I think it’s fair to say that Direct Delivery hasn’t gone smoothly so far, ok I may be underplaying the issues there. Darrius Gothly has a blog post entitled: The Fiasco Called Marketplace which has an in depth look at the issues. I’m not going to take an in depth look at the issues, largely because I’m tired and grumpy, this isn’t an unusual situation!
Linden Lab aren’t hiding the issues, they have a post on the forum detailing Jira entries on issues. Linden Lab have also made changes to the migration schedule, the original schedule was:
- April 2 through 13, 2012: Inworld Q&A sessions on using and migrating to Direct Delivery.
- April 18, 2012: All listings priced L$10 and lower must use Direct Delivery.
- May 16, 2012: Magic Boxes no longer allowed for any Marketplace listing.
This has now all changed, with the FAQ updated to state that merchants will not need to migrate before June 1st and that a new schedule will be posted closer to this date, this means the Q&A sessions as well as migration are now going to take place further in the future. This is a sensible move, I felt the migration dates were too short in the first place and that was without the problems that have surfaced.
Direct Delivery migration in itself, isn’t that painful an exercise. The FAQ that I linked to above takes you through the steps, so far I’ve found the easiest way to migrate is to copy all of your magic box into your inventory inworld and then put those items into the outbox, then they should largely auto associate.
If you want to take advantage of the new system that allows you to sell by folders, instead of boxed items, then the easiest way to get an item to auto associate for me was to rez the boxed item, copy the contents to my inventory so that my folder has the same name as the magic box item, and then drag the whole folder to the outbox. This may not work for everyone but I’ve found that most of my items auto associate when I follow this route.
Direct Delivery migration will get very painful if you have a lot of items that don’t auto associate, that would be a tedious task indeed, but from my experience, it’s a rather smooth process and I haven’t had any association issues.
However now you don’t have such a big rush to migrate, you can take your time, do a bit of testing, enjoy a bit of sun during spring and migrate slowly. The issues that have arisen are not all due to Direct Delivery, there seem to be some other issues going on, so not migrating does not mean you will be free of the bugs that are manifesting themselves, keep your eyes on your store and see what’s happening. I have been fortunate so far, others haven’t.
One issue to be aware of is that No Copy items cannot be sold via direct delivery, so if you’re selling an item you don’t have copy perms on, don’t migrate that item.
I know there are quite a few unhappy campers out there at the moment, I have sympathy with merchants who are experiencing issues, I also have sympathy with Linden Lab, they haven’t gone out of their way to create problems and now they find themselves in a fire fighting situation, the best thing merchants can do is keep an eye on the Jira, add new information, rather than saying you have the same issue and provide as much information as possible to Linden Lab to assist them in resolving these issues.
One Reply to “Direct Delivery Migration Dates Pushed Back”