Toysoldier Thor

Cerise wrote: Toysoldier Thor wrote: This should be be considered acceptable for SLM ! One of the benefits in theory to SLM is that the shopper can buy products for inworld when they are not online themselves (i.e. shopping while at work) or whomever the persons that is receiving the gift. THAT IS AN UNACCEPTABLE LIMITATION FOR SLM ! Yes, and this kind of trouble is why magic boxes are being replaced by direct delivery. That will take llGiveInventory and its limitations out of the loop. There is an annoucement for the beta program here. It would be nicer if the project was already finished and live, but something definitely is being done about the problem. But Cerise,if you can solve a problem with NO RISK to the Merchant and the Shopper and at a cost of $10 and you can solve a problem with HIGH RISK to the Merchant and at a cost of $1000. What solution do you think should be considered first? I do not think DD is a good idea (high risk, complex, costly, uses up a lot of precious LL development resources best used elsewhere) unless LL confirms that they have listened to the Merchant's concerns and have modified their design of DD to allow the source of the items to be configurable by the Merchant to be from a rezzed object or an alternate SL Account. If most SLM delivery problems are from LL's IM CAPS... then simply priorize what gets capped first... remove inventory delivery from any caps. Dont do Heart Surgury when a pill will be as effective.

Thanks Tari for the details on what triggers the limits. And yes I know that the gift failed delivered to my friend because she was offline at the time of the purchase... BUT... This should NOT be considered acceptable for SLM ! One of the benefits in theory to SLM is that the shopper can buy products for inworld when they are not online themselves (i.e. shopping while at work) or whomever the persons that is receiving the gift. THAT IS AN UNACCEPTABLE LIMITATION FOR SLM ! The SLM System should be able to allow a shopper to buy ANYTIME he/she wants. END OF STORY! Its one thing for a purchased item to fail because the shopper was DUMB ENOUGH TO BUY WHEN THEY WERE NOT ONLINE (I am being sarcastic as the only dumbness is the SLM delivery system), but SLM's delivery not only failed but it lied to me - the shopper by saying that the product was SUCCESSFULLY DELIVERED - when it was not! In fact, if it wasnt for my sending an optional message - the receiver of the gift would not have known. The solution to resolving a ton of SLM Delivery Failures is exactly what Darrius suggested. PRIORIZE which type of IM's get capped vs do not. i.e. Do not set a cap on inventory delivery transactions or set the number much higher. And if caps are needed - set them only for GROUP NOTICES first and IMs Second. It seems that LL could solve a ton of SLM delivery problems just by making adjustments to the CAPPING system instead ot overhauling the delivery system with a new and risky DIRECT DELIVERY model. But of course for LL - that would not be fun and exciting... they would rather have their developers work on functions that have high risk and takes a lot of work to deploy, LL Priorities - SKEWED AGAIN. (EDITED point #1 - NOT acceptable)

So if the IM CAPS problem occurs when a mix of both IMs and Notices hits an account ... AND if it appears (from what I just witnessed last night that my friend's SLM gift failedthe increase in SLM delivery that an SLM delivery will fail of the recipient's SL Avatar account has its IM CAP triggered.... AND since it was only a few months ago when the number of groups restriction was lifted from 40 groups.... Maybe the reason for the increase in SLM delivery failures has a direct coorelation to LL's recent move to remove the restriction of GROUP from 40? First thing I am gonna do is remove groups that do too many notices - I know exactly which one it is.... as I get about 20 or more notices a day from this ENTERTAINMENT group. Now the next thing I want to know..... cant LL simply increase the trigger count that CAPS IMs? If they CAP is removed then the Avatar's account could receive the SLM delivery. Does anyone know exactly what the trigger is for IM CAPS? Is it a certain number per hour or a total count without an avatar account being logged in?

