I’ve seen a few complaints recently regarding people receiving items that are not as described via the marketplace. One was a complaint that the buyer purchased three full perm mesh items, but received two boxes with no mod notecards in them, for the princely sum of 18,500 Linden Dollars: About Marketplace and thieves.
Another thread details how someone paid 6,000 Linden Dollars for a Mesh Avatar and after purchasing discovered that they also need to purchase a client from the Marketplace for the sum of 20,000 Linden Dollars : How do I get a refund from a Marketplace seller who falsely advertised?
In the latter case I can find examples on The Marketplace of something along those lines, they can be found in the :::Next Gen::: store on The Marketplace (Listings have been pulled). Those avatars actually look pretty impressive, the description states:
“The New Age range is entirely compatible with ALL mesh & rigged mesh clothing. You will look better than most of the people you know in this brilliant avatar.
All of our worn products work in conjunction with Premier Life and give the user such an enjoyable experience that has given us the opportunity to be in 3D development for the last 3 years.”
Maybe the buyer should have asked what Premier Life is before purchasing, but the description does not say that you must buy Premier Life, whatever Premier Life is, even The Marketplace description for Premier Life (Listing has been pulled) contains little details:
“This is the Premier Life Client which is needed to view ALL Next Gen Wearables.”
That line should really be in all their product descriptions, although if Premier Life is a third party viewer then it’s in breach of policy on client names, however as it will cost a buyer a whopping 20,000 Linden Dollars, it should be firmly pointed out in all listings that this product is required. I doubt that the merchant is trying to deceive anyone, it looks more like an oversight to me but it’s an oversight that should be rectified.
The bottom line here is that The Marketplace should have a dispute resolution centre similar to eBay’s.
The traditional line is that Linden Lab do not get involved in resident to resident disputes, but as they take commission on Marketplace sales and are actively involved in the process, there should be some protection for buyers. Linden Lab can investigate cases such as this, they can check inventories, they can intervene.
People will say that Linden Lab don’t have the manpower, but we do have an abuse report procedure, this could be extended to the Marketplace in cases of significantly not as described items (SNAD). Cases would need to be filed quickly to resolve such issues but it is feasible. Buyers and Sellers should communicate first, if the seller refunds then Linden Lab should be able to delete the item from the buyer’s inventory.
Another issue may be Linden Lab being inundated with complaints were they to open up a dispute resolution centre, if that ended up being the case, then it would suggest there are some significant issues surrounding The Marketplace in general, I don’t think that’s the case, the vast majority of sales go perfectly smoothly.
In many cases sellers aren’t intentionally misleading people in these cases, it’s an oversight on their part. However oversights should be pointed out. The Marketplace is a very popular resource, buyers could do with protection, I know sellers want protection too, but that’s a different area of debate.
It might be a good idea for users to start collecting such cases e.g. in the SL Universe forum so that we (and maybe LL) get an idea about the dimension of the problem. There is always the question of costs vs. benefits…
SLUniverse does have threads about stolen content, there’s a regular one for Mesh, I’m always wary of such threads turning into a witch hunt, although most of the posers over there are experienced.
Might want to re-check those links. Tried in 3 different browsers and they comt up empty for me (default to MP home page with ratings set to GMA) Even a search directly on the store leads to an empty listing – almost as if items have been taken down…. Or I need to give my PC a swift kick … “?”
The listings have been pulled, they were pulled less than an hour after I posted, there had by that time been a couple of one star reviews, I don’t know if the seller or LL pulled the listings.
Yeah. I assumed there’d most likely been a take-down (one way or the other), hence the suggestion to re-try :). That said, the way my PC in behaving at the moment, it could just as easily have been because it decided to sulk….
I checked the creator’s in-world profile. Interestingly, no reference to the business within it. Doesn’t prove anything either way; just interesting. The profile itself is around a month old, although the person behind it clearly states they’ve been around SL a lot longer.
A shame the listings were pulled, was rather curious to see if more could be discovered regading this “Premier Life” thing.