A question for vendors and merchants...

In your experience, how many items can I place in an automated vendor before people become tired of stepping through to find the item that they are looking for?

I am trying to organize my stock and I want to make sure that each vendor provides as much "Face time" for each product as it can...

I have made my vendors as easy to use as possible and the images rez pretty quickly (Thank you Hiro Pendragon...bless you!), so time between image rezzes is not likely to be a pressing issue, but if there are, say, 50 items in a vendor, a good portion of them will be skipped over...

So, what's a good number for items in a vendor?

not many, is the answer!

I'm actually one of the worst offenders, too

If I flick thru half a dozen things that dont inspire me I'll usually just stop looking. If there's more than 20 on one set of nav buttons I probably wont look at all

At least break them up by category or something, if possible. You can still have them in the same vendor, but if I want to skip stuff I'd rather skip to the next category than have to press your next button 50 times. Same for going backwards and forwards through it to get to something - honestly, there have been times when I've been like "ok, I WOULD have had that first blue skirt but I can't be bothered flicking back 40 times to it, so fuggedit!"

That's part of the reason my own vendors have selectable subdivided categories. There are hundreds of items in them, but all in manageable 'chunks'.

It'd be nice if there was a menu that would allow you to go to the item you want particularly after the first go round. Color variations of the same item can use up a lot of time to cycle through, too. An easier way to select the item once you know the name of it and bypass the cycling would be efficient.

Like... a bookmark! There is absolutely no reason why a vendor couldnt allow you to bookmark an item to return to!

And yes, if you're done browsing and didn't make up your mind first time round, a way of getting a simple text list of the contents that allows you to pick by name or number.

These are all really good ideas...

OK... I guess I am gonna have to write a vendor after all...
I was hoping to avoid it and just Use Hiro Pendragon's Free ones, but you both bring up REALLY good points.

If I am lucky, Hiro will let me look at his code and I can have something that works well by the time of my Grand Opening...
Otherwise, it may take a bit longer.

I may have a side venture coalescing here...
Free products for merchants to improve their customers' shopping experiences...
---Nice packaging that does not default as headwear.
---More flexible vendors with Product line selection and bookmarks
---Classes for new merchants on the process of merchandising in SL (I'll be looking for instructors for this one, since I am still learning)
---Maybe an SL Merchant's Guild, with a Landmark ring among the members, improving the ability of customers to find what they are looking for more efficiently while favoring members of the Guild over the unincluded non-members...

The Market influence possibilities are almost endless...
Hell, just increasing the standard a little for merchants in SL would make me happy... and a lot of other people too...
And if I can make it EASY for the merchants to increase that standard, all the better!

KEEP THE IDEAS COMING!!

I sell a vending system that lets you display up to 16 items per page. Specifically designed for vendors with lots of items. You can find it at any of my stores, see my profile picks

Im starting to prefer vendors that display 10+ items on one large panel much like the ones Kyrah uses/makes. Nice to quickly scan thru a dozen or so items and since there are more per 'page'; scrolling back to find a previous product is quick and easy. Granted this solution wont work in every situation but I like it.

Ohh I'll have to check that out. I hope they are copy/no-trans.

Those with lots on a page are good. But they really should have bookmarks or something. It takes patience to scroll through a vendor with 3000 items on it, even when they are 10-16 to a page. Then it takes a bunch more patience to try to go back to find the one(s) you liked best.

coco

Is this a flat vendor??

Do you have a holo version? Flat images don't work as well with Techno-organic lines...

Even if it IS flat, I will be looking at your product... I have other lines where it is not practical to rez a holomodel and I would be interested in whether or not your product can help with those.

For those interested, here is what I envision for the holovendor (Please critique):

In addition to the usual forward and back arrow buttons, there would be a central button used to bring up a dialog box that lists products by :
---Line (Individual buttons for "Fluidity", "Sylvan", "Sphinx", etc...) or by
---Function( Indiv buttons for "Combat Craft", "Passenger Aircraft", "Hoverbikes", etc., for example).
---Bookmarked Items
---All Items

When a customer selects what they want displayed, the dialog box will close and the vendor will update the stepthrough list to include only the items in that category.

If a customer presses the bookmark button, the item's ID is added to the current customer's bookmark list and when the customer selects "Bookmarked Items" in the dialog box, that list is used for stepthrough.

Purchasing is as normal.
No additional lag will be generated by these additional buttons, because they are "on touch" and the listener script is already listening... only two more conditionals need be added to the logic there (although the conditional processes themselves are likely to be a bit tricky).

Thoughts?
Additional suggestions?
Wishlist?