So have noticed this recent anomoly myself as of a couple months ago. I dont know the exact date but I remember when it first happened because it was so strange and new to me that I posting my observation to the Merchant's Inworld IM Group - and got moreso of a set of comic response since it seems it is second nature to many of you - but it was totally new to me. What am I talking about? About 2 months ago I logged into SL one evening - expecting to get my normal barrage of IMs (that I already saw as offline email IMs), and my slew of notices. What shocked me and actually even made me nervous was - for the first time in the three years that I have been an SL Resident - I got a message that my IM MESSAGES WERE CAPPED. OK again, I know that from listening to a lot of you and reading a lot of merchant profiles, that you all must have been getting these for a long time. But even though there has not been any fundamentalk shift or growth in my SL business... no new amazing SL career I have taken up like an SL MUSIC STAR with tons of groupie followers (I only wish)... and I dont have a stalker or SL dissed lover that is looking for alimony / support / etc. SOOO... there is no reason why I would all of a sudden have received my FIRST incident that would cap my IMs. As strange as it was, I somewhat shrugged it off as just some freaky alignment of the stars and I accidently reached the CAPPED IM limit that day. But then a few days later I got another one. And in the past couple months since that first event, I have had about 6 more. SOMETHING HAS CHANGED - AND ITS NOT SOMETHING I CAUSED. ... So the reason I am writing this thread and asking other their thoughts on this theory is because of what happened last night... another coincidental related event.... Last night was my SL friend's birthday and I did a rare thing - I actually shopped on SLM (eeek!) to buy her a birthday gift. Thankfully I bought from a Merchant I have known a long time and trust. I bought the gift via the Shopping Cart as a Gift (with a birthday greeting). 4 hours later she logged on while I was online. As we were IMing... she sounded frustrated and I asked her "what"... she said "I need to relog - the $L balance in my account is $0L which is surely shouldnt be AND I got a message that my IMs WERE CAPPED". When she relogged, her $L thankfully came back. I asked her "do you get IM CAPS often?". She said, "Not until recently". hmmmmmmm same as ME! I then asked...."OK did you get your Birthday gift from me from SLM?". NOPE! She got the offline IM birthday greeting from SLM... I got an order history record and email from SLM saying the delivery was completed and successful. But she did not get the actual product I bought on SLM. and yes... I made her check her inventory for the product in recent new inventory and at the top of her objects inventory or on the root folder for the name of the product I bought. Shes no dummy... she could not find it in her inventory. And... as soon as I heard she logged in with IM CAP.... I had a strong feeling that my SLM order failed. IT DID! So... my questions are: Did LL do something to the system that handles IM processing about 2 months ago that has caused an increase in CAPPED IMs? Did they reduce the CAP LIMITS? What are the Cap limits for IMs?Could this change have caused a substantial increase in daily IM CAPS which in turn are causing a major increase in SLM DELIVERY FAILURES?Since a lot of SLM deliveries are queued up for delivery to the resident when they get online - and if they log in and get a IM CAPPED process... could this be whats causing the SLM delivery failures?I want to know why after 3 years of never ever getting IM CAPS... in the past ~ 2 months I have been getting many of them. THOUGHTS?

ValerianKane wrote: Yes i want participe If you want to participate - fill out the application and participate. Saying so in the forum wont get you in. lol Look at Brooke's OP and follow her link. Good Luck

Now back to DD. We've been told that people will still be allowed to use magic boxes instead of DD. But eventually magic boxes will become obsolete. The good news here is that all those old items that belong to merchants who have left SL will be eliminated from the marketplace, thus giving it that long overdue clean up. It will reduce the risk of buying an item with no customer support. It will reduce the clutter. And that is good. And Rya, you dont think that magical clensing didnt happen during the xstree to slm cutover when a lot of these so called ancient and unsupported xstreet listings were never worked by Merchants that either decided they were not going to go thru all the hassle to cleanup the listings that were messed up from the conversion - or the merchant didnt even exist? The cleanup happened already. Removing the MagicBoxes wont clean anything - well I might be wrong - it could clean up a TON if the cutver/conversion screws up or more Merchants throw up their hands with yet another LL migration. And for those that said Merchants have the option to stay on MAGICBOXES.... no! Only until LL feels they are comfortable to force all merchants to convert to DD. Then there will be no more magic boxes.

Zanara Zenovka wrote: Isaura Simons wrote: I don't feel comfortable with things being delivered directly from my inventory. I like that right now they are in a sepparate box, and that when it is delivered the customer will get exactly what they paid for. I wouldn't worry about that - both your inventory and a magic box just reference an item on the asset server anyway. It's a bit like a shortcut on your computer desktop, that when clicked goes and finds the "real" file. That would be a deceptive statement Zanara and will lul Merchants into a false sense of security. I have a master copy of my SLM items in my personal inventory. I place a copy of my SLM Item out of my personal inventory and create a new copy of it into a seperate rezzed object inworld that holds this new copied asset in its own inventory. Sure, all the assets of everything in SL is in the same asset server... these assets are broken up and categorized into different types of containers and functions can be applied to. i.e. if I search my personal INVENTORY - it does not search past the boundries of my account's inventory - not into rezzed objects inworld that have more of my assets - and certainly not into other accounts in sl. In the same light - quite often, SL Account's inventories get corrupted or lost... this mostly does not go past the logical boundries of the account's inventory. As such, if this new DD Service were to be mis-configured by a new release bug or as a horrid side effect from a changed component elsewhere, there is a chance that the DD system could go Rogue up to and including all assets inside the boundries of your personal inventory. BUT... in the Magicbox model... this rogue DD would not impact anything but the assets in the magicbox. So... please do not lul fellow merchants into a sense that the DD system's proposed Direct, Automated, and not controlled service is ZERO risk to the rest of the inventory of a Merchant's entire account. Merchants SHOULD BE VERY NERVOUS OF THIS PROPOSED DD approach. SLM Asset Isolation is a common-sense and proper design that LL has totally thrown out because they didnt think of it or because they are too lazy to do the right thing.

