Errant vendor

I’ve been around on SL for a while now and haven’t had any glitches until recently. I bought an item via one of those vendor ‘machines’ and although the transaction was completed and my L$ transferred, no item was ever sent to me.

Perhaps I should have checked the vendor’s profile before attempting to purchase, because after purchase I saw that she hasn’t been online since August.

Now I’ve looked on these forums trying to find out how I could get the product I paid for or a refund, but all I can seem to find out is that my only recourse is with the vendor. But she’s apparently vanished from SL, even though her shops are still there and to all intents and purposes still dispensing goods.

Obviously I’ve tried getting in touch with her, but seeing as she hasn’t been around for months, she hasn’t got my correspondences.

Anyone here had a similar experience? Presumably, the vendor is getting payment for the transactions that are taking place in her stores, yet not necessarily supplying the goods.

From what I can ascertain on the support site, the Support Team won’t get involved in cases such as these and there’s no point in submitting a query via the Issue Tracker...

Any thoughts?

send her a notecard. IM her several times. wait.

then, AR it for whatever TOS it violates, if you get no response.

i don't think you can do much else beyond that. sorry this happened to you.

Profiles don't tell you when a person was last online, they only tell you when they made the account. GROUPS will tell you when a person was last online, if you're in that group yourself, and assuming SL isn't being borkier than usual.

First off, check their profile for preferred means of contact, if they have one. Some merchants prefer IMs, some prefer notecards, some don't care, some ignore all notecards, etc. Use this preferred method, and wait a couple of days. If they have no preferred method, send an IM, and wait a couple of days. DO NOT send a notecard first, unless their profile asks you to. If you get no response, contact again, and use an additional means of contact, whichever you didn't use the first time. Vendors fail in SL all the time, it's not unusual, especially in laggy areas. Don't assume from a person's profile that they haven't been online in a long time. Even if they haven't, they'll probably have IM to Email turned on and will see your IM anyway, and can fix the problem.

You didn't say how you tried to contact the merchant. If they're a big-name seller, they will need you to be clear on your problem, and send it correctly. If all you do is send an IM that says "hi" you'll probably be ignored because that doesn't tell them anything.

I'll use myself as an example. My product line is popular enough that I can get several IMs a day about them, everything from "I like this product" to "I have a small problem" to "hi r u on?". I get a LOT of messages, and I only have the energy to deal with the important ones. Messages that are pointless ("hi" and nothing else) get ignored, unless I'm online, not busy, and in a good mood. Offline I just delete them. If the message expresses concern over something, but lacks information ("i hav a problem wit ur avi" I'll point out the mistake and ask for clarification (which I rarely get - apparently I'm omniscient and should know what their problem is without being told).

Not all merchants are as forgiving of stupid as I am, though, and as a result some are downright nasty at times. They've gotten so tired of dealing with the dumb messages that they just ignore everything that isn't clear enough. Make sure you're clear, concise, and include details. When, where, how, who, all that jazz. Keep at it too, as SL is known to eat messages and notecards both.

[/end merchant rant]

Well I dont know if it is 'stupid' necessarily, there are a lot of reasons this can happen. Lag is one of them...I've clicked on something, only to have extreme lag happen concurrently. Then when I see it come up, I click to buy it, and not all vendor thingys tell you what you are getting. Some just say "pay."

Then I see that something else is on the picture and/or in inventory due to my screen not showing what is actually there at a given time, if that makes sense. When it's one of those 'page through choices' vendor thingys, it only takes a second for it to move forward and be the wrong thing. It isn't always the customer's fault.

I'm still upset about clicking on a box I thought was a freebie - it was in a hunt and looked like one...just a random box sitting there. I was tired, so yes technically it was my fault but why is there a $2000L item sitting in a box in a clothing shop?

I looked up the creator. They referred me to their website for a complaint form. Sigh. The most they would do, even given the transaction ID #, was a store credit. Their things were all ugly and overpriced. I didn't need any of their items. So I just chalked it up to a writeoff.

I think if someone says that they got the wrong thing, or nothing, or clicked instead of camming around due to lag, etc., and even has an ID # for the purchase, the $ should be refunded. But chocolate rivers should run past my house and be calorie-free, too.

to state: "reliability of product delivery has -greatly- improved since summertime's grid upgrades"...

but it's not perfect yet. :\ just a day ago i had a customer call about a missing delivery (it was a copiable, so i just checked their receipt and passed them a fresh one). i went to the same vendor, punching up same product, and test-purchased, very knowingly to 'accept' the vendor's inventory - only to find, no delivery to my inventory!! ;0

a second test-purchase worked then completely... however i ended up with only one successful delivery out of two. :\ at all related to the recent grid updates??

