What do you like in a vendor?

I have been considering the design of vendors recently. Personally I'm not a fan of the "flipbook" style ones that seem to be everywhere - it takes far too long to actually move between the options, you can't see what's available, and you have to load textures for everything in between. Fatal in a laggy sim. However, I'm sure that there are people who like them.

I was experimenting with a pop-up dialog menu but that has the problem of being (a) ugly and (b) only holding 12 options at a time, or 10 if you have "forward" and "back" buttons. It doesn't have to load textures each time though. You could have sub-menus I suppose.

Actually I prefer the "large number of individual blocks with textures on them" approach all told but that needs a lot of space and a fairly fast area.

Anyway, what do you lot prefer?

Something I haven't seen before but I think is a good idea:

Forget browsing through items with a vendor. Make a notecard that contains names, descriptions, pictures, and prices of all the items you sell. Organize by catagory and format like a catalog. Put a unique item number next to each item.

The customer can then browse the notecard more easily and more quickly. They can even take it home with them. When they find an item they want, they note the item number. Then they go find a "vendor" to purchase the item.

To purchase the item:

The vendor says something like "Click me to make purchase". Customer clicks it. Dialog appears instructing the customer to chat the item number. Customer chats the item number. Dialog appears with the name and description of the item. Says you can chat another number (in case of mistake) or pay the vendor to purchase item. Customer pays. Customer gets item.

Something along those lines would be cool.

HP

I've been thinking about this obsessively for a few days, actually.

Vendors. Can't stand them for all the previously mentioned reasons. By the time I get through flipping one, I won't go back and actually purchase anything.

I like individual pics on prims hanging on a wall, but I know people have a long wait sometimes and there are plot size limitations as mentioned.

I love the notecard with pics and descriptions. You would only need to put out some examples of the best/most popular items. Then several notecard vendors separated into categories would be perfect. Basically a catalogue, but easier to use than some I have seen.

Curious as to other opinions.

First person to say- "Nice products" will die!!!

* dies *

Okay. I like simplicity. Left and right buttons and a buy button would be nice. My current vendors are crap. They force you to right click on them and select 'Pay'. Then you have to enter the correct sum. I get lots of people entering random values into the pay box because they don't see the price of the item in chat. Not good!!!

* goes back to being dead *

My partner sky Honey and I are just now setting up our stores and have been going through this same discussion. We are designing our own super-cool vendor because we dont like any of the options out there.

I didn't answer your poll, because I don't actually like *any* of the options that you have up there, which is one of the reasons we are designing our own vendor.

Our conclusions (all negative )are:

- Forward and back buttons are annoying if there are more than about four items and the flipbook style ones don't res the picture quickly enough so they can be annoying too.

- Popup menus are bad cause the dialogue interface of SL is just minimal at best.

- Holovendors are laggy, laggy laggy (they have more open listens than a spy convention and require anyone within 128 metres to constantly update their image cache with evvery laggy texture on every stupid object) they are also slow.

- Information notecards are annoying to almost everyone but a Linux user. Personally I absolutely hate it when clicking on something fills my small screen with a long text note that I have to read. If we had HTML then maybe, but courier monospace text is just not fun for the average human being and should be avoided at all costs.

- Have no experience with demo versions, but it seems like a recipie for confusion to me.

Things you *didn't* mention that I also hate:

- floaty text (it's just ugly and gets in the way)

- people who put 46 slightly different versions of the same item in a vendor and expect you to click 47 times to view them all (as if the "puce" one is really that different from the "beige" one)

- the vendors where you have to click on a picture from an array on the left and then click somewhere else to pay for it, (I have bought the wrong thing every time from those silly things).


I like vendors, but I don't like most that I have seen.

Currently we have our stuff displayed in single product boxes in an array on the wall that have a script inside that vends the product inside. It gives you a folder in your inventory with the stuff in it and then sends the purchase information to us so we can keep track of sales. Simple.

The vendor we are working on uses no buttons, no text and will be very simple also. if you want info on the scripting of it and how it works, talk to sky Honey, but I think we are going to try selling it once we get it set-up.

I agree with you Dianne, but people who don't script don't have many options.

My favourites are the multi-panel vendors - ideally, with categories. Flipbooks are a pain to go through and have the texture loading problem.

