Advice please

I'm still in my first month of SL and so far have been ripped off twice due to client/grid crashes. Both times I have tried to get what was owed by an IM to the responsible party. Both times I got nothing. The most recent shows clearly in my transactions log. I made a purchase, I was charged and the client crashed. I never got my item.

What can I do? I sent an IM about it to the store owner and they didn't reply.

dont spend money in SL


problem solved.

Sometimes store owners get bogged down in Real Life. People get sick, go on vacation... there could be any number of reasons. People selling items in SL want your business and are usually responsive. I would give them some time to respond.

Sorry to hear you've had a rough first month .. I've been here over 12 months and hav'nt been ripped off.

Don't give up trying to contact the vendors involved .. maybe send a notecard .
.. Inventory/Create/New Note ..

If this was just a rogue walking around and you bought by word of mouth from him/her just try to remain calm and polite .. maybe it will pay off.

By large most of the "proffesional" vendors here will try to work out any issues .. there livelyhood here depends on happy customers.

Good luck .. hope it works out OK.

hi, i would send a notecard to the person too, you will know when they are online once they accept it, also if he receives a lot of IM's he might never see yours, because they will not be logged after a certain number.

goodluck

- check their policy, some offer no refund
- search for the creator's profile, some leave behind instructions on how to contact them
- send the creator(s) a notecard explaining your situation including the transaction's details of that particular item that you bought

Let's see, Client crashed - LL responsibility.
Log states you paid for it, money withdrawn by LL's software - LL responsibility.
LL can check your inventory and see that the item isn't there - LL responsibility.

Gee, I'd say send a bill to Linden Lab, their software, their glitch, their responsibility. Why would you think it's the shop keepers? They have no control over LL's software. Put the responsibility where it belongs...Linden Lab.

I agree it is Linden's equipment, but they didn't collect the money the store owner did. That is why I think it is their responsibility. She got the dough I want the goods.

Whether or not the owner does refunds is irrelevant. I'm not asking for a refund. I want the products I paid for.

Thanks for the note card suggestions. I didn't know there was a limit to the number of IM's. She did respond to one IM, but not the one asking for her to make good on my purchase.

Hi Whisper, yes, IM's get cut off after a certain number (I've never found out that magic number) so unless the shop owner is having her IM's sent to email, she might never even see your message. She WILL see your notecard, though, as she'll be forced to accept or reject it as soon as she logs in.

And don't forget that august and september are big holiday vacation months for a lot of people. Who knows, she might actually have a Real Life (RL!) Seriously though, good luck.

Whisper, on the other side of that, I sold something and the buyer said they never received it.

I IM'd them in reply, but have not heard back from THEM again. i happen to have my IM's sent to email, but not all people do. be patient and wait for them to come online again. send some follow up IM's, and be nice. nastiness will get you nothing.

you catch more flies with honey and all that jazz.

I don't know what to tell you--personally, I've been in SL for years, and never had anything like this happen. I guess some people are less fortunate in that way.

The only thing I can recommend is find a hardware/software combination that is more stable before you spend any more money.

*shrugs*

From the store owner's points of view, it's gonna be hard to believe your story..since many many times people will feed us a BS story about this and that happened to my item so you owe me a new one. Really, it's your responsibility to make sure your computer is well enough to run SL. If you are losing inventory over your computer not being good enough to run SL, why should the store owners have to make up for that?
That being said, I'm sure if you are nice and send a notecard, the owners will IM you back.

The big problem is that even though you have a record of having made a payment to the merchant, when a sale fails because of LL system failure, the best a merchant has is a note that they received funds from you. The system gives them no indication of your non-receipt of goods. When a sale is successful, the merchant's records show exactly the same thing: a payment from you, but no confirmation of delivery of product.

Depending on the cost and permissions of the product and the merchant's interest in customer goodwill, *some* merchants will take your word for it and give you "another" instance of the purchase; some won't. This system failure has been hell on the merchants over the past few months and I expect they may be as frustrated as you about it.

Unfortunately, Linden Lab doesn't care at all whether a transaction completed or not. Well, they might care in the abstract, but they aren't going to make good on the failed transaction in part because even they don't know if the transaction completed. This is a fundamental flaw in SL. Sorry you got bitten and that there is no recourse.

I haven't been nasty, and like I said she did reply to one IM within a day. Seems a bit suspicious that there was nothing when I had an issue.

I will send a note card. This is a well established business I am a bit surprised by this.

All other business dealings I have done have been very professional. I had a problem with a security HUD and the vendor came to me to work out the fix.

