Poll: Should Content Creators Replace "Lost Inventory" Items?

But this isn't their problem to fix for buyers. Frankly, I think it's up to the discretion of the creators. They spend lots of time and money of their own to provide you with the items in the first place.



This is complete insensitivity for all creators out there. It's an insult to each one of them. So what if they get scammed and take losses? So what if they had nothing to do with this, it's not their fault, they should do what *you* think is right anyways?



Majority of people don't have histories of shopping only in one place and spending lots of money very recently. You are negating the time it took them to create the items to SELL. Not just give away as much as *you* think they should. And frankly, your theory is flawed on whether or not they'd get the item anyways. Firstly, if they want it bad enough to lie about it, then they DO want it, but hey... might as well try for free right? Others can simply sell some items off ANOTHER creator's hardwork for a huge profit. Why should some scammer profit off another creator just so *you* can be happy?


Why should the innocent creator be left catering to everyone who may or may not have lost items? Creators CANNOT prove it's a loss, so don't use a definite.



More power to you to insult creators even further for not catering to your whims on a problem that isn't their fault. I'd rather lose a customer like you, than have a scammer reselling my same items and taking away much more business than you could provide.



So don't. That is your choice, just as it is theirs. You have no compassion for these creators whatsoever and I'm sure they are not upset over losing your business. They, like most creators, are probably SWAMPED with respectful and not so respectful DEMANDS to replace items, just like your demands. Frankly, if someone DEMANDS anything to me, being as it is my choice to do what's necessary, then I sure as hell wouldn't replace the item.

I really doubt you'd expect that if you lost a bag out in the RL, that you DEMAND the creators replace your items or you won't do business with them again. They'd laugh at you, tell you to leave the store and thank you for not wishing to come back.

You are acting as if it's the creator's problem and fault for this and it's not. The scamming is already abounding, where some creator's have seen just sent items in yard sales, but dishonest people, who got a free item to sell!

I also suppose I should add, if I did a small volume of business per day, it wouldn't be as much of an issue either, but I do quite a bit of sales everyday, which I greatly appreciate ..yes I do care about my customers. Most have dealt with me over other issues will vouche for that. Over the past two days I have been repeatedly bombarded with IMs, some nice and understanding of the situation, others rude and finger pointing.
It's been a hard decision to make really. I do want people to be happy, but at the same time, I have to look out for myself too.
The whole thing has just given me an enormous headache and I really wish LL could get on it and fix all these bugs....it shouldn't be like this for buyers or sellers

It's clear that every creator will replace lost wares, at least non-transferable wares. But should we really "fix a bug"? Don't understand me wrong but... with all understanding and generous shop owners and customers that are now used to the bug and used to demand replacements... perhaps that sends the wrong signal.

If this bug doesn't appear to be urgent, it won't likely be addressed and fixed that soon. If the customers complain to the item creator instead of LL, we create an easy workaround and take the urgency off this problem.

Also... what happens once the inventory bug gets fixed? Will all the missing items pop up then? Lots of transferable items suddenly owned twice by many people? I've already replaced several transferables and wonder a bit about that.

Instead of IM'ing merchants demanding replacements, and trying to make the merchant's responsible for this *bug* ..file MASSIVE bug reports about it, make LL get on a REAL fix for this, this is not the doing of the content creators, it is a bug, and it needs to be fixed and reported and investigated by those that run this platform- the ones that *installed* this bug..not the people you bought your last gstring from! I still just don't get why everyone wants to blame the people who make the items for them disappearing..its insane!
Also, have a little patience, they say this might be fixed wednesday...is that so long to wait? If its not, FILE MORE BUG REPORTS.
Stop blaming people who arent responsible for this nor have a *fix* for it. Get LL on it, its their world after all.

An afterthought... I just decided to put up a new sign in my shop, perhaps at both entrance doors. I think if other shop owners did the same it might help to contain much of the inventory bug as well as the "lost trade perm" bug that I often encountered.


Important Information

Many SL residents currently experience a bug which leads to lost inventory items. Apparently the bug occurs if you receive an object and don't unpack it, rez it or move it within your inventory. Please don't log out right after a purchase; unpack your ware or move it to another inventory folder.