I keep wondering about the possibility of a TLTP vendor, but it's a bit tricky because TLTP isn't accepted among SL at large. Do you think, folks, that you (and your customers) would tolerate a vendor that would require you to wear a HUD attachment when you used it - on the basis that once you had the HUD attachment worn, it would work for any vendor of that type you went near, regardless of whose vendor it was? (Of course the vendor would give you the HUD attachment for free if you didn't have one)

Scripters don't bite!

Except for buying a super groovy new vendor from Dianne

They do if you ask them something and they want paid for their time.

I detest vendors where you have to flip through items particularly if there are tons packed into each vendor. I only use one basic one for body art and now that I have my own main shop, that may get scrapped too. I have stayed away from them from the start, despite friends trying to persuade me to get a server based one because I could have a zillion Nocturnal Threads vendors in small spaces throughout SL, pay less rent cuz I have less prims and not have to fly all over updating shops all the time.

Well, guess what? I dont give a crap if its easier or cheaper for me. As a customer, I prefer shops with one prim box displaying each item. As a shop owner, I want what I think is the nicest, most user friendly display for my customers.

On the positive side, those wall-style vendors that where you click and a whole wall of items changes is a nice happy medium. I can also tolerate regular vendors when they are utilized in a sensible way. For example, when each one contains similar items and only a few. For example a vendor that sells 5 pairs of boots in similar colors or varying sizes. That doesn't bug me as bad as a vendor filled with 20 completely different items. As Gabe said, I get to product 4 and maybe I'm interested, but then I want to see the rest so I keep clicking...waiting for rez....clicking and by the time I get near the end I dont know wtf I want and am sick of clicking and leave.

Catalog is a neat idea, I suppose. It's not for me, but I'm sure many would like it. That is why I use SLex..i view that as an online catalog and customers can sort of window-shop there and still drop by shop to purchase if they dont want purchase online.

OMG that was my longest post evah....Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Sure, shop could just throw me a link to all the creator's products on SLEx and I'll tab over there and whizz through it all buying like crazy.

This is a really tough question.

My personal choice: No vendor at all.

The idea being that whatever you are selling more than pays for having its own prims set out. As well as the 'shoppertainment' prims that assist the sale, such as the environment of the retail space.

The items that remain out for a long time go through a sort of 'natural selection' - the slow sellers gradually being replaced with what customers like. Also, full previews seem to cut back on customer complaints before they happen.

Drawback: customers may have a very different tastes than yourself, and you may end up feeling like you are 'selling out' your vision, and turning fun into 'work.'



Of course, 'leaving an item out' is quite difficult/expensive for clothing and large structures, at which point the single prim and flipbook vendors come into play.

I have to use a flipbook-style vendor myself next to a 'walk-through demonstration pad' for my houses. But I don't like having to do so. Perhaps it's time for a re-think.


This is a stark philosophy. Between the 9568m I have in Alice, and a few prims excess in Caledon - 99% are business related. Does the strategy work? Well, it seems it can cover tier handily.

But out of well over a sim's worth in play - about 17,000 - I might be able to spare 50 prims for personal use. Yes, that's maybe... 0.3 (point three) percent. What to do with them? I have no idea. But someday, I'm going to try to have a Second Life for my very own...

I don't like the wall-of-textures approach, because I don't like walking into a shop and then idling for several minutes waiting for the textures to load. I don't like malls for the same reason... malls combined with walls-of-textures is just nuts.

Flipbook vendors are OK, if there's only a few choices.

The best vendors are the ones that have a set of categories, and if there's a large selection subcategories as well, and finally (when appropriate) color selection.

For example, a shirt vendor:

Top level: Tee, polo, button-down, combos, ...

Second level under button-down: open, with tie, with vest, ...

Then when I select open, I get to page through a few styles with arrows, and select the available colors from swatch buttons (maybe blue, red, light-tintable/white, and black). For shirts that are fully tintable that's not needed.

Have a look at the Luskwood Creatures vendors for the general idea.

Maybe this is a good a place of any to announce that my new freeware HiroVendor is in final beta test for version 2.0.

It's fully modular, so you put in whatever feature scripts you want. It's touch menu driven, comes with an inventory manager so that you just drag and drop items, sales tracking that is formatted and sent to email, sales splitting, a discount script, hologram display, picture display, a notecard giver for individual items, and will allow you to choose between selling objects, animations, sounds, gestures, body parts, and clothing.

