Extraordinary vendors?

I'm planning to open up a shop sooner or later, and I probably will use vendor machines to a sizable degree. This way I can show more wares / prim, and putting outlets in malls becomes trivial.

To start with I will primarily be selling clothes, so we're talking about showing a poster texture for each product, nothing more complicated.


I've encountered a few slick vendors, my favorite UI so far is to have a large display in the middle, with 5 smaller ones on each side. The smaller "thumbnails" update the larger display upon clicking. When you add pagination you can show a lot of products in a prim- and space efficient way.

Mu current vision is to implement vendor where I'd have the UI mentioned above, with prev page, next page, demo and buy buttons below the main screen.

How does this approach sound? If anyone has landmarks to stores which use vendors well I'd be interested to take a look. If there is an open source vendor close to this spec I'd like to know, of course!

If people have advice code-wise on vendor design I'd obviously like to hear it. I've taken a look at the multi product, multi seller holovendor script by Apotheus Silverman and it seems like we're not exactly talking about overly complicated things for a professional programmer. (My RL occupation.)


Then there is also the question of testing... How can i test my vendor sensibly? Put in some kind of debugging mode where it sells stuff to me and only me for 1 L$ each?


I realize many people prefer the approach of having a product poster prim per product, but that approach only scales if you have enough land. For the time being I don't, and any mall outlets will be limited to a small number of prims anyway...

All input is welcome!

www.apez.biz. The vendors have all that plus you can make all changes without logging into Second Life.

I had a look at their site but it was rather slim on specs. I assume I can't add functionality to a package solution like that? What about changing the appearance of the vendor?

I like control.

The creator is always open to new design ideas. The full retail vendor package comes with a large selection of vendor. The Owner has a island where he showcases most of his vendors. I suggest dropping by and also sending him a instant message for more detailed info.

That sounds like a plan, I'll have to take a look. I guess searching for Apez.biz in-world should find it?

I'm still interested in other input though, all ideas are welcome.

As suggested, the coding of a standalone vendor is pretty simple, and there must be several examples in the Library. The more tricky stuff comes with networked vendors: one must take money at the vendor and deliver the goods from a server, so it's highly desirable that the server be pretty sure the vendor it's hearing from is legit, which pretty much necessitates some form of authentication. Some server redundancy is beneficial so the vendors can keep working when one server's sim is down (and so vendors can learn from one server that another server has been replaced). Some commercial systems (I gather the one mentioned above is one of them) pass everything through a web server; in addition to the possibility of web-based administration, this sidesteps the aggravation of possible server UUID changes, but introduces the need for high-availability hosting and associated costs.

Some malls require use of one or more specific vendors to control lag and the chattiness of some vendors / configurations.

As for testing, the suggested approach seems reasonable--except I'd be sure to get an alt or friend to test, too (you could put in temporary "refund all L$s paid" logic--you'll need to have refund-L$s logic anyway, in case delivery doesn't happen for whatever reason, or in case the buyer somehow manages to pay you other than the amount specified).

No matter how clever the vendor design, though, buyers just make more mistakes with vendors than with "boxes" (proportional to the number of images shown on the vendor and sim lag, at least), so plan for scaling customer support, too.

I use the apez system.

The web server is used to auth when new vendors get rezed or when new servers get rezed, then i think the vendors and servers store each others UUID's in memory. From what i recall the apez system only needs the website to set up new products, and to rez/update new servers/vendors. The actual handling of money and product deliveries is indepedent of the website i think.

That being said, the apez system is great. It's easy to use, and i love being able to trigger a redelivery or even give someone an item free via the interface. The other feature i love about apez is it has a commision/public wares system built right in. Product Creators can set their products to be sellable by anyone with an apez vendor, and the creator can set a certain commision. When someone other the the creator sells the product, the seller gets the commision and the rest goes to the creator, and the creator's server hands out the item.

This is a networked system- btw

Another vendor system is Hippovend. I use it for my affiliates mainly. I think the one thing I love about hippovend is the customer service. Next I love that the affiliate vendors don't go offline daily. Lastly I love the categorizing system with hippovend. I can filter certain vendors to items to specific vendors- say only have a vendor for ItemA, ItemB, for ItemC, etc.

Look both into apez and hippovend- as when I moved from JEVN/JENC I looked into both and while I choose hippovend- apez was a very heavy contender in the race.

JEVN/JENC wasn't bad but the affiliates went offline daily, I once accidentally deleted my server and that made life difficult because the server is key based. I did recently delete one of my hippovend servers and just rerezed it and answered a prompt and life was sweet again. (I have a cat that likes to jump on my keyboard while I edit items that are mission critical) I also found while I had only that one issue with the affiliate vendors w/ JEVN/JENC when I started using hippovend I won't ever go back. Thank you web interface!