Rya, A good example and very strong indication that the LL Commerce and Development team spent very little time architecting, designing, solutioning this DD replacement of Magicboxes.... When I first brought up my concerns in the forums in March and escalating why I think the DD solution appears to have a serious flaw in design (i.e. not sourcing the SLM inventory from an isolated source - like a seperate inventory, different avatar inventory, a new SLM Item Rezzed box, etc.) Brooke finally was pressured to respond. Her one and only response to my concerns on this issue was... close paraphrase from the March thread ..."I dont understand why Merchants would want an SLM ALT MERCHANT ACCOUNT to have DD source is sales from" This is coming from a team member that should know exactly what the concerns are about this issue. She had no clue and I can safely assume that she didnt make that public admission on the forums before asking her LL development staff why I would have these concern. That means even the LL Development team and designers were not aware of this risk / concern. Insult to injury - I brought it up... several other Merchants started seeing the same risks and additional risks... and yet over a month later not once has Brooke or anyone of her staff approached me to further clarify our concerns. ( I can assure you that if these concerns were brought up by one of Brooke's favored Merchants - many of us are seeing who they are - she and her team would have already privately approached these favored merchants or even publically engaged in discussions on the forums with these people) These are the persons that are developing and deploying DD. This is the team that will once again be following the same comic strip approach to systems / service deployment as happened on many other past horrid deployments like SLM.

Rya Nitely wrote: Darrius Gothly wrote: We absolutely CAN NOT repeat the debacle that was Marketplace. Debacle? A temporary inconvenience is all it was for me. My sales continued to reach records as usual. I am betting Linden Labs also experienced little impact on sales volume and profit. If your sales were affected so badly as to call it a debacle then maybe it was your own handling of the change, but hopefully all is good now and you've settled in. With the coming changes I am sure you will settle in eventually as well. Ask others for advice if you have such major diffficulties again. Darrius Gothly wrote: Contrary to how some may characterize me, I WANT Second Life to thrive and grow! I think this would be obvious to everyone. If Second Life didn't thrive and grow then neither would these forums. It's obvious how dependent you are on them.... how vital they are in the way you spend your time. The fact that Merchants - ONCE AGAIN - adapted and suffered through the cutover form xstreet to SLM does not consider the SLM migration a success. IT WAS A HORRID EXAMPLE OF SOFTWARE / SERVICE DEPLOYMENT BY A VENDOR! Good for you Rya that you luckily survived through the transition unscathed and that now the new SLM for you is better than ever. That has absolutely no relevance to the fact that the LL Commerce Team's SLM migration was the poster child of "HOW NOT TO RELEASE A NEW / IMPROVED SERVICE TO A CUSTOMER". They held a closed beta on code that was PRE-ALPHA in the eyes of anyone that knows anything about software development and deployment. They rushed an ALPHA version of SLM into the public without any full thurough internal testing. They made the most basic and riskiest of moves by actually integrating this ALPHA code into actual production systems used by xstreet (a major risk) - and all in the interests of LL Staff convenience and cutting deployment time They used their own Merchants as basically forced volunteer tester to find the bugs anyone would find when working with ALPHA code. Forced because "this is coming if you like it or not so hurry up and find all our bugs we missed". Many of the basic functions and services that xstreet had - SLM still to this date does not have and what Pink Linden suggested SLM would be better and more flexible and advanced then Xstreet ever was. To date, LL Commerce Team cannot even get this new SLM to easily match basic traffic/sales reporting to xstreet. Many Merchants had many issues with lost items, corrupted listings during migrations, etc etc (even if you were luckily enough not to). I could go on but Darrius is right.... LL's SLM Deployment was a kindergarden deployment of a new service and laid a ton of risk on their merchant community of which many got hurt. I am seeing that based on Brooke's silence to-date on the details of the DD service, and not responding to HOW this new direct from a Merchant's personal inventory is the best way to solve current delivery delays/failures vs other approaches, and if LL will addres the escalating concern of DD not offering flexible options on where to source SLM inventory... we are heading toward yet another CLASSIC LL DEVELOPMENT / DEPLOYMENT FIASCO. And it will be on the backs of the Merchants that will suffer in order for LL to work out their bugs. Again... I commend the CLOSED ALPHA TESTERS of this DD for risking their own personal inventory and merchant sales on SLM and doing this going into the Alpha Tests blind. They are brave souls!

Nefertiti Nefarious wrote: Sounds like fun! I love to break software, and I write good bug reports. To Darrius, Toysoldier and any others who are bitching about the NDA. It's extremely common when recruiting Beta testers to insist on an NDA so that rumors and griping about features don't run amok and become embedded in the folklore of the user community. I have signed NDAs with Google, Yahoo!, WoW, and several other companies I beta-tested for. Toysoldier ... yes, it REALLY IS about hiding the ugly and fixing it up before the general SL public sees it. With the way hysteria regularly sweeps the forums, it's a good precaution. Good Luck to you Nef! A bit if a difference between Beta Testing for LL for a function that is part of a service that the vendor has an exclusive monopoly on VS beta testing for a vendor that is operating a service that clear competitors and they are not the monopoly on the function you are beta testing. But at least we both agree there will be something to gripe about - for valid reasons. And the legit reasons for hysteria to sweep the forums is the only response LL Customers have since we cant get LL to listen to us any other way. So until LL actually "REALLY" listens to its customers... they wont solve the issue of receiving the forum "hysteria" they rightly deserve. Again.. good luck to you.