Another common bug can cause an object with both trade and modify permission to lose its trade/resell permission as soon as you rez it on the ground and pick it up again. Some of our furniture can be affected by this bug. If you purchase modifiable furniture as a gift, please trade it to the recipient without rezzing it.

Our shop personnel consist of [insert names of the shop staff here]. No one else is authorized to sell our wares to you. Please be aware of con artists. Our staff will never personally take money from you (unless a vendor is broken).

That's an excellent idea! Helps protect you AND a buyer!

Well I have to say I am very unsettled and upset by some of the postings here and the attitude of certain people... let me explain...

I am a content creator - but one that sells very little. I do not depend on the money I get from sales to make a living - it just goes some way toward paying my SL bill. Because of this I dont really have a problem replacing items - although I would want to see that the person had actually bought it.

However I do know other content creators that do depend on selling in SL for their RL living. For them SL is their JOB - and a pretty thankless job it is too, especially lately. Perhaps the people who talk about the "greedy and selfish" content creators would care to know that some of these people work about 50 hours plus a week for minimum wage and struggle to even put food on their tables each week! The provide content here instead of a "normal" job for many reasons.. It might be that they are housebound and cannot do other work. They may just find it very difficult to get a job and so eek out an existance earning what they can on SL. Whatever the reason - it doesnt make them greedy - and more than the rest of us getting our paycheck each week/month (whatever). If out bosses/managers turned round and said that there is a problem with something we produce and we want all employees to work 20 hours overtime without pay, how many would agree?

Please show a little respect to people who devote a great amount of time to preparing content for us to buy - and try to put the costs of items in perspective.... that new outfit that you just paid about a dollar for in real money.... do you know that someone has just spend as much as a week working in that? How many do they have to sell to recoop that time spent? Do you really think they are making a "killing" off of their sales?

Of course there are those that DO make a killing off sales in SL - but these people are VERY rare. Most content creators make very little compared to the amount of time they spend working - and believe me it is hard work.

Im not saying that content creators should just refuse to help customers - I dont know any that do refuse to help. But putting the problem on their shoulders is just plain WRONG.

All these issues are problems with SL - and according to LL they will be solved on wednesday anyway and all these lost items will reappear in peoples inventory. Why should content creators feel OBLIGED to give people another copy (especially in the case of trans items) becuase of a bug in SL? Many will however, and often it simply depends on how you approach it.

As I said I am usually prepared to replace stuff, but if someone comes up to me and says "ive lost this item you have to replace it for me or ill post about you in the forums and never buy from you again and tell all my friends" then they can just take a long walk of a short pier - im NOT going to replace things for people with that attitude.

So - rambling posting - but short response. Treat content creators as PEOPLE who work HARD and deserver to be treated with RESPECT - just as content creators should treat customers with respect.

I've been replacing items that my customers lose because of the bug. I will be putting up a sign advising customers on steps to take to avoid the bug.

Those earning a RL living as a SL content creator, would have even more a reason to build excellent customer relations... by whatever means possible. I have never cashed out a dime in SL. I totally support the SL economy by enjoying my SL earnings within. Yet still I always aim to have good CS. Just don't understand it not being the priority here.

About a year ago, we had a well known asset server issue and I was out on one of my regular shopping sprees on another AV. At that time it was a pay and not receive the item bug. LL made one of their infamous posts to ask the creators to replace. It was their only solution offered at the time. Simply ask or lose! I even posted about my losses & that it was understandably touchy for a creator to be asked to replace a transferable item.

Long story short, my alt made several attempts to get a designer I had done massive spending with, to replace just one item that I wanted the most. Never heard back from her at all. She has lost not 1.. but 5 customers, with me (the person behind the avatars) alone.

The other day.. I had a gal that had bought 4 or 5 items from me, IM me sayin she got caught in some lag & accidentally purchased the last item & could I please refund her on the no transfer tattoo set. Yep.. I did balk, until I saw she had made several purchases, so I paid her the 150 and chalked it up to good CS rep. Think me foolish? I think giving her one of the nicest of the lot for free, along with a lil personal attention & trust only good for my business.

