Best vendor machine? Or what to avoid?

Hi! I'm on my way to open my store and I have to choose a vendor machine. I found so many of them so finally I'm more confuse about them. A little help will be appreciated. I know that it seem to have two kind of vendor: A local one and a networked one. I understand the difference. But what about fonctionality, number of prism, lag, security and affordability? Some seem to cause lag and other don't, some tell that it can't prevent security attacks, some seem so complicated, some take 2 prims other 5, and some cost 2000L$ and other 200L$ with the same permission...

So as I can't give them a test drive without buying them, what I can't afford :0) I need some advices. I know that probably each of you have it's prefered one. But if you can't give advices on the best vendors, can you tell me what is important to avoid or to have or not.

Thanks for your help!

By the way, maybe it's an important information, I will sell jewellery and will have hundreds of them. So Il will probably need a vendor that can handle many items. Can it be a problem?

Networked vendors are nice because they simplify updating the items in your vendors (ie. you can do it all in one place, instead of having to run around updating them individually) although lately I've been considering switching to simpler individual vendors because of occasional delivery problems when SL gets flaky. These problems are very rare though, the result being that I've been "considering" for several weeks now.

I use JEVN, although if I'd known about it when I purchased a vendor system I probably would have gone with Wolfhaven.

I have a wolfhaven vendor I use to sell avatars and skins with. It's a very nice vendor once you get used to how to set it up, and the customer service is great!

www.apez.biz - Nicely innovated networked vendor system and more.

apez.vend - a networked vendor service with a difference.

* Keep all your items in-world in a central location - in an iServ item server (use as
many as you need).
* Setup and manage your products on the vend.product pages, changing prices,
descriptions, notecards, etc. all via an easy-to-use interface.
* Sell your products through the iVend vendor in-world - rez as many as you need
in-world and manage their settings online.
* Don't limit your products to sales from your own stores! Make them available for
anyone to sell and increase your exposure!
* No products of your own? No problem, earn commission selling other merchants
products for them!
* Sell your products on-line or in-world.

Grab a FREE iServ and iVend at www.apez.biz and give them a
whirl.


Do you have your own web-site? Wish to sell your products from your own pages? Take a look at the Apez Affiliate Services Guide to see if our EzBuy cross-site purchase and item delivery handling can meet your needs.


- Cenji Neutra

btw, the price can be misleading, so make sure to read the description carefully. I've seen vendor systems where you get the vendors cheap/free, but the system sends a percentage of every sale to the creator of the vendor.

Moopf's Vending Machine.
-7 prims.
-Like others, allows for setting up multiple products.
-Allows "gifting" of the product directly to the person you want to give it to. ie, you can buy someone a NoTrans item with it.
-Copiable. You need to only buy one.
-Very low lag. Most of what is results from client side texture lag on pics.
-Price: @ 500L$

Networking vendors (as listed above) are very nice if you have multiple locations, or hundreds of products. Takes a bit to learn them, but most come with easy to understand directions. JVEN is one of these, though I'm not sure of the stats for those.

Hiro Pentdragon (think I spelled his last name right) also markets a set of free vendors to use.
-First is a 1-prim vendor. It still holds multiple products and simply cycles through them all at a touch.
-Second is the standard "arrow selection" vendor type. Arrows to go forward, back, buy, and I think one for information.
-Last is a holo vendor. Uses TempOnRez scripting to display a 3D "hologram" of your product. Good for displaying high-prim objects temporarily. A bit tricky to set up, but Hiro writes very nice instructions.

~Jessy

I like Moopf's vending machines as well. The whole point of the vending machine is for a customer to easily browse the items, and the items load as fast as possible. Moopfs seem to load faster than most.


Regarding the OP (but not to get off topic).... how do you know if a vending machine is secretly giving a commission to the vendor creator?

I'd assume you'd notice the discrepency in account balance. If you're like me and walk around with anywhere from 3-15L on you at any given moment, and sell something that costs 50L, it's easy to see if you're recieving the full 50...or merely 48-89L.

A prim cube, with the "sell contents" box checked and a pretty texture dropped on the front, is the best vendor bar none!

The only time I ever mess with scripted vendors nowadays is if I have a requirement to profit-share with a second party (or if I want to run a specialist vendor like a "mobvend" or a lucky chair).

When I said earlier I'm considering ditching my networked vendors, this is basically what I'm thinking of going to. One note here: make sure to give each selling box a descriptive unique name, so that you can tell them apart in your transactions history.