Also, as customers, what are your feelings about demographic data collection?
If you use my vendor to actually make a purchase, how would you feel if I were to collect demodata about the sale? I am not planning on using anything like name-data... just what was purchased, when, and how many in a given transaction. ("Transaction" being defined purchases by the same person in the same session... and yes, your key will be used to determine that, but I have no intentions of keeping it...just the data described.).

I have no problems at all with that data collection. If it's your stuff you're selling, I figure all the info about who bought it and where and when belongs to you.

coco

Thanks, Coco..

You'd be surprised the number of people that feel very differently as soon as the data becomes non-anonymous...

Of course, with marketeers compiling spam lists every day... I can't say I blame them.

I like the bookmark idea... another cool thing would be if the vendor would act like just about every commercial webpage, and allow you to tag specific items as being in your "shopping cart" for possible purchase, then allow you to confirm which items you actually want to buy and get them all in one fell swoop. I'm not sure that's even possible, but then I've seen a lot of things done in SL that I didn't know were possible.

I think it's possible. I just don't think it would be practical right away...

The scripting for something like that would not be the problem... the interface would.

People in SL are used to scrolling through product and buying what they want when they see it on the screen...

Implementing the bookmarked items set moves up one step closer to the shopping cart idea, but I don't think people would intuitively know how to shop in that fashion in SL right away.

For one thing, the instant gratification of buying that item RIGHT NOW is hardly outweighed by the convenience of making a single transaction for mutiple purchase items. It's not like you swipe a card or write a check for each item... you click "YES" and POOF.. the item is yours. You sroll through some more stuff... see something you like and click yes again.

ok
here's my take on vendors.

as some one who has a few shops in second life and does not use vender's except in extreme instances where prim count does not allow me more prims i use single selling boxes using the buy option.

why would some one with as many shops and in so many different locations use single prim selling boxes. knowing that it is much more work and time consuming?

there are 2 answers to this question
the first is and most important because we are selling stuff here. single prim selling boxes sell better then a vendor. i did a 3 month test this past summer with vendor set ups and single prim set ups in similar locations and some in the same locations . and always gave the vendor the better selling space. and the single prims sold way more then the vendors ever would.
the second reason single prims look better then vendors IMHO

Crucial,

I appreciate you taking time to contribute to the thread... Your market research is most interesting.

So that I can better understand the implications, could you please highlight the difference between a "Single Prim Selling box" and "Vendor"?

I have been using "Vendor" to mean any automated selling device, including but not limited to:

---Single prim/single merch (Only one item of stock per vendor, displayed unchanging on at least one side of the prim) This is what I THINK you mean by "Single Prim Selling box", but want to be certain.

--- single prim step throughs (Uni-directional by nature) Usually a flat screen that responds to touch by moving the display forward one item in the stock list.

--- three (or more) prim flat screens (Bi-directional or categorical browsing.) Two dimensional display of merchandise being sold. Sometimes with multiple merch images at one time.

--- three (or more) prim Holo-vendors that rez a slowly rotating model of the merchandise being sold with bi-directional or categorical browsing. (Good for vehicles, weapons and items of unusual shape that would not render well in a flat image... Not good for clothes or avatar shapes and attachments.)

I just want to make sure we are all using the same language to describe the same things. That's how real communication happens.

yes this is exactly what i mean by single prim---one prim, one item or set of items placed in the box and no scripts. you set the box to sell the contents of the box and the item or items in the box are transferred to the buyer in a folder.

this is the simplest way to sell items and IMHO it is the best

I have two things to contribute:

As a shopper, I get bored quickly ... if I look at 4 or five things in a vendor and they are all similar, chances are I'll skip the rest of the content, assuming its "more of the same". However if each thing is very different ... Im much more likely to run the list, just to see what all is there. Time to rez images is imporant ...

If I see something Im not sure about ... and the only way back is to make the full circle or to back up an unknown number of times ... I may not; buying on impulse has its limitations ... that impulse may not last long.

In walls of vendors or large sets of images ... I find it all very confusing ... nothing to scan ... it all becomes a jumble in my head. Course Im pretty linear when it comes to processing information ... I forget the actual Human Dynamic ... but I've been to a few places that sent me packing because it was just huge walls of images .. either one prim/object vendors or multi-object vendors.

As a merchant, I dont use vendors much. Based on my experience over the past year or so I think my work sells best when people can see and touch it ... so to speak. Not sure why that is but I always seem to do better when I can put objects out. Is why I have so much stuff out at my own market in Yamato ...

Besides I always forget to take screen shots to use in the vendors. )

Anyway, my 2L$ on the subject

just released a vendor with multiscreens, categories and can store up to 200 + items
just do a search for memnochs madness at grange

oh also with a info button for info on each item and a default card just to tell about the seller when the item is not selected.

three or four I'd say!