Bad Customer, Bad Store Owner, or SL borked?!?

10 months old now, finally got brave enough to try to add a Script to a prim

Long story, short version... Bought my 1st Script today for $L99...
(Master Scriptor's store....No names.... I know) Anyways $L was paid....waited and waited.. but no item received Then the store seems to boot me back to my home?

Sent IM to Store owner/Item creator (who was online) No reply! So I thought IM's capped! Sent notecard just to be sure ..... Notecard was not accepted (store owner/creator refused inventory offer )

Tp'd back to Store and was met with ban lines .... not allowed access to this parcel....Banned!!

Was it me... did I miss something? Has this Store owner the right to just take my cash, fail to deliver the goods then Ignore and Ban me!?!

Confused and Annoyed,
Velda.

Shame that it happened, but all you can really do is accept the fact that you've lost L$99 and remember to not shop there again.

Word of warning, though... if you get too persistent in trying to get your money back, the owner may consider it as hassassment and file an AR against you. Better to just leave it be.

On a side note, what script are you after? Most are freely available either inworld or here, in the forums.

It never stops the wonders what people go thur to make money. 99L is wirth banning someone from their land? Wel then again maybe its their own RL income they make and they have to be cheap and do these types of things. Not everyone is like this cheap ********. Sooner or later it will catchup with him.

Hi Velda,

Bummer! I'm sorry to hear about your experience. But, as Butch says, thousands of scripts are available as freebies. Scripters are cool that way. It's a possibility that the shop owner thought you were going to complain that he is selling free scripts. I got booted from a script store for doing just that. What is it that you were looking for?

O

Velda, sorry you had a bad experience. I'd suggest looking in Search > Events > Education for any beginning scripting classes at the NCI Centers, <ASL>, Dreams Classrooms or any of the other learning centers. Most will have free scripts offered and you can always ask about reputable script shops. The classes rotate every few weeks, so you'll find one quickly and they are usually offered at different times for the various RL time zones. Be sure to go to any NCI Center to pick up a selection of free scripts at the freebie section.

velda, i have more freebie scripts than i can ever use. IM me inworld on Wednesday and i'll shoot over the version of what you are after, IF i happen to have it.

that guy is FAMOUS for that.
its not just you, he loves banning people from his freebie script reselling shop.

Just a note, the WL client (maybe normal too?) no longer seems to be telling you that you received your items, atleast for me.

If you do a search for it in your inventory it's like magicly there even though you didn't get a notice about receiving it. Not sure when that started as I don't shop much but the other day it happened 4 times in a row in different stores as I was on a shopping spree.

First tie I waited 5 mintues and almost wrote the store owner but then did a careful inventory search and sure enough, it was there...

What have I been saying about shop owners? You see? Then some of you come out telling me how nice they really are. If they were nice and very few are then you wouldn't see threads like this all the time. And this is when people want their horror stories known, most time they don't print it here.

Most are nothing but greedy, egotiscal morons who have no idea how to run a business by treating customers the correct way.

Yesterday, I wanted to buy a waterfalls, not for the waterfalls itself but to take it apart and use the rocks since they were really beautiful. But as always it was non-copy, non-mod. I sent the owner a IM and a notecard which I saw he accepted. NC said if he made it mod for me I would pay him a lot more then the price he was asking.

I had looked for this particular texture for a while now and had yet to find it. But here it was so I waited for a response. I never got one although he received both the IM and notecard. Finally after several hours I wrote him again telling him he should of had the decency to respond to a would-be customer. I added he had lot to learn about customers and running a business correctly. I then muted his ass and I told him not to bother responding now as I wouldn't be receiving it.

Greed and paranoida rule these so-called merchants of sl. You can count the decent ones on one hand, the rest are just as I mentioned.

What you can do is go to SLExchange and OnRez and look for the store owner there. 'Buy' one of their free items and then give them a review. In that review you can explain what happened. It doesn't really help you, but maybe it helps people who consider buying from them.

