Vending Machines for Shops

I'm interested in starting up a little shop. Initially, I was looking at some of the server based vending machines like Apez or JEVN, trying to figure out which was a better system. Then one of the marketplaces I was looking at, had a note saying JEVN and other server based vending machines were not allowed.

What are the pro's and cons of server based vendors?

What are the pro's and cons of JEVN and Apez and any others out there?

We used to use the JEVN system and stopped. We found for a large group of people having to host a large number of servers the lag they created was unacceptable to us on our property.

If you can afford it the JZ vendors (not networked) are super reliable and very low lag

If you need something cheaper (also not networked) Moopf Murray does his Giftoph (spelling?) which has the advantage of allowing people to purchase items as gifts for others. THis one i sby far the easiest to setup I have ever seen. Very reliable. Just not quite as economical as the JZ.

of 52 family members we are about 50/50 split between JZ and Giftoph.

I used to used JevN, but because I offered several colors of the same outfits, it was a page of one outfit, then another and another, each taking time to rez.

JevN DOES allow you to only have to deal with one server, so if you plan on having more than maybe 5 vendor spaces, I'd recommend it for ease of updating products. You can centrally store the items.

I have not used the other system.

Another reason I decided not to use it, is because I liked the way the Linden tools for sales have been set up when you sell contents. Makes it much easier on clothing folders, than having to unpack everything you sell.

The overall reason I decided against ANY vendors is the constant click through. Myself personally, I don't like to sit and look at one thing (or several) and click... click... click, so I figured others may be the same. Some people have loaded 90+ items into a single picture showing vendor and I'm certainly not gonna click 90 times.

However, a vendor set up may be your only alternative, if you have say... 300 items and a prim allowance of 50. (At which point I'd put up as many vendors as I could under the limit and spread the items out.)

If you have more than two or three sales locations, a JEVN server or similar networked system can be a HUGE time saver, and also gets you far more detailed records of your sales, telling you precisely what items sold, in what locations, and to whom. But yes, they do cause more lag. I use JEVN for my clothing sales now.

I have also used low-lag, low-prim veding systems that have only 3 to 5 prims per vendor. Those are OK if you have 20 or fewer items to sell in a given vendor, but it takes a long time to scroll through the options one at a time, and often these only tell you that you made a sale from that vendor at a certain location, to whom, and for what amount of L$. They usually do NOT tell you which of the 20 or so items in that vendor was purchased. And since these are not networked, updating your inventory means going to every site and doing manual changes. To me these seem best if you have a low prim limit and a modest number of things to sell. It is also fairly forgiving for customers with slow video cards. They can scroll through a number of choices, reading the text above the vendor, and then only have to wait for the item that interests them to rez.

Selling items individually from boxed displays, using 'sell copy' or 'sell contents', does give you detailed records of which items sell. And for customers with fast video cards, they can look at a wall full of images and just buy the ones they want. No muss, no fuss. But it takes a LOT of prims to do this, if you have a large selection. And if the customer has a slow video card, they see nothing but grey boxes, and you WILL lose their sales to vendors using other vending methods. I use individual one-prim vendors for my texture sales at Textures-R-Us, because it is the store standard method, and they have the prim count available to sprawl like that.

Thanks for the info. I really like the thought of detailed sales records and updating vendors from a remote location. But I had come across the lag issues and was concerned.

well there is also the kdc netsys

I do too, and with the sell contents of a prim through Linden set up, I name the item and code it at the end. Such as:

~NCD~ YHoobler blobber Outfit (bs)
~NCD~ Flabblegagler (g6)

(Those are not real items, not trying to promote my stuff.)

The things in parenthesis are the indicator of where the items are.