Transaction ID’s Should Be Preserved On The Transaction History Page

One of the issues that has been raised regarding the new Transaction History page is the issue of transaction ID’s not being present. The argument goes that as only a portion of the transaction ID is present on the page, it’s not guaranteed to be a unique value and therefore is not as useful as it could be. The full ID is available in downloads and will continue to be available in downloads.

However, part of the transaction ID being present is better than none of it being present. Here’s a scenario, a customer has an issue, the merchant asks them for the transaction ID from the SL website, the customer complies, the merchant finds the transaction and from there, they can see what happened with that transaction or at least engage with the first steps in finding out what happened.

Some people seem to believe it’s better to ask customers for date/time, item, price etc. instead of trying to go for a single lookup via a transaction ID. I’m finding this all somewhat bemusing as the chances of the portion of the transaction ID on the SL website not being unique in a certain range is minimal for the vast majority of merchants and customers, the only strong argument against their inclusion is that they are incomplete, but as the issue of duplicates is not likely to happen often, it seems odd to want to withdraw this.

Again this seems like it’s something that busier merchants may find less useful, but busier merchants are in the minority. There should be a happier compromise here, collapsable fields. Therefore those who don’t want to see a certain field can hide it, but for those who still find it useful, it will still be there.

The thing with transaction ID’s is that they are like call ticket numbers. Whereas a support system should be able to find tickets filed by customers based on their name, the date it was submitted and the subject matter, it’s easier to find their ticket if they take note of the call ticket number and provide that.

So as I said, the big flaw with the current format is that the transaction ID is not fully displayed on the SL website, but how often do you see the same transaction ID on the SL website? The more transactions you engage with, the more likely the chances that the ID prefix will be duplicated, but this is not going to be a common scenario.

I’m not sure why Linden Lab think removing the ID prefix from the website is a good idea, those who find it less useful won’t use it, but those who are finding it a useful reference are going to want to keep using it because it’s a good way of getting to the relevant information in a timely fashion and is a field that is far more likely to be unique.

This really boils down to options and whereas I don’t think Linden Lab should over complicate matters, the ID prefix remains a useful field and should stay on the transaction history page.


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