New Search: Vendor-based merchants, how will you compete?

Sure it can, if the vending system is designed to.

Depending on the vending system, the same information can be presented before purchase... full inventory of the "package" as well as included permissions.

That is a problem many vending systems have... there isn't a feature to provide that level of data to the buyer. Vendors which provide notecard information about products can, if the merchant thinks to add the information to the notecard.

Again, depending on the vending system (and the merchant) this information can be presented rather easily. My old vending system had the ability to provide an informational notecard about the products it contained, so long as the merchant takes the time to write one.

I agree with you 100%. But that is a matter of design and merchant preference. I have seen plenty of vendors which do not have hovertext, and rely on the product's "ad" texture to provide the information hovertext would.

A properly developed multi-item vendor will usually rez faster than a wall of product textures. It's all about proper design... a store which has 5 vendors selling 20 items each will rez a LOT faster than a store with 100 individual textures all loaded at once if the vending system is well done.

That's an example of poor vendor design in my experience. I've tested a lot of vendors in my day, and the laggy long-loaders are usually "thrown together" without much care for texture loading times and script lag. That includes one of the more popular systems out there.

If you're really unlucky the texture you saw in the vendor 5 minutes ago will have been been removed from the cache and need to rez in again, making "back-and-forth" quite tedious (it's already inconvenient on a vendor).[/QUOTE]An area with less textures is more likely NOT to bump your recently viewed products out of cache, as there is less being loaded to it at once... however I can understand how in some areas that really wouldn't matter based on the rest of the stuff within view distance. A properly developed vendor would preload the product textures before and after the current set you are looking at, thus allowing you to view them without too much wait, or as much of a cache concern. A lot less textures are loaded at once that way, allowing more prims for the merchant, and less lag due to rendering all of those extra prims/textures at once.

That sounds like one heck of a crappy vendor system! I can imagine the frustration. The only thing I can suggest there is to provide the merchant with feedback regarding their vending system. Most merchants would rather replace a bad system to make sales, rather than be loyal to something that is costing them business.

Your experience here is based on a poor (unknowingly so, I am sure) choice in vending systems. There are a lot of crap systems on the market. I am trying to develop one that works as well for shoppers as merchants, loads quickly, creates virtually no lag, and provides an efficient, happy shopping experience.

Well, I personally have a similar problem, and it has nothing to do with poor vendor systems. I often walk away from a wanted item, simply because I don't want to first wait for the texture to load, then hit next and do it again. In malls and such where there are tons of textures already, a vendor that you have to manually change just takes too long (Sometimes they auto-change before its loaded too =()

I like the wall of images better, as even before its fully loaded, I can see the color, general shape, and if I right click one that I think might be it it loads faster (For me anyway). Its faster for me, and less frustrating. (And yes I know I have crap internets =p)

Sure it did. First of all, a vendor that is scripted to auto-change is bad news. It's running at least one timer to do that (lag) and can be a royal pain in the backside for shoppers. Most vending systems are not designed to preload textures either... another mistake. Poorly designed vending systems are the problem... not vending systems as a whole.

There is nothing I hate more, than having to fly all over a building to find a product I could have easily pulled up in a well organized and well designed vendor system. A well designed vendor system can save time, provide less lag, and open up the merchant's prim count to make the place look nice.

The key is... the vending system MUST be well designed. And, the merchant has to be well organized. Those two factors are paramount or you will run into issues like this.

If you have to fly all over the building, then the business itself is poorly designed. Bare Rose is excellent, and uses the wall of prims. They have it sorted into styles, and genders, and have lanmarks for the Japanese/Gothic section and other parts (Different parcels I think actually..).

If its amazingly well designed, they could even sort it into Styles, then colours (B@R sells multiple together so N/A there lol), and there could be TPs to the various style types.

This is an excellent sorting way. Also, it allows more people at once than a changing vendor, since you cant have one vendor showing two items. Sure you could set up a duplicate vendor but then you'd seem kinda redundant.

(Rearranged the quoted parts slightly)

I appreciate that you're speaking from your own experience as a vendor creator . (At least that's what I got out of your post, sorry if I got that wrong)

Consumers never have a choice in it though, we have to work with (or against ) whatever the seller decides to put up. From your perspective it's probably very unfair to lump the dozens(?) of vendor systems together into one unified complaint/experience, but you can't really expect me/us to know which ones provide a better experience and which ones provide the horrible experience .

What you shop for most probably has a big impact on whether you like vendors as well. For me it's clothing (or clothing related items) so I think of clothing vendors first of all and it just doesn't fit with that purpose (for me).

I wouldn't expect texture stores to dedicate one prim to every texture and vendors are "natural" there, although I still dislike the texture lag on them there and end up using 3-6 at the same time to make browsing a little bit more time-efficient.