Yes, aparently LL is somehow worried that the new DD might be so ugly and/or have so many issues with it that they do not want the BETA TESTERS to go out on the forums or anywhere else to tell the rest of us. They would rather keep it a secret and hopefully fix as much of it as they can in Beta and then upon final production release - they can control / spin the media/message of what they were trying to hide duing the beta. Normally an NDA is demanded from a vendor when something of theirs is new and innovative that they want to OR need to show a select # of their customers BUT they do not want it to get out in the general market so that a competitor can use the information to beat them to the market with it or use the information to damage their compeitive advantage of their new idea. Clearly for LL and the SLM, this is not the case. They have the ~98% monopoly on website ecommerce of SL products. Also, they have already spilled many of the key beans of how this DD will work (and Brooke promised a blog posting to tell the rest of the community a lot more details of DD). SO... the need for an NDA here is not to protect a good idea. Therefore, its only purpose is for LL to limit the potential bad things that DD will encounter durning the alpha beta tests and to control the message to the general community. Like was already said.... I also commend those of you Merchants that are brave enough to put your own items up as well as risking your personal inventory as part of this DD test. You are like the first Russian Cosmonaut on his first flight into space (who just celebrated the 50th anniversary this week of that event btw). GOD SPEED !! THIS IS WHAT YOU ALL CALL TRANSPARENCY?

Darrius Gothly wrote: The one part of the application that is a bit thin is this: I answered yes, but that is a conditional yes based on what the NDA states. The last time I was presented with an NDA about Marketplace testing, it was so overly broad and all-encompassing that both myself and my legal counsel rejected it out of hand. Limit the NDA to the matter at hand, allow for the fact that we're skilled in our profession and are not willing to enslave ourselves and our talents to Linden Lab forever for free .. and I'll help. Otherwise? Why does LL need an NDA to release a new feature to a online ecommerce service that they have a monopoly on and no competitive threat??? Are they afraid someone will actually beat them to the market with a Direct Delivery system that takes transaction security away from their customers? Thats an innovative solution - I am sure there is high demand for that, NDA?? WHY?

How bout telling the Merchants the details to the Direct Delivery FIRST - as promised at the last Office Hours meeting? "join the beta... we cant tell you the details yet... and you will need an NDA before we tell you the details... and then when we tell you the details, including the fact that DD will not include Merchant's selection of alternate SLM item sources... you wont be able to warn the rest of the Merchants until it is too late for them"

Zanara Zenovka wrote: Clarke Kondor wrote: I had a similar experience but from the customer side. I recently created an alt and went to outfit him by using the gift capability in the Market place. I purchased multiple items from 4 or 5 merchants. Over 80% of the deliveries failed at least twice! Then I trasferred the $L to the alt, logged him into the Marketplace and had him purchase the items directlty.... everything was delivered within a few minutes Maybe one of the major causes of these delivery problems lies in the code that handles delivery of gifts. - Clarke Interesting. I don't get many failures, but I'd say quite a few are gifts. The other common cause is just people not being logged in when they buy and losing the delivery to capped messages. As Minxi pointed out, multiple orders in cart can be a problem. This is not just because of any cart bugs, but because of the intrinsic time delays in the way that items are delivered. Each delivery keeps your magic box busy and unable to process any more orders until finished the first. This is one reason why multiple boxes are important. As well as sending messages to you and the buyer, the scripts are sending email and http requests back and forth with the marketplace website. These communications can be queued, but the more there are, the more chance of timeouts and failures. Add to that the fact that llEmail has been a bit buggier than usual of late because of server software updates in some regions. Test it yourself - go order a shopping cart of your own stuff from SLM then watch your inworld chat and see which boxes are working when, and the time between deliveries. Ideally you would test this with only one box rezzed, then with several to see the difference. Putting all your freebies in boxes of their own can also help with this, so that freebies don't keep the box occupied when a paid purchase is trying to get through. I have 6 boxes in 3 sims, and most of my purchases are singles. If you make the sort of things that people will fill up a cart with, I'd suggest even more boxes than this. Zanara, This was good deepdive info on how the Magicboxes work. Is this technically how the MagicBoxes intereact with SLM, Buyer's inventory and RL Buyer/Seller notifications? Is there a LL whitepaper on the actual sales transaction process? Being a systems designer geek in RL, I would be REALLY interested to get the LL deepdive explanation on how it works. The reason I want to know is because I am not 100% convinced that more magicboxes are "THE" solution to a Merchant that is experiencing high delivery failure rates. Maybe its because these merchants and yourself as well process a lot of daily transactions and the merchants that generally dont have magicbox problems (like me) are those that have relatively low transactions per day. With 3 magicboxes, how many transactions does your SLM process a day? Do you know how many per hour? How many SLM items do you keep in each of your MagicBoxes? I only process about 5 to 20 a day - most of them on a daily basis (at or over 50%) are my Freebie/Demo pack. I have only ever had 1 MagicBox that contains ALL my SLM items - about a total of 50 items. Generally - I rarely get Delivery failures (maybe 1 a month of sales) with the exception when LL is tinkering with SLM and causes a blast of delivery failures. I seem to be one of the Lucky SLM Merchants regarding delivery. And I want to mention that my MagicBox is in my store which is on a sim that is notoriously known to be BADDDD for lagging most days (my customers often complain about it). So my Magicbox tends to operate quite will even on a badly lagging sim. So... I would love to get more facts / info from you and others that say they do encounter a ton of SLM delivery failures... and more importantly, I want to see the transaction system flow from an LL source. Does anyone know where I could get this system flow?

