Linden Lab have blogged that the new Viewer-Managed Marketplace is available on Aditi, better known as The Beta Grid. The blog post informs us that :
The new Viewer-Managed Marketplace (VMM), now available* on Aditi, allows you to easily manage your inventory on the Second Life Marketplace using the Second Life Viewer. Items no longer need to be loaded into the Merchant Outbox or a Magic Box, and are instead sold directly from your inventory.
VMM will allow all Merchants to get off of Magic Boxes in addition to supporting modification of listing inventory directly from the Viewer. While Merchants will still need to go to the Marketplace web site in order to edit listings, they will be able to create listings and list or unlist them from the Viewer.
The blog post is accompanied by a Wiki article and a Knowledgebase Article which both have extra information and instructions on how to use the coming new feature. The Viewer-Managed Marketplace (AKA VMM) addresses some outstanding issues from Direct Delivery. The first is a biggie, VMM allows you to list no copy items. Currently, Direct Delivery does not support no copy items and merchants selling no copy items have had to continue to use magic boxes.
Another issue is that there have been intermittent issues with the Merchant Outbox and VMM addresses those issues too because once this is fully rolled out there will be no need to move items to the Marketplace because they will be being sold directly from your inventory. At this point can I just add, I remain unconvinced that this will end well, but we’ll see!
There will be a migration process, although as in the past its probably best if you take care of this yourself if you can. This may be painful for merchants with large Marketplace stores. The knowledgebase article is definitely worth a read as it provides some information regarding what can be done via this new feature, for example :
The Marketplace Listings window
The Marketplace Listings window is an extension of your Second Life inventory that allows you to manage all inventory in your Second Life Marketplace store. By dragging and dropping items from your inventory window into the Marketplace Listings window, you can immediately begin setting up new listings, add updated versions of your existing products, and even list or unlist items on the Marketplace Store. You can access the Marketplace Listings window by choosing Me > Marketplace listings from the top menu bar of the Second Life Viewer.
Version folders
Each Marketplace Listing folder contains one or more version folders that allow you to easily manage updated versions of a product without creating a new listing. Version folders look like normal inventory folders with three lines drawn on them, like this: Inv_VersionFolderClosed.png. Only one version folder may be active at a time for each listing; when a customer buys your product, they receive a copy of the active version folder and its contents.
To activate a version folder for a Marketplace Listing, right-click the appropriate version folder and choose Activate. Currently active version folders are marked by the word “(active)”.
There’s more, it’s worth reading. However you may run into a little difficulty if you download the project viewer and login to Aditi, you may see something like this :
I’m not sure whether that will be a widespread issue, I’d have thought if Linden Lab want more Merchants to test this that the requirement to apply for Beta testing should have been removed. However there is a Jira Project where you can report issues too.
This will be interesting to watch, I’m not convinced that keeping items in your inventory for sale in this manner is a great idea, but we’ll see how this pans out. Addressing old issues regarding No Copy items is certainly to be welcomed.
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