In a furniture store I guess I'd probably use a vendor for different fabric textures (as long as I can still see the furniture actually rezzed) per furniture set (Although I did come across one system for that the other day that I found far more pleasing to use).

I guess it depends on how you shop too. I usually just look at everything in the store, it's not that often I come in for one specific item and just poof back out again.
Downloading 100 textures is faster overall than downloading 5 batches of 20 textures though. I personally don't mind waiting the extra minute initially, but having to wait during shopping does annoy me.

And probably less of an issue in general, but I can just scan through a store with the camera much faster than the time it takes to flick through a vendor and I like seeing all the different options for a particular outfit next to one another .

(Silly vBulletin says I ran out on my smiley quota lol )

As with most scripting performance issues, sadly, it isn't that simple.

Vendor texture preloading might save on delays when choosing an item... but what do you think happens when there are 20 or even 40 vendors near each other in a mall, and they are all preloading textures?

It's far better to make one customer who's selecting an item wait, than to make _everyone_ in the sim wait while the vendors force their SL clients to load textures that might be nothing to do with the vendor they are using or the item they're interested in.

True, design of a shop is important. Some, however, people are better at making products than organizing them in a shop. That doesn't mean their business is crap.

Redundant? No... I don't think so. In my old shop, I had 6 vendors set up in my shop, each feeding off the same server. This provided my clients with the ability to shop without waiting for a free vendor, and they rarely displayed the same product at the same time, as people would browse through their contents and leave them on different "pages". Saved me a lot of time getting things organized, and I was causing less lag than shops of equal size (product count wise).

I meant the shop layout, not total business sorry lol



But then you're still limited to 6 people. With a wall of images, you could have.. 40 people seeing 40 different things, and buying any/all of the at any one time, as opposed to 6 people pleased at a time

That does have the problem that it's 40 prims for 40 items, whereas a scripted scrolling vendor can have as few as 3 prims for unlimited items.

What do you think happens when an equal number of items are placed out individually? You are forcing everyone to load ALL of those textures, rather than the fraction of that number with a vendor. Even with preloading... we are talking about displaying 6-14 textures loading at once in a vendor (on average) over hundreds of individual prims loading textures on them.

Not true. You only have so many loading as you have items, therefore images is actually less (No vendor textures outside of the products). If a vendor has 10 items in it, and there are 10 unique vendors, then you're selling the same 100 items as if it was the 100 images. If you have less loading because of a vendor, you're selling less unique items as well.

Oh, of course. I was just saying that it's not the case that, in a scrolling vendor, preloading textures isn't a "no-brainer" choice. Essentially, it means that anyone who gets near to your vendor will have to load all of its item textures, even if they're actually in the shop next door.

Exactly... and the number of vendors can be adjusted to suit the traffic in the business.

With my vendor, the preloading only happens with the next "page" of items. It won't load the whole vendor at once. But you are still talking WAY less textures loading at once than a shop with the same number of items on separate prims.

I don't like "autoscrolling" or "rotating product" vendors which rotate the display automatically... they cause lag with the timers, and most of the time, there isn't anyone around to see them switch. lol

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Fancy.. I think I told you yesterday.. but I like how you do things XD

Why would you have 10 vendors out if you are only selling 10 items?? That wouldn't make much sense to me.

Vendor systems are not for every situation in SL... I never said they were. But far too many people lag the hell out of sims by placing seperate prims for each of their products. Keep in mind, every prim placed is one your viewer has to texture, render, and track. A sim with 10 vendors each selling 100 different products will lag less than a sim with 1000 products individually wrapped.

[ correction ] - A well designed set of 10 vendors... lol

You misunderstood. 10 vendors with 10 items each, unique items. So 100 items. (Thatd be the worst vendor ever if it had 100 items per vendor imho... gah..)

Thanks lol

This is why I don't like vendors:

I like to look at every item that's available and pick the one I like the best, rather than having to remember every screen in a vendor. Side-by-side shopping, I guess I'd call it. Even if the vendor has those little extra pictures on the sides, there are still a LOT of main screens to plow through, and I can never find my way back to a particular thing that I like. It's like walking through a maze sometimes. Just one girl's opinion.

You've just given me a rather nifty idea... lol

You get them often o.o

'breakthrough' yesterday, now you have a whole new idea... dude.. you're crazy ^^

LOL yeah... 100 items per vendor can be somewhat difficult to browse through... hehehe

Using a lower prim vendor would be a good idea with that view items in the vendors... if you are going to have 10 items in a vendor, there is no need to use a vendor with more than 3-5 prims to it. There is still a benefit with a lack of extra textures/prims being rezzed. You can sell more items on less land due to the prim and space savings too.

LOL Well, after being out of SL for about a year... I have a lot of catching up to do! lol I have a year's worth of ideas flowing out all at once.