:\ suffice to say - personally double-checked to see that scripts were delivering okay, otherwise would have never gotten the blue boxes - but the first one definitely failed to finalize to inventory. unusual, as often as past calls have been, i've never actually had a delivery failure myself upon testing; it's just too sporadic an error. but i finally had one happen to me with my own boxes, outside of a known grid outage or other blog-worthy prob...

so do contact the creator - and please do be patient for their reply. i am sometimes away myself for family trips (up to fourteen days; any longer and i would post an alert.

i've looked into jira-ing what i can about the prob, but of course all threads regarding the prob are all pretty much ir-reproducible probs, in a regular fashion. :\ not sure what else i can contribute except to vote on each jira thread.

Shopping when you KNOW you're experiencing severe lag is most definitely your fault, unless you're new and don't know that lag can cause data to be dropped like that. That said, I, personally, replace lost inventory when asked to. SL failures are why my vendors report sales with two different methods. I won't give a refund for a copy/no trans product, but I will replace it.

Well, lag doesn't always begin before one sets out!

Also it isn't necessarily the customer's lag problem. Those page-through vendor thingys (someone tell me what those are called?) always seem to get stuck or hung-up or just move through slowly.

It's either be patient and wait for the pic of the item to rez, or skip shopping there. Which would you rather customers do?

I wish vendors would not use those pop ups that only say "pay." If the item is the same name but different colors or slightly different styles, merely having an item title on top and 'pay' does not help avoid these foul-ups. (I've seen cases where it's just the main item name, no further title like "Evening Star, Sparkle" just "Evening Star." Btw I made those up, I'd never name names.) There is no pop up box with items in it.

If I can see what is in the item list, I can figure out better what I'm buying - that's if it's in a language I can understand. But some creators name their products very eclectically, rather than descriptively, which can make it harder to figure out what's in there, at times. I might see a pic of a red strapless gown, but the title on the pay menu says "Rebel Roja" or something. Or even more mysterious - something like "Darla's Rage." And if the vendor isn't caught up, the mouse hover could say the wrong product name too, so that doesn't help, to mouse-hover on the pic. So, even if "Darla's Rage" on the pay box means that red strapless gown, the only way I can find out for sure is to buy it and open it at home. And it might not even BE the right title, if the mouse-hover isn't caught up to the pic that's rezzed. This can all happen without discernible lag.

How is someone who hasn't been burnt by those things yet, to know how it can go wrong?

Another problem (different type of page-through vendor) is that it isn't always clear that you have to click on the LITTLE pic to put it in the center (to make it the big pic), before you can buy that item. Some of the things let you buy it FROM the little pic, some don't. They never seem to say which, up-front. It isn't as if most people are used to virtual shopping in a 3D environment. A notecard nearby, say a sign they can click that looks like a real-life department store sign, is always a plus.

I just think that type of vendor is vulnerable to giving the wrong product, to misfiring. I understand why they are used - they take up less space in the shop. But it can lead to a customer on a slow or small computer, or who is new and trying to figure it all out, to give up, or not go back. Unless they really love the product enough to hang in there despite all that. Heck I've left a shop before because it (the shop/products) just wouldn't rez at all! (Which is no one's fault.) FWIW I appreciate creators and support them every chance I get.

Great to hear about the creators who work WITH their customers, even IF they think their customers are stupid. Lol. Good customer service is good policy, and giving the customer benefit of the doubt is too, especially in the upcoming world economy, SL or RL. Whatever happened to the customer is king? /soapbox

While shopping during heavy lag might not be advisable, I wouldn't exactly call it stupid...but then I've done it myself so I guess that might be why

Like stated above, check the seller's profile for instructions on how to contact them. If I can see a transaction occurred and I got paid, and a customer says they didn't get it, then they get another one...whether it is copy or transfer. I have to give them the benefit of the doubt.

I'm another person who typically ignores IM's that just say "hi" tho...if I don't know the person, I don't respond unless I'm bored or not busy, and that doesn't happen very often.

You make some good points Limonella, but most of what you're wanting just isn't possible in SL. Vendors can't be scripted to display the product's name on the Pay window, that's part of SL itself and not changeable. Only single objects marked for sale can do that, scripted things can't, and when your inventory is huge you can't just set out lots of boxes. No one can find what they want then. I do agree that there are lots of vendors out there that really should be scripted better. I think the ones with floaty text are a bad idea for all sorts of reasons, not just confusion wise. What I do is I don't use floaty text, I put all the information on the image of the product. That makes the shopper wait and see what they're actually looking at before they hit Pay.

