Return to Vendor!

Please note this is a necropost! I mistakenly opened the thread not once but twice before finally going with the third attempt, which still had a faulty poll attached. The idea is discussed on:

/327/d4/302237/1.html

An impulse led me to vote in Joshooah Lovenkraft's poll, Ginsu Knives & impulse buying in Second Life /327/c7/301628/2.html#post2282617 and before I knew it, I found myself thinking in a public forum about the entirely unsatisfactory terms we have as consumers in SL.

Eventually the notion occurred to me that it would be good to have the option to return goods within a limited period of time if they are found to be unsatisfactory. I'm not at all skilled at programming but I suspect that it would be possible to configure a Return to vendor option within the SL viewer that would effectively delete an item from inventory and refund its cost in lindens.

* The option would, have to be limited to a reasonable period of approval - say 24 hours to a week - in case the Grid is playing up or the customer required assistance or advice from the vendor (creator) before deciding whether or not the item is fit for its purpose.

* Lindens spent would have to be held in escrow so that the sum may be refunded if the consumer chooses to return the product or transferred to the vendor's account when the approval period has elapsed.

* Some other controls would be necessary to prevent abuse: it would be quite easy to scam a new outfit every day, for instance, without effectively spending a linden cent so I guess there should be a limit to the number of times within a given period that the same account could return items.

* An option to specify the reason for returning the goods could be very useful for product development in the long run: if too many of your customers complain that your textures are crud, then you would be a fool not to brush up on your Photoshop skills.

I believe the inclusion of a Return to vendor option would raise the stakes in-game since nobody likes to find they have spent real or virtual cash on rubbish, creators will work harder to ensure that customers accept their products and the process of buying and selling in SL will become all the richer for it.

I have set this up as a poll because I intend to open a JIRA on the issue.

How about you get your impulse spending under control?

lalalala....just bumping this to tick off all those who hate reviving the dead. Enjoy!!

(I'd type IBTL but that would be ridiculous...who locks threads anymore?? I'm just sayin...)

god, not this again.

/327/d4/302237/1.html

Been talked to death. The idea is utter rubbish if you ask me.

LOL...come on Winter...you know you love me. BTW, I still wear your "bits"--haven't found anything better in all of SL! HUGS!

ETA: btw, I have no interest in returning to vendors...I just bumped the oldest thread I could access (yeah, I'm immature like that)

ground hog day?

Oooh!! I love Bill Murray!!

So does Bill Murray.

Bing!!!!

Poll? What Poll?

*sneezes* My opinion on the subject hasn't changed. So, no. Not just no, but hell no.

*shakes her head and pouts*

Won't happen.

Ephraim Kappler chuckles.

I somehow managed to open three versions of this thread and this is one of the two false starts I made. For what it is worth, the 'official' version can be found on:

/327/d4/302237/1.html

I wouldn't waste your time, however, since the poll is closed and most of the respondents thought it was a bad idea.

Huh. Without reading that thread, your idea seemed good to me. I especially like that one could order up a refund if there was a delivery failure, instead of having to beg and rely on the good will of the merchant.

it's too easy for someone to buy something make a copy of it then rename it and return the original..nope don't like it much.

or just buy that wedding dress for the day.

If you look up the associated poll thread that belonged with this necropost, the idea got rather thoroughly beaten to death by most of the respondants.

Necropost!? I am indebted to you for one of the most side-splitting additions to my vocabulary in quite some time.

While I agree that idea did indeed get beaten to death by the majority of respondents, I would say that you are somewhat stretching the point with the adjective 'thoroughly'. Many objections were plainly reflexive in that respondents had not read the full outline in my original post.


My point was that it's too easy for people to take lindens for old rope. The process of buying in SL is being eroded by an excess of shabby, poor quality product and downright rip-offs. And I stand by it. I am still curious about the proportion of merchants and consumers who would have rejected/accepted the idea. Unfortunately I failed to set the poll to choose more than one response. It is a shame I messed it up.


What is it with the wedding dress thing?

Buy a wedding dress and get it refund next day.

It's bad in many ways:
-the first one being that not every seller has the same sale policy.
-the second is that many sales systems completly detach the action of giving money and the actual item delivery from eachother, no way to ensure a sale was performed on those systems.

Being a wedding dress, you only need it for one day. Hence the argument about buying, using, and returning. Does this happen with RL wedding dresses? No it doesn't. Why? Because wedding dress merchants aren't stupid.

I still believe your idea is a good one, Ephraim, but it should be voluntary to the merchant. Would a wedding dress maker use it? No. Would a furniture merchant use it? Quite possibly. There's much less chance of somebody buying furniture for a day, ya know? Making it voluntary gives merchant flexibility to use common sense, while also allowing the customer to vote with their lindens (for the best customer experience as well as the best product).

There's no doubt that this shifts the balance of who gets ripped off away from the customer and toward the merchant. Good, I say. It's the lesser of two evils.

A few simple things will help though, like disabling the vendor for someone who's returned product more than once. Let them use traditional vendors after that. Make the return duration about 15 minutes. Long enough to try something, but not long enough to use it for a day. But make it 15 minutes of being logged in, not 15 minutes on the clock since purchase.

It's also worth noting that the buy/use/return cycle is a RL concern as well. Dealing with customers who do that is part of the cost of doing business for Best Buy and Walmart. Little stores tend to not allow it - but they also tend to lose a lot of sales to the big stores. But they get to exercise their right of choice.

I got that bit, Love, thanks. My remark was a mixture of rhetoric and sarcasm. Quite a few posts in the original thread cited the very same example, which sticks in my craw somewhat for reasons that have nothing to do with the proposal: I happen to think the whole wedding/partnership thing in SL is a ridiculous drama mire.


I totally agree. I made the point in my original post that the option would be likely to improve the quality of product in SL by making developers work harder to ensure consumers kept their products.



I also outlined similar conditions or measures in my suggestion.



I believe that developers, both large and small, who are confident in the quality of their product will thrive on such an option. Customers are honest, by and large, and I think that the feature will not be abused unduly.

Frankly, the only objections to the idea that I accept are those concerned with re-jigging the software to make it possible: apparently this is well-nigh impossible at this point although I don't see why it cannot be included eventually.