Vendors or Prims?

Do you use vendors or prims in your store? Personally, I use boxes (i sell avatars) and res them in my store. I think it looks a lot better than a big screen that takes long to load and vendors look ugly to me. I've gotten lots of compliments on using the traditional prim loading store.

Prim stores are more upper-scale and class in my opinion. Vendors just look the same and are really too strip-mall-ish, for me at least. However, Nexus' The Source implements vendors really well.

I am prim guy...if I see a machine, will only look if what showing looks interesting, if not, won't look at all..

but if all out in a box (with picture on box), or actaully out, will look at it, if at all interested in the product.

So for me, a box or out is better then any vendor machines.

I think if you're getting started, that a prim is the best way to go. If you set it to "Sell Contents" it will create a folder in the user's inventory and automatically transfer all contents in the prim to that folder. Simple and efficient.

However a well designed vendor can reduce clutter and set up time. For instance I sell my animations in prims but I sell our Neualtenburg animated goods (chicken hat, steins) in a vendor. The vendor takes up a fraction of the space, is easy to grab and setup in another location, and can do advanced tracking of sales.

~Ulrika~

Well the basic problem is do you have prim space? I prefer boxes if I can get space for them. Our basic set out is about 70 boxes give or take a few. If you can't get the prim space, a mix of vendor and boxes works nicely. Let's you highlight new items or hot sellers.

More important than boxes or vendors I think is the question of resolution. If you use 256 textures for both your vendors and boxes, you will have a nice quick texture load and help do your part to minimize lag. Vendors which load quickly are more likely to get used. I have spots where my textures load before the site.

Hope that helps...

Surreal

I have general guideline that tends to work pretty well..

if I have more products in that range than I have prims in the vendor - I make a vendor.

If less, I use boxes..

Wherever possible I try to leave demo models of anything I think is interesting, or that people may find cool (reclining lay z boy - couples dances).

If Jonquille goes poser crazy (and I suspect that will be a possibility) I may make an animation vendor at some point.

Siggy.

I use both myself. Vendors if I'm very limited by prims, and whatever I lke in my own store or where I can spread widely (rental space with 40-50 prims - yeah I don't have that many items to sell yet, hehe). To me it's more a matter of prims and of what is allowed or not in a specific place. For instance, one of the places where I rent a shop encourages people to avoid objects updated through chat and "talking" items, so I use single-prims there, to avoid exactly that. Etc.

Vendors for a couple reasons...

1. There's nothing quite like being able to sell your entire catalog from a 8x8m spot. I currently have 30 different car/color combinations (with at least 10 more on the way), and One Vendor To Vend Them All. It makes the most use of limited space and limited prims, and allows me to inch my way into cheap retail nooks where a traditional showroom wouldn't fit.

2. Easy field upgrades. All I have to do is rez the new vendor, set its group, and say a command. The rest is automated via scripts. Whole process takes maybe 20 seconds. When you've got 10 retail spots to upgrade, this helps!

3. Little extras that only a scripted vendor can do. Free test drives are the killer app here. Visitor stat counting and IM reporting have also been crucial for me lately, letting me evaluate how successful each individual retail spot is, both in terms of raw visitors and "click-through rate".

4. Uniqueness. I have yet to see any other holographic vendor that lets you pick from several options at a time in a list. Most of them only allow you to cycle through via next/previous buttons. And I've only seen one other test drive script in SL (and it wasn't for cars). I want my vendor to give off an aura of "wow, Cereal knows what the hell he's doing" - that is IMPORTANT for sales.

But of course vendors are not without their disadvantages...

1. Some people, especially new users, may be afraid to pay a machine and then trust that machine to deliver the goods.

2. Some people may be too lazy to browse through a vendor. It's easier to see the stock when it's all out on the floor at once. (This is why I try, when possible, to have a few cars rezzed out in addition to the vendor.)

3. I've heard people say my vendor is too complicated. Of course, I've also heard people say my vendor is great and that the previously-mentioned people are idiots. Regardless, there's a "user interface beauty is in the eye of the beholder" angle here.

4. Some mall owners are anal about sim performance issues, both real and perceived, and frown upon certain types of vendors.

5. Not everyone is Johnny Codes-A-Lot, and while there are a variety of good turnkey vendor kits out there, you might not find a vendor that's exactly what you need.

All in all, though, I'd say the good of vendors outweighs the bad, at least in my particular field. There's just too much they can do, that boxes or rezzing-for-sale can't do. I'm not afraid to use technology to give myself the edge.

That's my L$2.

neo's clock stores employee a brilliant scheme. full prim sample clocks are displayed surrounded by small textured boxes. you buy a clock from an associated box that's displaying the texture you want your clock to have.

I prefer object boxes, but do use vendors from time to time. However in order to minimize texture lag in shopping areas, I concur with Surreal that it is much better to use textures that are sized to 256x256 pixels. They load A LOT faster. I can always tell when someone is using 1024x1024 textures cause I have to wait like upwards of 5 minutes for things to load, which usually annoys me. Patience is a virtue, one which I am sorely lacking

It has been interesting to watch the transition to vendors, and now back away from them. When 1.2 came out, everyone was so prim conscious that vendors seemed the only way to go. Slowly, we have seen a shift away from vendors back to prims. I use specially made animation vendors in my store because you can cycle through all the animations while inside the machine, instead of having to click on each box and click the permission dialog,so for useability, it is necessary. My art gallery has always been prims, though I do use vendors in my tshirt shop. I may rethink that eventually. Vendors definitely have a place in SL, but I am glad to see the return of the prim boxes - it is something I found so magical when I first joined SL, and the world seemed more generic with giant vendors everywhere.

There are also some amazing examples of vendors out there that go so far beyond the standard vendors and create a whole new shopping experience. Cereal Milk and Furaz Chung come to mind as having two quite amazing vendors. I think we will always see a combo of vendors and prims, but thankfully there is a balance again. Now if we can just get the people who sell in prims to use the damn Sell Contents option consistently - there is nothing more frustrating than dragging a bunch of shit one by one out of a box, when a much better option is available.

I use vendors where I sell in small areas (my 'mini-stores') or on someone else's land. As was stated above, it's so easy to just fly around and replace the old vendors with new ones after you've restocked.

In my own mall, and at the two locations I have specialized for selling prefab housing, I put the prim boxes out, because the boxes have fairly detailed pictures of the houses which benefit from being displayed on a larger surface. I also have a few samples of furniture out in the mall, because 1) I hope that seeing a couple of items will encourage people to go through the vendor for more, and 2) bookshelves double as display racks!

I use a combination of vendors, boxes and alpha standees. I have way too large an inventory to use strictly boxes, but only using vendors isn't very aesthetically pleasing in a store. Using a combination allows be to highlight the new stuff and the best sellers, then cycle it into the vendors when I create newer products.

If I had the prims and space to do strictly boxes, I'd go that route, but that would require a lot more land than I want to own.