, because it has a script for resize. That script (whichever is being used) usually causes the clothing to come out of the package,marked as No Modify, even though in essence it is. The reason I stopped marking it Modify, is because some customers were confused by the Modify option. They thought oh...it is modify, so i can change the colors and do what I want to the textures. So in order to avoid that confusion I and others mark such as items as no modify, and just put on the vendor or in the product notecared "Resize script". I have nothing against consumer movements and I personally think it may be a good idea. But you do have to be realistic within the constraints of SL. SL is in the end a virtual environment. Not all clothing is equal. you have SL layers, Prims, Sculpts and Mesh and soon deformed Mesh. Each one of these to produce a "demo" is a fairly complicated and long process. Interestingly enough I set up HoloVendors for some of the prim skirt collections and boot collections I have. Those rez the boot or skirt in front of you. Yet, customers seem to buy from the vendors, and ignore the Holo Vendors (which is a step below trying on an outfit.) Another final worry of the Demo idea, is that in SL layers a lot of customers (It is not only designers that are at fault here), but customers will take an SL layer piece of clothing with the word DEMO splashed over the textures, and still wear them. I think all this should be taken into account before one calls designers to task for not including demos. Finally, most good designers, will gladly give you a gown for free if you contact them and they think you are for real in wanting to purchase it, to try for yourself. Like it...buy it. Dont like it .. delete it. All you have to do is contact them and most are fairly amenable to this request as long as it does not go overboard. My 2 cents...