The problem of making your selection before paying is another problem that doesn't have a good solution. Most vendors work sort of like a soda machine in RL. If you want a Coke, you press the little button that says Coke. If you want the orange fox, you click the little orange button. Very few SL vendors want you to *pay* the little orange button, and the few that do are typically marked as such. I would expect logic would dictate that if you pay the vendor when it's displaying a picture of a blue fox with the words "BLUE FOX" displayed, that you would receive a BLUE fox, no matter which little button you right clicked on. And most of the time, it does. Of the several hundred customers I've had, only two or three didn't understand how the vendor worked and failed to make their selection before paying (and I gave them what they meant to get, btw. Benefit of the doubt and all that). This method is also industry standard, so changing it would actually cause MORE confusion because no one does it that way.

As for customers being stupid - I never said they were. But there ARE stupid people out there, and some of them buy stuff. If you work any kind of sales long enough, you WILL meet them, and you'll probably get a bit tired of them. I've been in sales-related business for many years now, and I know. Ironically, what makes those few even more irritating is when you go out of your way to make something easy to understand, explaining everything and giving instructions. I can't tell you how many creators' profiles contain stuff like "IT'S IN THE NOTECARD, READ IT" because they've gotten so tired of answering the same questions over and over, that are already answered in the product's documentation. So I guess one has to be a bit forgiving in return, I try to be anyway.

And if anyone doubts the depths of stupid that humanity is capable of, read a bit of notalwaysright.com

Thanks for the replies everyone! Wow, Maya! You sound like someone who has already borne the brunt of buyer 'issues'! Let me assure you I'm not a purveyor of 'pointless' or 'dumb' messages, and I really am very analytical when problem solving. Point being, there doesn't seem to be a solution when the seller vanishes from SL.

In my initial post (for brevity sake) I chose not to detail the method of contact, merchant's correspondence preference and full details of how I found out she was MIA. Perhaps that made me appear obtuse, but I was pretty sure people didn't want to read my sob story, warts and all! What I was hoping to do was illustrate a problematic area and glean some opinions from others as to how to deal with a situation like this: where the Merchant has disappeared off SL, but is continuing to trade. Does one just leave them to continue business, or is there a mechanism to prevent it?

Here's what I've done already:
1. As per the Merchant's Profile guidelines, I dispatched two separate notecards, 6 weeks apart, to query the transaction.
2. I checked when she was last online at SL, via her Profile: I joined one of the Groups listed IN her Profile. I then alphabetized the member names to find her and learn her last login date.
3. At the time/location of purchase, lag wasn't a problem at all. The meter is one of the things I double checked when I didn't get the item within a couple of minutes.
4. My messages to her were clear, concise and detailed with all the necessary information from my SL account transaction. All by the book. In my case, unfortunately, I don't think even my thoroughness could magic her back to SL! She truly has vanished.

I know how frustrating time wasters can be in all walks of life... Please try not to let them mar your opinion of the average Job Bloggs buyer though: I’d like to think most of us have at least an ounce of respect for others and a couple of IQ points to rub together!

I honestly don't know what could be done in a situation like that Sometimes people have to leave SL unexpectedly, rl stuff happens. In a situation like this I think I would AR the vendor, not because you want to get the creator in trouble but to protect other people from having the same thing happen to them...I don't know what other options there are. I do know that there is now an AR category for fraud, while the creator might not be acting fraudulently (with intent) it might be the only way to stop the vendor from ripping people off.

Good luck.

Ah, now that I see the whole story, I have some different advice:

If the vendor in question is in a rented spot in a mall, you may want to advise the store owner of the problem. Most store owners will at least mark a "dead" vendor, if not return it outright, to keep more people from being stiffed by it.

If it's not in a rented space, the only thing I can think of is to AR it as Ralektra said. I agree that it's not necessarily intentional, but it is bad for it to stay and not deliver products. Ethically bad, and bad for the merchant's reputation.

As for me - I actually can count on one hand the number of silly or hard to understand messages I've gotten. But many of my friends are also content creators, some more well known than myself, and I hear things from them. Some of them have the "Don't do this or that" things in their profiles, but I don't agree with that. It doesn't really work, and it makes one sound unwilling to help. I always do my best to appease the customer, but I may giggle to myself if one just doesn't want to try to understand what I'm saying. I would like to think I'm known for being nice and helpful overall.