Second Life Marketplace Direct Delivery Testing Part 1. Creating A New Listing

There are two tutorials in this series.  This one details the basic process of creating a new Direct Delivery only listing and Part 2 shows you how to migrate existing magic box content. It doesn’t cover everything but (unless things change dramatically) will guide you through a basics of Direct Delivery, which you can practice on the beta grid.

The tutorial starts with creating a new listing as it will allow you to see the new process without the clutter of existing listings.  I suggest you do both to get familiar with how Direct Delivery will work.  It assumes you are comfortable with creating listings on the current SLM website.  If you’re a complete newbie to SLM you might struggle a bit where I’ve not given step by step instructions for things we do at the moment.

Before we start, remember the usual caveat – this is LL we’re talking about here so the process may change. However, I doubt there’ll be major changes so it should give you a good start for when the day comes when we need to do it for real – you don’t want to be destroying your listings.

Preparing for the Test

To start, you need to set up on the beta grid and find your Direct Delivery test storefront on SLM.

So, first of all, go to your test storefront: https://marketplace.aditi.lindenlab.com/  and log in.  If you don’t see your basic storefront, which looks like this..

…go to the “create store” link and set it up. (I didn’t try this, so I’ll take LLs word it works).

Once you’ve done that, download the Direct Delivery project viewer from here: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Alternate_Viewers#Direct_Delivery.  You’ll see the links in the blue box that says this…

UPDATED! January 10, 2012 – Direct Delivery Project Viewer

Direct Delivery is a new, more convenient system designed to improve the delivery of Second Life Marketplace products to recipients, as well as help sellers more efficiently list their products on the Marketplace. For more information, please see the Direct Delivery FAQ.

Installers: Windows | Macintosh | Linux

Once you’ve installed the viewer, log into the Beta grid – you don’t need to select it as it will automatically log you in there.

How to Create a brand new Direct Delivery listing

you can do this anywhere on the Beta grid as you don’t need to rez anything.

First of all, go to me>merchant outbox and click it…

…as you will see, it brings up the outbox that you’ll be putting your items in.

Select some items to load – they can be in a folder or boxed.  If you drag a boxed item in there it will automatically create a folder for you to save you time.

Don’t be surprised if you don’t have all your stuff in your inventory.  It will be as current as the last time you logged into the Beta grid – in my case that looks like it was early 2010!

So create something to load or pick something and drag it in and click the send to the marketplace button

When it’s loaded you’ll see a success button -

Although apparently it may not have been successful despite this notification.  When you go to the website, you should see your listings like this.

The only difference between this and loading via the magic box is the name in the Delivery column.  You may see a lot of unavailable items, just ignore them – the test site has picked up your magic box items from the real site.

If the items you’ve just loaded don’t appear in the Unassociated Items list then you need to go to your Merchant Home page and click on Import Failure Log  and I assume there’ll be some instructions.. or probably not.

Then you create the new listing as normal.  Note, there’s a new field called Usage Requirements where you can tell the customer how they’ll receive it and what they need to do to get to it.  So if you quick fill from other listings just remember to update that field.

If it’s a folder, leave it as none and when the listing is created it will look the same as normal but with the Use It Now instruction.

and if it’s boxed and you tick the Unpacking radio button it will look like this…

If you don’t choose one of those buttons, it will automatically assume it doesn’t need unpacking. (cue possible drama and bad reviews)

I didn’t try the rest so I don’t know what instructions they give, I’ll leave it to you to try them out and feel free to report back in the comments section below.

Once you’ve listed your items, if you go to your storefront you’ll see it looks exactly the same as normal.

Note that there’s no way for the shopper to know if an item is a Direct Delivery or magic box delivery unless you identify it in the listing name.  This may cause problems for people who don’t have a viewer with the inbox. Time will tell how we’ll manage that when it’s released.

So, there you have it – apart from not having to go to load your magic box and wait for the sync and the new field, it’s the same process as usual.

Part 2 of this tutorial is testing the migration process.  It’s not as straight forward as this but isn’t as bad as you’ve come to expect from LL, so if you choose to do a straight migration to Direct Delivery then it won’t take you long at all.

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If you want more information, check out the LL help pages:

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Marketplace/Direct_Delivery_Beta_Instructions

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Alternate_Viewers#Direct_Delivery

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/SL_Marketplace:Direct_Delivery_FAQ

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Release_Notes/Marketplace_Beta_Current

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