Arwen Serpente wrote: Thank you Darrius for the explanation. I pretty much had understood "lag" the way that you do. I guess in the case of the DD system and our personal inventories, even if it does not cause lag for other avatars, if it does slow down the Merchant as they are working, that's almost as bad. I try to be as efficient as possible with my time inworld, every minute counts when I'm doing something. If there's any chance at all that this new DD folder/system is going to hamper Merchants in going about their usual work, that's not a good solution to our current Magic Box delivery issues. Basically, solve one problem and create another. I really hope these issues are addressed in upcoming information from the Commerce Team. We can hope that Brooke's team will have listened to all the rationale SHE ASKED FOR in her question to me in last months Update thread after I brought up these questions / concerns on AIS/DD and LL planning to silently dip into all us Merchant's private Avatar inventories. She could not understand from my initial question why "anyone would want to set up an ALT SLM Account". I responded to her the reasons why. Darrius and a couple others piled on and added many other reasons why. But it was the last that I ever her from Brooke about this issue. Even in the few vague conversations Brooke has posted / texted to the public about DD - she has not acknowledge our concern and even alternative ideas that the DD solution should consider. So... not that Brooke likes communicating with me directly anyway, but it leads me to believe that my concerns on this DD design / solution are valid but her team totally didnt think of it.... AND as is usually the case, the LL Development already had the solution designed and mostly written well before LL Commerce even mentioned this service coming. As such I suspect the up coming details of DD will not have any of the proposed solution ideas that I mentioned. But HEY.... maybe I will be shockingly surprised.

Argus Collingwood wrote: Arwen Serpente wrote: Hi Toy, yes, your suggestion of a Merchant Alt for the DD program is one that I like. The only thing I don't exactly understand is that my items are all no transfer. So how do I transfer them to an alt account and have them be deliverable to someone else? You must change the permissions to full perms, transfer to alt who then must set the correct permissions again. [if this is the way that seems best after we understand how they are doing it] This will not be an easy task. Yup... What Argus said. It will be painful - specially if you dont sell full perms (I do). And the other painful work to do is to create a new slm store with this new SLM MERCHANT Account and copy all the SLM ITEM info details that your main account had in SLM. And until LL commerce engages the new DD service... you would have to get a magic box in play and have the new account fill it (or you can just slowly get this new SLM Merchant account ready.. and leave it with listing disabled until LL engages the new DD. Its a big task - specially if you have alot of item - I dont have that many - but if you start now... and just do a couple a day... when LL is ready with the DD - you will be ready. I think I will be doing it because i am 99% sure that Brooke and the LL Development Team will not take the suggestion of a Flexible SLM Item Sourcing serious. LL has historically NEVER changed design ideas that they didnt think of initially - especially ones that are more significant changes. SOOO... time to protect ourselves from the risks of the up-coming Direct Delivery service.

Arwen Serpente wrote: Thank you Brooke for the transcript. I was encouraged to see that the stale shopping cart issue is recognized and planned to be fixed, that was good news :smileyhappy: When the details are shared with Merchants for the Direct Delivery project, will they address whether this "DD" Folder will add to our inventory numbers (I expect it will since it isn't a separate part of Inventory like the Library is)? Here's why I ask: If I have to set aside inventory space for a special DD folder, I will consider it "locked" - meaning, I won't be going in and out of it like a regular folder for fear of changing something that is an active/live sales item. That means I would carry double the inventory of my finished boxed products. Right now, because my finished items are either in the Magic Box, or rezzed in my inworld store, I don't worry about how I use the "finished" boxed items in my inventory - I'm constantly working with them. If for some reason, my inventory doesn't load, or something is missing, right now I can pull it out of my Magic Box, or from the wall in my store. Given my current inventory count, it does take time to load inventory. So what happens if the DD Folder is "waiting" to be loaded, or even doesn't load entirely? Does it result in a failed delivery? Even worse, what if we get that dreaded "missing from database" message (which has happened to me just this weekend when I went back to some things I bought but hadn't used in some time) - is it possible that something in a DD Folder could become "missing from database"? Trying to keep inventory levels at reasonable levels for a Merchant is very difficult as it stands given all the working materials, prototypes, etc that we have, in addition to finished work. For the way I work (and this may or may not affect other Merchants depending on their inventory management methods), basically, the DD Folder would add substantially to my current inventory, and due to duplicate naming of items that are in different folders for different purposes, lead to possible confusion and error as I manage my day to day operations. I am also concerned about missing from database issues that could occur... I hope the Commerce Team will be able to address these concerns. Thanks! WOO HOO... great additional questions and concerns to add to my list of reasons why the Direct Delivery better have the flexibility to be taken from an alternatie Avatar, or 2ndary inventory, or even allow the Merchant to tell DD to draw from a new Rezzed version of the MagicBox if they want to. No responses so far from Brooke/LL on all the concerns myself and others have told her about when SHE ASKED ME "why would a merchant want to create an ALT Avatar for the DD"? I am serously thinking of creating my new TOYSOLDIERTHOR-MERCHANT Resident avatar that will be used for SLM and migrate my SLM store to this DD Avatar. Then even if DD screws up an inventory - it will be isolated to the inventory that only has SLM selling content - NOTHING ELSE. thanks for adding these additional concerns about DD and tying into the Merchants actual primary personal inventory.

