With the clock ticking on Direct Delivery, one area where merchants may have been taken by surprise is in the category of demos, which will have been unlisted today if you haven’t migrated. Linden Lab did warn merchants about the need to migrate, so why would demos have caught merchants by surprise? Well it’s more than likely to do with how some busy merchants think.
Demos are not an item merchants consider they are selling, they are there to demonstrate an item, so when a merchant gets an email telling them items they sell that are priced lower than ten linden dollars need to be migrated, quite a few merchants would be thinking that they don’t sell any items in that range, as they don’t consider a demo an item that they sell.
This issue harks back to the days when The SL Marketplace was first acquired by Linden Lab and people were asking for demos to be included in the item listing, something that still hasn’t been achieved.
The horse does seem to have bolted now but I would imagine a few merchants are scampering around trying to sort their demos out and in some cases, they will still be running into the documented problems. Now in hindsight, it’s probably easy to say that Linden Lab should have pointed out that demos were included. However if some merchants haven’t considered the issue of demos, and I’ll be honest, I didn’t consider the issue of demos (I don’t have any listed, but I didn’t think about them) then it’s no wonder Linden Lab didn’t think about them either.
The fallout is here now and merchants will be dealing with it, but there will be frustrations ahead.