Speaking of selling things and vendors....I have question didn't want create new thread about it but isn't there a script that will just let you buy a item directly without vending?
Why aren't these used more versus vending systems?

Depends a lot on what you sell, how many items you sell, and how many locations you have.

I sell all my texture bundles with a 1-prim vendor that allows the buyer to preview all the textures in the bundle, and which splits the sales income between myself and the store owner. It's OK for selling at a single location, and it provides detailed sales records, e-mailed to me, indicating exactly who bought what. This is the arrangement the store owner prefers, and it generally works OK. But when I go into that store on a system with a low-end video card, what do I see? Thousands of blank grey squares. I have to hover my mouse oevr vendors to force them to load the image. So as a shopper who is stuck on a low-end system, I think it's a terrible way to buy the items. On the other hand, if you have a fast video card, I suppose it's fairly easy to compare a lot of things at once.

I'll also use a single prim vendor to highlight sale items, so they are seperate from my main vendor and can get more attention.

I used to set up a 5-prim free, non-networked vendor at each of my stores. That meant that any time I updated my product line, I had to go to each store and manually update or replace the vendor. It also only told me who bought something and how much they spent, but not what they bought. By changing the name of each vending machine to indicate the product line and sim name, I could at least get a record of what stores and product lines sold well. But I also had to download my transaction file at least twice a month to prevent myself from losing sales transaction records.

I use JEVN networked vendors now for all my non-texture stores. Plusses: Easy to update all locations at once. Detailed sales records, e-mailed to me, and can split sales profits between myself and someone else if I want, adjustable on an item-by-item basis. Minuses: Harder to initially set up, Affected by sim lag badly, sometimes has trouble with updates or product delivery because of lag issues.

Any vendor that supports multiple items and hover text descriptions gan be a godsend to the consumer, in high-lag situations. They can flip through the items, reading the hover text, and don't have to wait for each texture to rez. If I an shopping, and one store has a vending machine with hover text, and the one next door has individual boxed items that are all still grey and unreadable because the textures haven't loaded yet, the one with hover text will get my sales. I can't buy what I can't see.

Does SL cap how many records it keeps track of? I was under the impression that it keeps all records over the past 30 days, but I guess I don't know for sure.


On the other hand, people don't buy just based on hovertext, they want to see the pictures. What Ceera describes helps a lot so that people can start browsing through a large list of items in a multivendor, but if you only have a few big ticket items then hovertext doesn't really matter because people aren't going to actually purchase until the textures are loaded. The important thing is to streamline your textures so that they load as fast as possible.

You don't need a script to do this, you can do it all using the "Edit Object" window. Sell the item directly or put it in a box and sell the box or contents of the box directly. No scripts to go haywire everytime there is an update. This is how I sell all of my items. I think it is prefereable for the customer instead of having to waiting wait for a mulit item vendor to display a new picture of the next item.

The transaction records on the SL website only cover the past 30 days. If you forget and accidentally wait 32 days between downloads, you can lose customer sales data. and there is NO automated way to get a copy of your transaction log from the SL website. So I do a manual download every 14 to 15 days, to cover my tail.

The bit with the hover text is that I don't have to weait for 20 screens to rez for items that I am not seeking. If I want a pair of purple boots, I can skip past all the other colors and then wait for the purple set's pic to rez, to see if I want to buy that item. If it was 30 1-prim vendors with no hover text, I'd be looking for a needle in a haystack, waiting for each one to rez before I had any clue what it was.

Hi! I wanna thanks everybody here to help me and sorry for the delay of responding. So I wanna let you know that I choose to give a try to two different vendor suggested here: Wolfhaven and Apez both networked. The first one seem to be very fast and the Apez one have more functionnality... but I'm still testing them.

Thanks again!!!

Perhaps you should also take a look at http://www.lslwiki.com/lslwiki/wakka.php?wakka=LibraryVendor

That's where I got my first scripted vendor systems from. Create 3 linked items (display and forward-next button, display prim as the root prim), copy the "Main Vendor Script" and "Image Display" into scripts in the main prim and the prev / next button scripts into the appropriate button, to get the vendor up and running.
I found this basic solution to be fast and reliable. The previous / next image is preloaded on the (usually flat) sides of the root prim, so the items load pretty fast. Additional functionality (like payment buttons with the correct amount in the payment dialogue) can easily be added, if you aren't afraid of scripting.