Medhue Simoni wrote: It is not just about showing a graph tho, because I'm sure that the graphs for the last 2 years are going to show a dip during about the same time. Why? Well, last year, LL released the viewer 2, and then broke search by the 4 of april, and now this year they implement a crazy maturity rating system. This is a perfect example of how there are no real dips, only LL changes. In all my years in SL, almost all the major market moves have been because of something LL did, and had nothing at all to do with RL or any kind of seasonal, imaginary crap. All that said, I'm encouraged by the renewed efforts and brainstorming the marketplace team is engaged in. Me, tho, I want the technical things, not deals or whatever the Fk. I want things to work right. I want bugs fixed. I want deliveries that don't fail. Then, when all that is fixed, I want people to work on marketing, not before. So, double ditto on what Ann wants with reguards to things we need. Same goes for inworld too. Unlike Ann, I don't have any need for bouncing boobs, or anything else new. I'd even wait another year on mesh, if that meant key bugs were going to be fixed. And, that is saying alot, if you know me. Why is SL not gaining more people, because everything is broken. The stuff barely works. When you fix everything, then look for something shiny to dangle, before that, I'm not going to be all that impressed. yeah you are right... Brooke's SEASON Slump that I doubt was even a slump from the way this happened exactly what you are suggesting - LL Commerce Team induced sharp slumps. So I guess Brooke could be right (even though she dont put her Stats where you mouth is)... there was a season slump in March - still is - and it was because of the LL March changes to the SLM site. reading through today's transcript... this is what i saw from LL... An SSL bug is source of latest SLM site annoyance from last change and LL Q/A testing somehow missed and will be fixed this week Also admitted a bug causing delivery delays - fixing that (wasnt our imagination as a couple cheerleaders tried to dimiss as normal) Tried to clarified spring seasonal slump as being very common which was still confusing and was not backed with any numbers or proof... so currently stands an LL made up theoretical excuses for their screw up of the SLM in March. LETS SEE THE NUMBERS BROOKE. Argus was right in the transcripts - without numbers - there was nothing more to ask of Brooke... just made up general statement Announced that AIS is now called Direct Delivery. No discussion or revealling of any details - just that later in the month there will be a blog coming out to provide details. just that its to get rid of the fragility of magicbox - even though there is no evidence that the magicbox is the problem to delivery. Questions were asked but Brooke didnt want to answer them other then her guess on 3rd party viewers (good thing the user group meeting is for 2-way inter-action - so that Brooke can skim past any questions) SEARCH... Brookie acknowledged once again (simply re-hashed all the concerns on search from the forums) that she knows Search is a concern to Merchants and... "we are still looking into this....and looking and researching and looking ZZZzzz". Once again, no promises, no action plan, no commitment to fix. AKA.. they have no clue what do to about search so keep waving the carrot on the stick to make Merchants think that Search will be fixed Reaaaaal Sooon. and finished off with "any questions on search?" lol The DASHDEAL promo that will firesale SLM items and LL takes a 50%. just a blurb that was already known in the forums - its coming - its a test - your too late if you didnt already apply. No stats as to how many Merchant suckers agreed to participate and to explain LL's response on all the overwhelming Thumbs Down by the general Merchant community. 3 Monkies (hear see speak no evil - pretend LL didnt see that no one in the Merchant community like BashBeal. She updated on a couple changes that not many merchants would think are a priority - like the extra manager and review notifications. nice to haves for most but not critical. no immediate plans. DEALING WITH FREEBIES... threw out a few ideas that LL can dream about implementing to deal with Freebies .... no commitments no plans no real actions deadlines. next topics.... Questions.... Zzzzzzzzzzzz (oops fell asleep by this time in the transcripts) OHHH Woke up.... Brooke listened to the overwhelming Merchants opinions.... inworld group meetings serve no purpose and do not accomplish true 2-way conversations (as we can see in these transcripts) so Brooke is cancelling the meetings. Yeahhhhh ... no big loss on this. Meeting over. Only new fact that came out of the entire 1 hour meeting - that there will be no more meetings!

So Darrius..... I see from today's transcripts that Brooke tried to clarify how the same March slump could also be growth and yet with NO ACTUAL FACTS PRESENTED... even when asked by an attendeee. ROFL Then Brooke asks "are there any questions?" lol So basically after today's enlightenment... LL commerce still have ZERO numbers or facts to back up their statement. We do have stats that show a day or two after the early March changes, sales on SLM plumeted. I got my stats. There is an entire thread that complained about the significant SLM drop is sales after the change - showing it had nothing to do with a mystery Seasonal Slump. So.... Spinning numbers out of the air to show that SLM is still growing growing growing... even in a "seasonal slump".... gotta love that nothing has changed in the LL Commerce Team.

