What do you like in a vendor?

they all have listens, open no, its not like you walk into a mall and say "hi bob" and watch all the vendors flip out, at the least they are on some weird high numbered channel

a good amount of listens could possibally be felt on the sim, but if everything is operating on its own filters its a small effect....

much smaller than walking into a place with 100 512x512 pictures on the wall, atleast to joe user.

btw i have no opinion on the subject, if you have 20 objects on the wall, i might have to wait for them all to rez, if you have 20 objects in a flipbook, i get faster access to 1 item, but overall im still loading 20 images, to me its 6 vs a half dozen

I have been thinking about holo-vendors a lot cause there are four within draw distance of my store and they really BUG ME! The difference between them and a regular mall or store with the wall of 512 textures on boxes is easy to see if you think about it.

Say that I sell a product that uses four 512 textures in it. The box is another 512 texture of course but that is the only one the customer loads. The holo-vendor on the other hand loads the four textures from the actual object and sometimes an extra one that is like a label for the object or an advertisement much like the box texture is in the first case.

That's four times the load in this scenario, (or whatever average number of textures in the objects being sold happens to be.)

Where my store is located you have to walk right by four of them, so your client is loading all these textures on a rotating basis as each product is ressed every few seconds.

I think the biggest argument against holo-vendors is that almost no one uses them. Walk around second life and see how many of them are in use relative to regular vendors and the number is very small.

dont forget the extra geometry that your video card is rendering

over all yes there isnt much real use for them, but

i used to sell fractally generated globes, and i used them, but becuase its hard to relay a sphere in a 2d image, someone mentioned a house place, ive been to a cupple and its nice to flip tru the book and have a model to walk tru. so there is a reason for them.

but like so many other things in SL ppl go nuts becuase they can, back when i had my GF2GtS i was renting a booth and the person next to me had like 20-25 sunglasses, all basicly the same, just different color / lens style whatever, whenever i got near this thing it would just KILL me. it ezily could have been done with stylish posters, and caused less stress on ppl's machine...

I bought a vendor a few weeks ago (haven't tried it out), that offered categorizing your items. it's a flip-over style but what I liked is that it had labels, like if you click 'shoes' it will only show shoes, or dresses and only dresses will show. I would love to have a vendor like that combined with the numerous preview boxes and easy installation of JEVN servers.

Of course if I were selling furniture, vehicles, houses etc, I'd like a version of this but in holo form.

Vendors like this can make opening small branches a hell lot easier and more convenient not to mention cost efficient. ^_^

An idiot proof, child friendly instructions would also help greatly.

Very few people use them - because very few products actually require them. (Houses and large vehicles in the main.)

Notecards, live displays, and demo versions

I've only ever sold with full-sized displays, so my selling experience is skewed.

Notecards are good because you can pack them with all the information you can provide, which can include a brochure descriptive, landmarks for other places of yours, feature list, and the product manual. You can pack them with screenshots, too... and the nice thing about that is the screenshots won't actually load until someone decides to click on them. It has no impact on the surroundings.

Something that pissed me off about buying from other people was the lack of information on the local vendor on what the product actually does, it's featureset, and how easy it is to use. This only applies to the complex stuff of course. My favorite instances were when the actual product manual was available to the customer before purchase.

I don't think flipbook vendors are bad, as long as they provide notecards on click of the current product display. If there's a lot of products being sold, they could be broken up into several flipbook vendors by type.

Live displays help becuase some customers really want to know how big the object is, want to see it from every angle, and want to make sure the prim and texture craftsmanship is to their liking.

I've also noticed that if you're selling a really large object, like a house, that it's best if you provide a freebie footprint object so people can take it back to their plot and see if it'll fit or not. Simply saying "fits on most 1024m" doesn't work because some people may have odd size plots.

Demo versions are self-explanatory. The absolute biggest plus with this is that you're showing the customer enough confidence in your product that you're willing to let them try it out before they buy it.