No doubt there are bad business owners, but your method of establishing how many of them are bad is totally whacked. LL shows over 55,000 avatars with a positive monthly linden flow. How many horror stories do we see in these forums. One every day? I don't recall that many. One out of 50,000. A different one every day for a year is only 0.007% of the possible store owners, and many of them are repeats, as this very post is. It is true we probably only hear a portion of the bad stories, but what portion of good stories make it to these forums? None, no one is complaining about all the good stories, why should they? Your broad-brush generalization just comes off as goofy to me. The truth is MOST we never hear about either way.

Wow...Bitter?

Threads "Like this" are not here all the time and to be honest its very rare that people ever hear the good stuff, its when things go wrong that people need help..thats human nature.

As for your "waterfall" shop..its just may have been that he was busy with something else and would of got back to you..but sadly now you wont ever know

I do agree that the experience the OP has had is out of order but its not the norm..thankfully. I to have experienced bad customer service from a few merchants in SL..but I can count them on one hand.. the great customer service I have received from others outweighs the bad eggs completely.

it seems to me that this guy didn't even have the script he was trying to sell. I've heard of this before, someone will want to make money but they're too lazy to learn a craft, so they put up signs offering you a script, item, ect., and put these empty boxes in a store. Instead of setting it to "buy" they set it to "pay" so that you cannot see that the box is empty. you pay the board, and it never pays out, because it's not even a vendor, it's just a simple box that is set for you to pay it. you get banned before you ahve the chance to grief him.

In the future, just be careful about vendors taht you have to pay, instead of buy.

All items I sell give customers the selection to pay instead of buy. Any networked vendor or box with a split profit script inside will.

Even if the box is set to buy which you think is safer. Can you actually see what is in the box? Anybody can throw a script, texture, prim in a box and name it whatever they desire and well... set it to buy.

All that story tells me is that you're an unreasonable and demanding would-be customer. Perhaps that's why you have a problem with so many business owners - your condescending attitude and demands make it not worth dealing with you. Sometimes people are busy - keeping a shop in SL does not make it your entire life.

Almost all of the merchants I have dealt with have been honest, polite, and willing to help within reason.

Ricardo your comment is bizarre to say the least. Who is going to come to the forums and start a thread every time a transaction goes well or a refund is received with no problems? People only come here when something goes wrong. There's an obvious selection going on. To extrapolate from that basic fact to "all SL dealers are crooks" is paranoid and stupid.

I don't know whether OP was cheated or not - it sounds like s/he was, because banning/muting upon receiving a customer service question is not normal behavior.

Having said that, the inventory system was VERY balky yesterday. I bought an item and ended up paying for it twice and there was about a 30-second delay between the time I selected "buy" and the time that "You have paid ___ $L195" message appeared. Then there was another delay before the item appeared in my inventory. A short while later I bought another item in a different sim, and while I didn't double-pay for that item I still experienced the delays.

With respect to the double-pay, by the way, I sent the creator a note card that said, "I'm sorry, I seem to have been charged twice for ____ item which I only bought one of. Here are the transaction numbers from my account history: ------------------ and -------------------. When you have a moment, can I please have a refund? By the way I love your stuff, thanks for doing such great work."

I had my refund by this morning. I don't think all SL sellers are crooks.

In defense of merchants..yet again...

I made a sale yesterday. I noticed my Linden balance was higher than normal, went through my transaction history, and saw the person had paid 2 times. I immediatly IM'd the buyer and said "You paid me twice, I am returning the second charge, does your transaction report agree with this? Thank you".

I recieved an IM back that the 2nd payment was a gratuity for our professional service. Wow Paid twice, purposely.

Ricardo always posts how horrible merchants are. At least this time, he said most, not ALL. It's best to just let him rant on. You won't change his mind.

Those of us who bend over backwards to present excellent customer service and professionalism know who we are. We don't have to brag or holler about it. Word of mouth regarding a positive experience is the best advertising.