Darrius Gothly wrote: Sassy Dirval wrote: Darius, I think some of your points are valid, but there is a flipside to every coin of conundrum: While I appreciate the limelight .. umm .. I'm not Toysoldier. *grin* (It's the sexy long hair, right? LOL) ROFL - i didnt even notice that. She had the sexier Male Avatar in mind when she was writing to me.... hence you showed up

Sassy, I agree with your counter points. Nothing is perfect and I was not proposing that inworld shopping is the flawless perfect means to shop.... FAR FROM IT... and for reasons you mentioned. The one put I want to clarify on the Myth statement... 4) MYTH #1: In world sales are commission free. I'd would argue that many don't know what average percent of sale goes to the tier. I'd also bet it outpaces SLM 5% cost significantly. I know what you are saying and I TOTALLY AGREE that inworld costs are there and they are serious, but they are not "COMMISSION" allocated. That is the problem we have right now for inworld sales and the disadvantage inworld shops having when competing with their own SLM. Your costs to operate your store inworld are a FLAT FIXED COSTS (as you can read that I explained in my my blog posting). This means that regardless of whatever ever sales happen in your store (if you make $1millionL a month or $0L a month) - generally the monthly costs do not change. If your store and land tiers to run your store is $20,000K month AND if your sales have declined inworld to $10,000K a month - YOUR STORE IS LOSING MONEY. It is a money losing operation. Unless you have emotional ties to the store or you are too silly to realize it - that Store is costing you $10,000L a month out of your pocket and a wise merchant would likely close that store location. The SLM store truly is a COMMISSION Cost model in that if your SLM products make ZERO SALE - your cost of operations for your SLM store is ZERO. No Risk! So... although I know what you are saying - its not a myth - there is no commission costs for inworld. There is fixed unchanging costs. As such and as I mentioned in my reasons, it is important that as much of a Merchants sales occur inworld as possible to JUSTIFY ITS EXISTENCE. Now... I know some of your Merchants are going to say.... "Yeah Yeah Toy I understand that the inworld store has become a money losing operation but I am making up for it in SLM sales so my inworld store costs are covered - So you are still wrong". My response to those of you that think like that..... DONT GET INTO REAL LIFE BUSINESS! Why? Because if you are running a real company with sales at 3 stores and one of your stores has sales that have slid down on a monthly basis (for what ever reason) to be a constant money loser.... Most wise and even not so wise business owners would.... wait for it..... SHUT IT DOWN They dont say.. "ohh well our other 3 store are making a profit... so we will just redirect our profits over to keep that money loser operating.... why? "Because we like the store and we want to make sure that the few customers it does service - we are there" so... i stick to my points.... We all need to think more like a REAL BUSINESS ... of course you dont have to and you can lose profits to have the honor of saying you have an inworld store that drains your profits.... if that is what makes you HAPPY in sl...

I am glad this thread and moreso my blog posting on this thread (the topic goes much further than this top 10 list) is generating a lot of good disucssion and debate. Contrary to some Merchant's beliefs, I truly believe that - specially in the virtual world of SecondLife where the vast majority of Shoppers are much more informed of SL commerce activities and concerns since most are actually merchants themselve - the more informed and enlightened the SHOPPER is on whats going on in the Merchant / Commerce community of SL, the better it is for Shopper, Merchant, and even LL & the Grid. I do not believe in the notion "we Merchants should not aire our concerns to the shoppers and that it is better to keep them blissfully happy and treat them like mushrooms on the grid". Our Shoppers are very intelligent well informed fellow residents that often know as much about what is going on in the commerce world as most of you Merchants know - because they are Merchants. That being said, my response to some points made: Again, on REFUND of SLM purchases and each Merchant's personal policy if they wish to "eat" "absorb" a fee that LL took and has no interest in returning. Its each Merchant's choice. In the real world, refunding a customer that has made a purchasing mistake of which there is a SUNK Cost to make the initial purchase and that portion is not included in the refund... this is COMMON PRACTICE. It even has a name. Its called a Re-Stocking Charge. In this case, the 5% LL commission that is a COST TO ME THE MERCHANT is clearly a sunk cost - re-stocking fee. I know it, the Customer knows it and more importantly in the 2 year in xstreet/slm, ALL my customers have been 100% OK with it. They were just happy that they actually got almost all their money back for a mistake they openly admit they made. So, if you are a Merchant that personally feels that you NEED to cover the costs that LL incurred and cannot be up-front with your customers for fear that they wont be understanding - MORE POWER TO YOU. LL loves you and so does your customers. But, my customers that were refunded 95% for their mistakes have loved me just as much and I have ALSO got a lot of repeat business from these customers as you all have got for rebating LL's cost. As for refunding, LL's 5%... it would be interesting to know from those of you Merchants that say you refund the 100%... what is the total price of your product? Are you selling items at $100L of which you are covering $5L of LL's cost or are you eat the 5% LL cost of a $10,000L product - i.e. you are eating $500L? Then you are very kind and generous. No one - not even my OP listing of reasons to buy inworld - implied that we are scolding Shoppers for buying on SLM. If that is where they want to buy - GREAT! Buy there. The list is just to inform my educated Customers what is happening behind the scenes before they make a buying decision. This is not taking away from their FUN IN SL as some have implied. LOL - I dont know any Shopper that is mad and crying because "Toy has demanded their buy inworld". If after reading the list of reasons - a Shopper says "wow I didnt know that - I have no issue buying at a merchants inworld store now that I know this - if it helps the merchant more and the SL economy"... the great. If a shopper says "good to know but I like shopping on SLM".... Great... keep doing it. No one was telling them otherwise. I truely believe and am in complete agreement with Rodvik's perception of LL's Customers - of which 99% of them are also all us Merchant's customers. The SL Resident Population is made up with a very large percent of highly technical and Internet Savvy people. They are not stupid. As such, any Merchant that takes the stance of treating them (the Shopper) as uneducated children that need to be protected from the big bad world of SL Commerce and dont inform them on whats going on for fear of them having some tantrum or "not being happy", is doing their own Merchant business as well as the SL Grid a disservice. But - we all have our opinions. Those are Toy's opinions.

