Whether you are a merchant or a shopaholic failed deliveries are a PITA. Darrius Gothly has a post in the SL Forum (A New Theory Why The Shopping Cart Causes “Failed Deliveries”) about failed deliveries and what might be done to improve things. A quick summary follows.

Concept

Darrius has the idea that we may not be have a higher rate of failed deliveries, but only a perceived higher rate. It is like not having a TV, so you don’t know about all the storms around the world. You get a TV and hear about them and suddenly start thinking there are more storms than ever. It is not the weather that changed, it is you intake of information that changed. You are now aware of what is going on.

Darrius explains how the shopping cart in the Market Place (MP) has changed the information flow so that we see more delivery failures. We personally have no increase in failures, but merchant reporting tells us about more failures and raises our awareness.

Actual Failures

There are real failures. People do buy things and don’t get them. Darrius thinks most of the failed deliveries come from a small group of people having problems with their Magic Boxes. If Linden Lab were to look into their data, they could find the find the problem boxes. Then they could be offered the owner help to fix the problem. He even volunteers to help.

It is hard to know exactly what is happening. There is no doubt that Magic Boxes get overloaded and fail. The region a box is setting in can have problems. The utility servers that support assets and sales can have problems. It makes it hard for a merchant to know whether they have a box problem or there is some other problem they have no control over.

Possible Fix

A Magic Box can have too much inventory stashed in it. I have no idea what the limit is and I suspect it varies. The rate of sales, number of sales per minute, can affect Magic Box performance. Anyone that is selling lots of stuff should be using more than one Magic Box and dividing up inventory.

I’m pretty sure I’ve never had a sales-per-minute rate that reached 1… So, I haven’t had delivery problems. Nor do I have a load of items for sale.

Direct Delivery

Once Direct Delivery (DD) is live Magic Boxes will not be needed. People will sell directly from their inventory. Since we are expecting DD to arrive in September, with any luck, we will soon see fewer failed deliveries.

Competition for Market Place

We used to have competing market places. Linden Lab has pretty much bought out the competition and closed the services or rolled them into the SL Market Place. If you read the thread Darrius started, you’ll see a number of people are unhappy with the current Market place and especially SL Search. So, just as Facebook is open to competition because users are unhappy with Facebook, so too is Linden Lab’s Market Place. May be someone will start a new market place.