But the fact is, I was already considering giving her the refund, even before i saw she'd already bought several others. Why? Simply because I so easily can. I have only recently retired a good chunk of my early items.. I sold countless copies of these things for about 2 years with little to no extra work. SL in no way resembles RL manufacturing. Is like comparing apples to oranges. Unless you are creating custom & exclusive per order items, of course. Yes.. we do often spend inordinate amounts of time on creating things.. and for some, no its not just a hobby.. but again, it seems to me the latter are the ones that need to take advantage of our ease of mass manufacturing, the most!

I've been lucky so far, only one customer has IM'd sayin they lost one of their tats & she'd bought 3 I think. And her reply when I dropped it to her was that it is good to see I honor my shop. I thought that a lovely, way to look at it.

No offense Pal but I'm willing to bet there arent many content creators who would balk at refunding $L150 to one customer.

Consider yourself lucky!

Would you feel any different if you had say .... 10-20 or more customers per day asking you for refunds, for several big ticket items worth thousands of $L.

Think that might wear you down a bit?

You may think this an exageration, but don't believe for a second that this isnt happening to a grander scale than you believe it to be.

It's a serious dilemma that if allowed to continue can get way out of hand, and the answer is not as easy as "good customer service."

This is beyond that point.

This situation is having a severe impact on the economy and customer vs. content creator relationships within SL. I know LL has been working very hard lately. Hopefully they understand the gravity of this situation and are alloting most, if not all of their resources into coming up with a prompt resolution to this most unfortunate situation.

If you ask me I am of the opinion that LL should be shutting down the servers until this situation is taken care of, but ... C'est la vie. Que sera ... sera.

This isn't really a bug, it's because you don't have the permissions set correctly on some item that's inside the object. Check every prim in the object for a script you might have forgotten to delete.

If i Lose my favorite sweater in RL weeks or Months after i bought it, then went back to the store and asked them to replace it for me, they would laugh me out of the Shop.

SL Vendors are under no legal, or Moral obligation to replace items you lose (Or have Taken from you) no matter the Circumstances under which you lose it UNLESS they have provided specific Warrenty protection For the item in just such a Case.

I Have heard that some are providing replacements in Good Faith. This is a very good gesture on their part in terms of customer service, I only hope people do not take unethical advantage of their generosity, and make them regret it.

Angel.

None taken, Cheyenne. And yes, that would be hard to bear. I apologize if I came off like I do not truly understand the situation, or care about the big time headaches this is causing.

My reply was regarding the current issues & how I would handle this until LL fixes it.

I agree that this is wide scale, involves multiple buggy code issues, along with the ever-flailing asset server & has not been given the swift attention that is most definitely called for. Also quite aware of LL's track record in their handling of these kinds of things.

I'm not even trying to say it is the content creators responsibility, to continually cover for LL. And quite happy to see a few aggressive & persistent posts that this needs to be addressed & fixed immediately. Unfortunately, until they do get it together.. it just makes good business sense to me, to cover my own assets.

My inventory still holds the not so hilarious at the time, crime scene tape and closed for business sign I had to put up across my shop when 1.6 rolled out & made me totally rework my method of delivering my goods.

If I had a rash of complaints, I would have closed down this time. I'm sure many have & I do feel for them. I know I've been lucky this time. Not quite sure what the cut is on these things, but I've certainly been on the wronged side before.

I agree with Pal in that you can't compare this to a real world shop. In the real world, a shop has a fixed number of products to sell. In SL, the shops have infinite copies of items to sell. I'm much more likely to patronize shops that have good customer service than shops that say "too bad, so sad, sucks to be you."

I shop a *LOT*. Well, I used to. Now with this bug, I'm not shopping anymore. All my friends always ask me the best place to buy things, because I spend a lot of time browsing around and finding cool stuff. You'd be surprised at how much word-of-mouth adds to your profits. I know I'm personally responsible for many sales of items that wouldn't have sold otherwise because my friends didn't even know of the existence of certain shops, and now they shop there all the time. I'm like a walking commercial sometimes!

