Selling out of boxes?

I am really considering getting rid of vendors and selling out of boxes... mainly to make things easier to view and unpack...
My question is, how do you keep track of sales when you sell from boxes?
Also which do you prefer, vendor or boxes?

I prefer boxes to vendors, both as a seller and a buyer. I prefer to have everything load at once, even if that takes a bit longer to rez at first, and be able to just zoom around a store and stop on whatever catches my eye.

Keeping track of sales isn't as easy with boxes, of course. I don't script my boxes, so no emails are sent or data gathered from the sales. I just check my Account History in-world or Transaction History here on the site to see what's selling and what isn't, or to check and see what so-and-so bought if they message about gift permissions or anything.

I've been considering starting some vendors for sale items or older merchandise, but I hate loading vendors so much I never get around to it.

I sell primarily from boxes, and I prefer to buy from boxes.

Vendors can be time consuming to set up, and I am very lazy. I use holo-vendors when prim limits force me to. But I usually procrastinate in setting these up. To track sales from boxes, I just check my sales on the My Account part of the SL web site.

I like to buy from boxes because I can more easily verify what I am buying and what the perms will be.

I think it depends on you you intend to sell. One advantage of vendors is that once you set one up, you can simply take a copy of it and set that out at various locations, which can be much easier than boxes. Also, if you do have multiple locations, consider a server-based vending system so that you don't have to go to each of your locations each time you update - you just update the server.

I prefer using boxes though for my own sales - I can make it so that the customer receives a folder, instead of a box they have to unpack, and I just think they're "friendlier."

And also--in Second Life 1.10, "click actions" will allow you to set a box so you can rez it on the ground, click on it, and Contents will appear (instead of doing it through right-clicking). There's also an easy button to transfer contents to inventory.

Hopefully this will ease it some; while my finangling with boxes has at times been painful, I see the most amazing packaging sometimes, and that makes it worth it!

Ok, I didn't know about this! Will it also create the folder automatically? If so this is really nice. I too love the packaging and have created some nice packages myself, though I am loathe to use them because unboxing has always been a pain.

For those that use boxes instead of vendors, does it cause alot of loading time considering there is tons of textures now to load? or would it equal out since there are alot less scripts being used?

It does create the folder too. It was requested for a long time, and hey, gotta fulfill such a useful request.

On the down side of selling from boxes ... I've been to places that have massive walls filled with 1x1 flat boxes ... sometimes it seems like they run 100 meters high .. although its probably more like 30 ...

I find that so off-putting .. I dont hang around long enough for anything to catch my eye ... makes my neck hurt just thinking about trying to look at all of that.

So in that respect vendors allow for a different kind of browsing, without wearing out your cam controls.

For the record, it seems my things sell best when they are actually there ... present in all their prim-ness. Better than vendors; better than boxes. Maybe it's a more compelling shopping experience when you an interact with something instead of just looking at a picture.

That's my thinking on the matter

I asked about this on another thread. (Granted, the person who answered wasn't a Linden, but he seemed knowledgeable, and his answer made sense.) A well scripted vendor with X number of products causes less lag than X number of boxes. It's fewer textures to load, and fewer prims to render.

As a seller, I usually use vendors. They cause less lag, use fewer prims (not that I need to be stingy about prims at this point), and I can group together objects that are part of a outfit or series. It doesn't hurt that my vendors are extremely easy to set up. I sell 25 variations of a few pieces of jewelry, for instance, so rather than sticking 25 boxes on the wall, they all go in a single vendor. Any truly stand alone items go in a box. I'm thinking of setting up a directory system to tell people exactly what's in each vendor, so they know where to go if they want product X or not to bother slogging through Y vendor if they're not interested in product Z, but I don't know how many people would use it. I can barely get customers to read the stuff on the product pictures themselves, at times.

As a consumer, I sort of prefer boxes. It's nice to see, all at once, what colors and variations of a given interesting product are available. (The downside is that it's not so nice to have to load all the colors and variations of the products I'm not interested in.) The other problem I have with buying from vendors is that I don't like the way many people organize them. If there are many different kinds of objects in the vendor, then I've got to click through the whole thing to see if anything good pops up. If it's all the same type of product -- well, I've still got to slog through it if I like the product, but otherwise I can ignore it.

I like both, but there are less complications when you sell out of boxes. Vendors are affected much more heavily by lag and scripting snafu's. I keep track of my box sales by checking my account history.

I use boxes a lot of the time, because I like the aesthetic of having everything in an individual crate, and it displays the whole product line at once without people having to flick through a vendor.

On the other hand, if I had hundreds of things to sell I'd use a vendor. I use one to distribute freebies - it's a very simple one that I made myself, where you just drop the item in and it updates etc automatically. I have 25 or so freebies and I add to that list all the time, so I don't want to have to create new textures for each one.

Also: everyone past their first day or two knows how to buy from a box. Vendors vary.

I use boxes plus products showed rezed in my EXAKT store(s). It uses a h*** lot of prims but people se what they get.

I have a vendor in inv - and printed out the manual and fainted.. BUT I will (need) put it up as my primlimit are...

As a consumer I have shopped from vendors but its so slow.. take time and mostly are no fun...I love to walk in stores that are filed with things.. I get a feeling a lot faster what i want and not...

/Tina

It depends on what you mean by "lag".

Boxes impact the server less than a vendor, as a vendor must be scripted.

Obviously, a hundred boxes, each with a unique texture, will take longer to rez than a single vendor that only loads textures as viewed.

Which solution is 'best' really depends on what you're aiming for.