I don't know much about scripting, but I have a ton of free scripts in my inventory. If you need scripts, let me know. Also, Free Union has scripts, and waterfall kits and all storts of nifty things for free.

Reminds me of an event about a year ago, TP'd to a 'scripting store' paid 100L$ to a vendor that was selling a script I wanted, what I recieved was a NC with a LM to a freebie store to collect my goods.

There are many, many businesses in SL that believe in providing the best customer service possible, going out of their way to make sure that the customer is happy with what they buy. Whether that is helping a customer make sure that a hat they bought fits, or helping them with positioning a building so that it works for them.

As in RL, there are always going to be some rip-off merchants. Finding out something about a business that you are about to make a big purchase from is important, just as in RL. Talk to representatives of the company, maybe even get references if there is a particularly huge project you want to work on.

Wow, now that's is just priceless!

Of course this person is just a crook. Although when you consider that it took more effort to create the notecard than it would to have to just load the free script into the vendor, I still have to give them just a little credit for being honest about it.

Also, I have to agree with several other posters here. I may just be lucky, but in a year and a half in SL the vast majority of business owners I've dealt with have gone out of their way to help solve whatever problem I may have encountered.

This might seem like a stupid question, but what is the difference between pay and buy? I have purchased stuff both ways, but don't understand the difference.

You gotta be kidding me. Am I the only one who's troubled by this?

Lots of good merchants out there that never get mentioned because people tend to post only about their problems.
I had trouble with a belt for a dress and IMed the designer/owner. He showed up immediately, put on the dress (!) himself, showed me how to adjust the belt, ended up giving me another copy, and sent me on my happy way.
Another just gave me an AO when I had trouble figuring his out.
And then there are the many notes you see in shops where the owners encourage you to IM them regarding problems or alterations.

No, I've had far more excellent experiences with shop owners than I've had bad ones (well, I've had none). And, believe me, I shop plenty

hi hun, the difference between "pay" and "buy" is how the store owner sells their items. "Buy" is usually using the Linden Lab "Sale Object" option. "Pay" comes from a script inside the object that sells you the goodies. Such as a vendor system.

I use a vendor system, this helps me track purchases and deliveries to make sure my customers receive their items and helps me track mis-deliveries to make sure they were truly mis-deliveries.

Store owners w/ a lot of products normally use a system to keep everything in check. As a consumer you are not affect by using this system. ^^ Just another way of doing things

I have bought a lot of items in world during the past year, and I mean a lot. Everything from clothes, to gadgets, pre fabs, furniture... pretty much every category on SLX.

I have also spent a lot of time chatting with vendors along the lines of "Hi, I am doing such and such project, I really like your whatsit, I was wondering if you could provide it with these perms?" ALL of them have been very polite and either said:
+ No, which I respectfully thanked and wished a beautiful day, OR they said
+ Yes, and didn't charge extra, OR they said
+ Yes but for up to three times the cost of the item (the average rate for copy/mod/no transfer), OR they said
+ Yes but for TEN times or more the cost at which point I thanked them for their time, wished them a good day and moved on.

I just wanted to add: any time I've had problems with an item, often due to my own stupidity (let's retexture a non copy item!), the creator's been great to deal with, many going above and beyond the call of duty to help.

There is no common way to do business. Everyone is different, and that's cool. I respect other people's business practices provided they don't sell what they shouldn't.

How easily we can forget that those of us who can't create certain things or create at all are dependent on the skills and labour of others to create on our behalf. They deserve credit and they deserve my money (usually LOL -- some items are outrageously priced, I agree). They deserve to be treated with respect even if we can't get EXACTLY what we want from them.

Because without the content creators and those who sell, where would we be? What kind of a world would we be living in if we didn't have an SL economy?

Food for thought.

Thank you! Some stores have given the consumer an option of both, in that case, does it really matter?