BettyBoop String wrote: "If you have a purchase problem of any nature whereby you are entitled to a Refund, the Merchant is able to provide you 100% of your purchase price back. If you have the same issue from an SLM sale, the Merchant can only offer you 95% of your purchase as a refund. Why? Because LL has the other 5%. So if you are looking for $1000L refund, the Merchant can only offer you $950L of it – he doesn’t have the rest." I'm going to be pedantic here and disagree with the choice of words because they are after all inaccurate. You state that the merchant "can only offer 95%". Sorry, that's plain wrong and a bit of a silly statement, I can choose to offer 100% and do, or I can offer 200% or any value actually it's entirely up to me, as it is any other merchant. The fact that LL has 5% is what a business would consider as a "cost of business". What about those merchants that charge their inworld price PLUS 5% to cover the commission cost. Should they give it all back since they charged extra to cover it? Think of it as an advertising fee, I don't care if it's called that or not, the point is that it's a cost, same as if I rent a mall spot and I have to refund something that someone bought there, do I say "I can only give you 95% back because I have to keep some to pay for the cost of the mall spot"? No, I don't, do you? However, i'm not against the suggestion that there should be an "issue refund" button on the marketplace web page for the merchant to use which did a 95% refund from the merchant and a grab on the 5% from Marketplace Linden but there isn't so i'll continue to just shrug and consider it a cost of business until then. (I'm not holding my breath) Betty, you can offer 800% Refund to your Customer that accidently bought the same product twice - most often because of a SLM Delivery delay... more power to you on that if that is how you want to run your business. But, I have had countless customers make buying mistakes on SLM and inworld. For those on SLM that make a buying mistake, I tell them openly an dup front that I am more than happy to refund them all the money that I received from the SLM transaction but I tell them that the 5% of the SLM transaction that went to LL I cannot return - they would have to talk to LL. I also encourage them to shop inworld more often to avoid issues like LAGGED delivery and the 5% commission are not an issue.... 100% of all my customers that I have refunded with this policy have been perfectly understandable about it. But if you feel you need to cover LL's costs... that is your policy. Generally I stick to my point and we simply must agree to disagree.

Jenni Darkwatch wrote: I generally only windowshop in SLM because it's ridiculously impossible and time-consuming to find anything in-world. The only reason I often go to a merchants store is to see the item rezzed. My _preference_ would be a good in-world "SLM" of sorts. Dont we all wish for that. Its pretty bad that as bad as SLM search is - we are wishing that inworld search AT LEAST had the search / sort / display capabilities of SLM search.

but more importantly is the big concern I have that the LL commerce team will be deploying AIS (whatever it stands for) with no flexibility to TAKE INVENTORY from a Merchant configured target Avatar or alternate inventory other than the merchants main personal inventory. IF LL Development has some real ARCHITECTURE THINKING ppl on staff as opposed to a team that just writes code to solve a specific perceived problem (as they are doing now), then they would have developed an architected solution that would be moreso SERVICE ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE. As such, the new AIS module of code should have a standard input / output interface that would allow LL the ability to take the SLM items from any inventory, like: The Merchant's Main Personal inventory (the way they are currently heading) A Mechant's future 2ndary or alternate Inventory (something that currently does not exist in SL's data model) The Main Inventory of an Avatar account other than the Merchant's main account (as configured by the Merchant) The content of any designated Rezzed object as selected by the Merchant (uhmm like perhaps a MAGICBOX?) This AIS design would be much more flexible and provide LL with a lot more future flexibility - even though right now they see no value in this flexibility. Sadly, I have watch how LL comes up with designs and solutions in the past 3+ years and this type of Strategic Solution Designing from LL is a foreign concept to them. They fit 100% into a typical Startup Company with no mature enterprise classed systems/software design methodologies and planning. Their solutions are the SHOOT FROM THE HIP. They write solutions to solve specific problems and do not look beyond the immediate pains. So.... I doubt the AIS will be written the way it should be. Lets look back at this posting in a few months to see if I was right.