Maybe with this new fix (posted on the blog) this whole conversation will become moot. But seeing how SL has been going in the short time I've been here, I feel like this issue will come up again. I am glad the merchants are posting their true feelings, and I think it might be wise to refrain from buying until asking a merchant about their policies on replacing items that were deleted by a bug.

This is exactly why I use no-transfer exclusively. Also, on SLBoutique.com, you can transfer any "no transfer" you've made in your history as many times as you wish (providing the in-world vendor still exists, of course!).

Regards,

-Flip

FYI-Inventory Big Is Fixed-from the LL Blog

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Missing purchased items returning
Tuesday, October 17th, 2006 at 5:57 pm by phoenixlinden
Tags : none

The bug causing the occasional missing inventory on re-log has been located and corrected. All new purchases will work as expected. All inventory purchased since 2006-10-11 and before 2006-10-17 18:00 SLT is being returned to the Lost & Found folder in your inventory.

For those interested in the gory details, the back-end systems in Second Life have picked up permissions and security settings which block invalid viewer requests to modify inventory. The simulators have been sending incorrectly parented inventory items to the inventory database since the feature existed. Before 2006-10-11, the viewer would immediately detect and correct the inventory item but now that request was being blocked.

The inventory database now corrects bad parenting information and other checks are in place to make sure this never happens again.

All inventory in this state is still available and I have kicked off a process which will return these lost items to your Lost & Found folder. This process can take a long time — possibly a week. I will be investigating ways to optimize the process to try to finish it sooner.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 17th, 2006 at 5:57 pm

--------------

This is what I am going to implement now, since having my vendors, and catalog system exploited IN A BIG WAY, now this bug, and all the angry mobs wanting replacements of items that are transferrable, when I was told by the lindens to tell people to wait a bit, they would probably be able to return their items, but nobody wanted to hear it.
I was just *lying* and being a *greedy, selfish, lazy, and stupid* content creator I believe was what one called me even tho I spent 45 minutes checking out her story, and the situation, because I was just becoming aware there WAS a problem..and not quite sure how to handle the massive amount of IMs I was getting with these replacement requests.
All I asked was some time, to figure out what was going on, to know whether or not if these items would be returned when the Lindens found a fix...I dont think I was unreasonable, not half as unreasonable as alot of the RANTING Istant messages I was subjected to.

Never under other circumstances have I refused to replace items that weren't received, or items people tried to edit and totally destroyed, or even requests to edit certain things for people, and I alway try to do what I can for my customers. But this was too widespread, too many requests, not enough information about what caused it and what the end result was going to be. So now, because I took a stand based on the few facts I had managed to get from contacting the Lindens, I will be labeled as giving bad CS, and put on the *DO NOT SHOP LIST*. I have even gotten some inquiries about my policy on this, and being told, "im checking before I buy, making a list of shops to avoid and telling ALL my friends".... Doesn't this sound a bit like blackmail??

I think it's a shame 1) that content creators seem to get all the BLAME for this bug.
2) how demanding and rude SO many people have been about it.
I am not saying ALL or MOST, but TOO MANY..definintely.

So hopefully this has been corrected if everyone can just have a little patience.

Andie, don't worry too much about this as I can assure you, you were not the only content creator taxed by this matter. I know many content creators who reacted in much the same manner as you did because under this situation, it only made good business sense to do so. It was not a normal CS situation. Conditions warranted taking a wait and see approach to see whether that merchandise was actually lost, or whether it would eventually be saved and returned to our inventories. This is the main reason I started this poll/thread. So that both entities could have a venue to explain and understand each others plight and point of view.

Mature and understanding customers understood this and worked together with content creators and designers through this very difficult matter. Unfortunately, some customers were not so kind and instead decided to lambast, disrespect, and demean content creators for a matter they were well aware was not the content creators fault.

As it turns out, its apparent that items will eventually be returned to all affected persons and that those content creators who were pleading with their customers to take a wait and see approach were being reasonable after all. In a perfect world, it would be nice if these customers would contact these content creators they disrespected and reinforce their support for them over a friendly IM.

But we wont hold our breaths waiting for that to happen will we lol.

Nevertheless, hindsight is always easier to see than foresight. So that in the end I am sure all involved persons will see the truth for what it is and ultimately all will be forgiven.