On our sim, Zyrra and I exclusively use boxes, but we're very careful to use 256x256 textures to cut down on the load times. I do hear comments occasionally from customers talking to each other, such as "just a minute, waiting for everything to rez," so I think there is an impact, but I think it's minor if you take steps to reduce other lag variables. And a "wall" of boxes, all the same size, all crammed together can be intimidating to look at, so we also make our displays so there is one or two large pictures, and the others are smaller and grouped around the large one to create individual, easily visible displays.

Thanks guys I am horrible at displaying stuff so I think I will get Asri to help me out lol

For me, vendors win hands down both from a consumers and a sellers perspective.

As a consumer, I've noticed that places that sell from boxes only and have hundreds of products, makes it a) very difficult to search every box to find the item you are looking for as opposed to leafing through a few vendors and b) all those prims DO cause lag, both server side and client side (and my computer is no slouch).

As a seller I prefer vendors because it allows me to offer far more items for sale than my land could handle boxes (unless all I had out were the boxes for sale, and that doesn't make for much of a shopping/exploring experience either). While some vendors can wreak havok when it comes to lag, any well written vendor will produce far less lag than the hundreds of prims required for box selling. Take the JEVN system for instance: it is an extremely well written server based vending system that while idle produces no lag and while being used produces very minimal lag. JEVN has been extensively tested for it's lag producing capabilities and has come out a champion and is actually the preffered vendor in many rental malls because of it's extremely low lag production.

As for ease of use, for me there is really no difference except that when using a vendor I don't have to use my camera controls to see everything (or fly in the case of a large shopping area), I simply click through, find what I want and (just like a box) right click and select buy.

So again I say, vendors win hands down!

I use a freebie low-lag vendor system, and most of my store locations right now actually are set up with 4 such vendors mounted to a decorative 'back wall' prim, so I can categorize merchandise better. All told, I use 13 prims to display well over 30 items, and I could have 4x that number in the system without expanding farther. That makes it very economical for me to set up a shop in a mall - I can rent the minimum space, keep my overhead low, and still sell anything I make. The vendors don't e-mail me or do other fantastic things. I use the reports on the SL website for my accounting.

For my texture sales, I use a standard texture pack vendor that TRU uses on all their stuff. One prim per bundle, and a script that handles selling the contents and splitting sales profits and e-mails sales recipts. Works rather well!

I am considering moving to a networked vendor, for ease of doing updates, and also so at one location I can split sales income with the site owner, rather than paying a flat monthly rent. Right now, I rez a copy of my kiosk, update it, then replace what is at each store with the updated vendor, changing the nendor names at each site to allow me to track sales by locatiion. For example "Fashion Vendor - The Forest", "T-shirts - The Forest". It would be nice to just do it once and be done with it!

As a customer, I can't shop in stores that have hundreds of textures on the wall. It takes far too long to load, and my system's too slow. If store A has 30 boxes on the wall, and store B has 30 items in one low-lag vendor, store B is far likely to sell to me. Most vendors, I can flip through the selection and read the hover text, without waiting for the image to rez. If a description sounds intriguing, I wait for that to rez so I can see the product. If all I see is a wall of grey, unrezzed textures, I keep walking.

Boxes.

Just easier to deal with - even with the ability to script my own vendors to do exactly what I like - I've found it's just easier to deal with individual boxes.

I've noticed more sales too - people don't have to pissfart around clicking buttons and such.

As for sales tracking - I just put a shop identifier at the end of the box name so you'd have something like 'WaterSlide - (Ga)' which would let me know it sold from Garrison .. or 'Beachtowel (WW)' would tell me it sold from my main WaterWorks store.

Farting around with vendors was the #1 reason for me pulling back from different locations to the maybe 4 (and dropping) places I sell from at this time.

I use a networked vendor, so I have only one place to update. Coupled with the fact that I hate stores filled with little boxes it just made sense for me.

As others have noted, with the poor caching now rampant in SL, going into some of these sell by box places results in near constant rezzing as you move around, even when you go back to something you just looked at. I find most such stores extremely laggy as well. On top of that, finding something out of those hundreds of boxes is nigh on impossible. I far prefer a shop with categorized vendors. I can page through those quickly, reading the text descriptions, then wait for the one image to rezz when I find what I want.

I use vendors. I usually write my own and they are all scripted to give items in a folder. The only reason I do this is so that I can email out purchases and/or not necessarily give everything in the box. If done right this won't cause any lag, doesn't use listens, sensors, etc. Shadow and I have been working on some vendors that allow use of categories. We've gotten it fast enough that even with hundred plus items in the vendor there's almost no delay when sorting through them. You can add and remove things without having to tell it to update. Can even do it on the fly while people are using the vendor. Shadow is already using them if you want to check them out. We're doing a bit more refining before selling them to other people but should have that done soon.

Best to get in line early at at the box store just in case they sell out of boxes.

too late, I bought the last one. I'll sell it for 1.5M L... any takers? common, the last freakin box in sl people! (damn environmentalists shut down the prim rig)

How did I know you would create something like this???? Let me know when it's for sale... although I heard they have a new feature that unpacks a box into a folder in your inventory... hmmm

I have always only used selling boxes except for a short time last summer. I believe that boxes can sell your products better if they are displayed correctly.
the biggest hassle with selling boxes is set up it takes along time to set up a lot of boxes one at a time.
that's why several months ago I started building standard set ups for my items in different size configurations.
i can now set up a 250 prim one drop shop in less time then it takes to set out a half a dozen vendors.

as for tracking sales i do it in a less orthodox way i use gmail lol. what i do is copy and past my in world transaction history that shows all payments and purchases made from me. i copy that in to an email and send it to my self using the date in the subject line.
gmail has such a great search function that i can pull up any transaction made by anyone going back to when i started doing this a year ago