I believe this non-display after a certain number relates back to a client update addressing a spam problem. Since then I've had packages open and transfer to inventory with a stack of notecards, gestures etc that flag up this notice about too many images to preview.
This worried me once but on reflection, it was only the preview that didn't happen. The items still went to inventory. Of course, if this is an unexpected IM from a customer, simply going to inventory isn't going to get read!!!
Just my background thought on this.

I am surprised at the mention that LL have no immediate feedback of whether bought for goods have been delivered. What a glaring omission in programming or am I the only person to think this? I would think for any present day transactions RL or SL there should be a full Delivery Tracking implemented.
Wouldn't this be worth generating a Jira or have I missed a relevant thread on this matter?
I would think this a worthwhile development whichever direction LL want to steer SL unless they foresee closing resident created content down completely.

From observation of a class of SL defects, it seems very likely that the client was written with the expectation that database writes would never fail. This assumption worked fine when the concurrency was a few hundred avatars but fails miserably now. Incidents like half-completed purchases and building "snap-back" arise when the client sends the database an operation like "put purchase in avatar inventory" or "set texture of prim to this" and the database drops the request because of overload.

It is very hard to go back and retrofit transactional integrity for all client actions when it wasn't there in the first place. So far LL's efforts to fix this seem to be attempting to speed up the database rather than fix the underlying issue.

Ah, the famous biker slogan 'bodge it with a bungee'
Yes, I can see they'd go for the symptom rather than the cause. Thanks Malachi for the explanation.

The magic number is 100.

I'm a bit surprised and disappointed that everyone thinks there is no point in appealing to LL about this.
I sometimes have people ask me for another copy of something they bought from me because they accidentally deleted it from their inventory themselves. I can go to my transaction history (from My Account on the SL web site) to confirm that I did receive the money from them for the item they are asking for. Since I sell copyable no transfer clothes of course I'm happy to give them another copy. It wouldn't be so easy if they wanted another copy of a piece of no-copy transferable art say.
Ideally LL would check to see who paid for what, whether they have what they paid for in their inventory and if not why not. Then make everything right.
Since the problem here was a crash I think I would at least try to get some help from LL.

People have tried and tried and tried to no avail.

Linden Lab won't even assist you with items that you have created yourself that have gone missing or are otherwise broken through LL's fault.

The first and last time I ever attempted such was in 2004 when I had a box, clearly made and owned by me, full of contents that were clearly made and owned by me which had become locked to me. This was in the days when you could say that LL tried to care. They wouldn't reset the permissions on the box so I could access my own creations.

LL doesn't care nor do they believe they ought to. And then they wonder why their retention of customers is so lousy.

/me agrees with sending the vendor owner a notecard. Give the notecard a good name ("Whisper Dallagio: items not recevied" or something) and include the info from your transaction history (especially the exact date/time) in it. Keep it short and polite.

If the objects were copy/no-transfer, most people will send you another copy.

This happened to me twice. The first time, like you, it was a crash straight after purchase and the seller made good the transaction after I sent her an IM.

The second time was a place where I used to go dancing in a private sim where the group pay for dancepads was quite good. On one occasion the dancepad failed to pay me, and I sent the owner the full details including which pad, the date and time etc, all of which could be checked from the pad itself in conjunction with transaction history. 2 or 3 IM reminders and one notecard brought nothing. In the end I just left the group and told her why, and left it at that. Some people are snakes. Its a hard lesson.

1 good 1 bad, I don't know if that's an average for SL...

Agreed. And make sure to double check the text in the notecard saved! I can't tell you the number of times I've received notes without any text.

Or spend someone else's money!

Wow ... sorry to hear that you've gotten hit twice. I've never had a problem. Although, I find myself doing most of my shopping on the SLExchange and OnRez web sites.

I recently had a purchase through the Exchange ... when I got the object in-world, it wasn't there next time I logged in. I sent a message to the seller and not only did she send me the object, she sent me some accessories for my inconvenience.

I bought something else in-world, and when I got them they were no copy/ trans. I really needed copy / no trans. I sent her a message, and she gladly took back my trans and gave me copy.

I have a wall mirror that I sell. It clearly states that it is for display only and does not show a reflection. However, someone bought it and then complained that it didn't show a reflection. She even quoted my disclaimer and said that I lied. I can only assume english was not her native language and she misunderstood. I refunded the $50L and didn't even ask for the mirror back.

I say all this simply to point out that most sellers want your business and will work with you to make sure that you ... the customer ... is happy.


Oh ... and in honor of today ....

Arrrrr ... Avast ye scurvy dogs!