"Pay" Vendors, why?

Seein that SL is dead again, figured I'd ask this. It's been buggin me for awhile.

Why do so many people use 'pay' vendors? I don't know bout the rest of the population, but I'm always more inclined to buy something off of a vendor with the Buy option. That way I can see exactly what I'm getting.

What I usually look for is if what I'm buying is copy/mod. If it isnt, it's not nearly as useful to me. With a pay vendor I just can't see that.

So, why do you use them?

I tend to buy from either type vendor, as long as the perms are clearly stated in a notecard, vendor item texture or floaty text descriptions.. this way there's no suprises. If they don't have it, I buy from someone that doesn't have anything to hide.

I sell from a pay vendor; but I have my permissions clearly written on the sign above the vendor. And the items I sell are pretty inexpensive so the risk is low.

Because there's no such thing as a 'buy' vendor. Vendors that sell multiple items can not make use of the builtin 'buy' command. The only way to do that is to have every item in it's own box sitting out on the shelf. While some sellers like that, it's not practical for everyone. One of the main draws of vendors is that you can stick a networked vendor at 30 different places, and update them all from one server at your home.

Limitation of the system, don't hold it against the sellers.

Personally, I don't, all my vendors are the "Buy" kind, precisely because I do the same thing myself. It's not true that I never buy from "Pay" vendors, but I'm far less inclinded to, so using a "Pay" vendor guarentees you'll lose a percentage of your potential sales...

OTOH, there are things you can do with "Pay" vendors, scripting-wise, that are more difficult with "Buy" vendors. The question is (as always), do the benefits outweigh the costs? I imagine there's no one answer to that...

I don't think that's actually true, but it's admittedly a lot easier to set up a multi-item vendor using "Pay" than "Buy".

Oh, yeah, if the contents are listed in a notecard, or atleast the perms in a floaty, that's always good.

Intersting. I've not heard anyone complain about vendors before.

I use "Pay..." vendors becasue they allow me to keep a central location to for updates and getting fixes out quickly.

At my main store I use all 'buy' vendors also, but it's more because I like having demo models of everything sitting out.

One thing about vendors is that you can pack a lot of items into a few prims. Oftne when renting in a mall or other such establishment you do not have the prims available to use buy vendors for everything, hence pay vendors are the only option.

Some people, myself included, often use pay vendors for limited editions of something, also. You can construct the vendor to stop selling items after so many are sold, something you can't do with 'buy' boxes.

Personally buying from a pay vendor doesn't bother me.

It is true. There's no way to make a vendor that uses the Buy command. For starters, the only options you have are 'original', 'contents' and 'copy. Well, no-one wants to sell a copy of their vendor. If you sell 'contents' you sell everything in the vendor at once for one price. Original will sell the whole damn vendor to them. On top of that, if it's a networked vendor it won't have any items inside it anyway.

Okay, so it's impossible to make a 1-prim "Buy" vendor. Still don't see why it's not possible to make a "Buy" vendor in general.

It would be relativly easy to modify a holo vendor to display panels you can buy from instead of holograms. The panel would have a picture of the item inside it. When you switch to the next product the panel gets replaced.

I'm the worst about forgetting to add the perms to my vendors, so I was working on a vendor that has a button you push and it gets the perms of the item it's displaying, but llGetPerms is a bit wonky. But it's a good way to do it if you use the pay vendor stuff.

Now if I can only get the inspiration to get with it and change all of mine over..

Also 'pay' vendors can use code to do things like give an entire outfit in a new folder in someone's inventory, 'buy' vendors can only transfer a single object, be it the object itself, or a container, it is confusing to new players (box on the head anyone?)

With a pay vendor, (and permissions CLEARLY MARKED) we've done very well... I agree buy vending is better for toys and single objects, mebbe a single piece of clothes, etc, but for complex things, like an entire avatar, 'buy' vending just doesn work...

Plus our pay vendor has approximately 220 avatars in it now, in 50 prims, much better than 220 single 'buy' objects

Exactly what I was thinking. Unless there's some reason this doesn't work, you can use "Buy" without leaving copies of everything out on the shelves.

Huh? All of my "Buy" vendors give you a folder...

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Because there's no way to interact with the Buy command by script. So something with buy can only ever sell itself, or all of its contents.

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What, temporarily rez the item for you to "Buy"?

Nice idea, but mainly the vendor spots I have are all limited, either in space or prim allotment. So, really, a "Pay" vendor is the only option I have.

But, as everybody else here states, I too very clearly list object permissions on my vendor.

Also, I mostly sell avatars -- full prim ones. Even at my own store, I can't just drop a 200-prim avatar out for you to buy. Aside from the prim usage, there's also the fact that I give other components that come with my avatars, such as HUDs, skins, gestures, etc. It's easier for me to box all of that up into a self-extracting prim.

Not ALL of my items are boxed, such as my vehicles, and so I plan on putting those out for display with the Buy option. Once I build my new store.

Haha wow, and here I thought it was just a bunch of bastards bein' sneaky')

But anyway, if the contents/perms are listed somewhere, anywhere, it's not a big deal.

...

Right. Once again explaining why a 1-prim Buy vendor is impossible. But I never said it was. I'm assuming the Buy vendor would have at least two prims.

Ah well, never mind. Not worth arguing about. I'll just make one when the grid is back online to demonstrate.


Not the way I'd do it (for prim and space reasons), but sure, you could do it that way if you really wanted to...

Oh you can do it. you have to rez up a fresh prim for each product and your customer buys a copy of the rezzed prim. Not possible to network as each vendor has to contain a copy of all your product boxes. Will make for a very laggy shopping experience as there is a time delay attached to rezzing a prim up (which is bound to increase after tonight).

You could do it with out rezzing and derezzing product boxes by stacking them and just changing the positioning order so the customer only ever see's the one at the top of the stack, but one vendor could easily take you over the prim limit you have to live with in most malls, and it would be a PITA to maintain.

I like buy, I have never not bought an item because it was in a pay vendor.

I assume, then, you mean rezzing a prim that has Buy Contents with the items inside.

Not hard to implement, though since I am moving to a centralized vendor system, that won't allow remote item delivery.

they can do that if you 'give contents' and have more than one item in the contents, but then they can't pick and choose, they have to give *EVERYTHING* in the contents, meaning you need a minimum of one prim per 'folder' you wish to sell

Fell free to share it here, it not like we have anything else to do....

Sure, if you want to box up all your items and set them to buy contents for the right price and then stick them in a vendor that rezzes them. It's hideous. I actually tried this very thing when I was new to SL, I wrote a vendor that uses 'slides' that does exactly that, derezzes the slide and rezzes the next one when you hit the button. It's clunky at best, causes a lot more lag than a pay vendor, and you can't network them. Lose, lose, lose.