I prefer a vendor with a sexy voice that flirts with me. Tells me how manly the product will make me and how girls will want to have sex with me if I buy it.

Yeah, this was annoying and was solved a while back. If you can mod the vendors you can throw a quick call to llSetPayPrice() in there and the problem is over! Otherwise, I'd get new vendors. I've made a few quick mini-vendors for specific purposes before (like selling limited amounts of something) and it drastically cuts down on the work involved. It makes it so that when the pay box comes up, you only have one choice, the button with the correct price, no input box or anything. Saves the scripter from having to put checks in the money event too to verify the amount entered.

Woah!!!

I'd heard something about a llSetPayPrice() function but I never realized just how helpful it was.

Thanks for the tip!!

Interesting. Most people commenting seem to dislike the flipbook style, but very few voting seem to like the dialog menu style... which is, er, a pity, because the vendor I have been working on uses dialog menus. Hmm. Well. That can be changed if necessary. (It does use llSetPayPrice to make things easier.)

I must admit not to having seen a dialog-based vendor elsewhere in SL.

As regard SLExchange and SLBoutique, well, I'd rather not link people to there if I can help it, because they charge commission. If I can make it just as easy if not more so to buy products from my vendor than to go to SL(Exchange|Boutique) I prefer to do that, though they are obviously important other avenues for sale to consider.

I'm a little new to this "selling things" lark. The only things I really sell at the moment are almost-freebies for L$1, but I do need to raise some money to support both rent and the proposed Steampunk sim. At the moment I have everything up on individual sales blocks with appropriate textures, but this does take a while to load, and I dislike seeing a wall full of grey textures.

The notecard catalogue is a good idea... what do people think about an actual website as well, with product details? It would be prettier than the notecard, easier to read, bookmarkable and so on. I don't wish to put such things up on my blog too often as it's a journal rather than a commercial enterprise, but I can put it elsewhere.

I don't like the dialogs, generally, so I'd not like to have to use them while browsing.

Now, one of the things I'm considering adding to my vendors is a quick-browse system where the contents is shown via an enumerated list with llSetText - the browser can then chat the number and see the item. This lets me turn on and off the listen (like you can with llDialog) and minimize what the vendor is showing/doing when idle.

Anything that makes browsing through a seller's items easier is a plus. The more items a person sells, the more important it is that they be catagorized and searchable. A web site would be great for this and would allow the seller keep the catalog up-to-date (an issue with a notecard catalog).

I still like the idea of assigning a unique item number to each product and providing a way for the customer to purchase the item by its number.

HP

My shopping area is made up of free-standing walls and the floating text wars are getting out of hand. NO FLOATING TEXT and notecards for the more detailed products that don't have enough vendor space to explain themselves thoroughly.

Hum... just use use a single prim, set For Sale, set type to Contents, set the name to something descriptive, and drop your contents into the prim. No scripts, and it drops the goods into a directory on the purchasers system. To see who bought, just check your Account Information online at SecondLife.com. Nothing is simpler.

I've tried several sorts of vendors and for the most part they've all given me a headache to set up. Some are easier than others. Some are simpler, once you get the hang of it.

But ALL of them are more work than simply putting something out and sticking a price tag on it.

I agree with Desmond, in that I think some kinds of purchases are facilitated with an environment, and with the items being out and easy to look at, check for quality, etc. I believe my stuff sells better when displayed.

I can see how that also results in fewer customer service issues.

Anyway ... as for what I like and dont like ...

I dont like to flip thru a long stream of items. I dont like 17 different flavors of the same thing in a vendor, unless that is the only thing in the vendor.

I really dont like a wall full of single prim boxes for sale or pictures doing the same thing ... Im very much a "line o'sight" fella ... and if you make me look up to see your merchandise .. I probably wont.

As to holo-vendors ... can anyone tell me if categorically they are ALL laggy? And ALL riddled with open listens? This feels to me like the kind of thing that is "common knowledge" based in old experience ... but not necessarily fact, based on recent research.

I think that it's worth trying a dialog menu. Since nobody's used one I suspect most people are just leaving that blank because they don't know whether they'd like it or not... they're filling in the things they know they like.