We are into week 2 of Direct Delivery. The problems continue to mount. JIRA’s continue to pile up. The Lab has apparently cut off support for Magic Boxes. In general things are a frustrating mess.
Support
In a thread on SLUniverse some people have filed trouble tickets for Magic Box problems. They are getting a canned response that the Lab stopped supporting Magic Boxes March 21, 2012. They are asked to move to Direct Delivery (DD).
I don’t understand why the Lab would have the Support Team cut off providing assistance to Magic Box users. I think it might be more helpful to handle both systems until the transfer to DD is complete. I imagine that requests for DD support are overwhelming. I also suspect there is little they can do to fix those problems as DD is probably still very much in the hands of the Commerce Team.
Whatever the reason, the decision to stop supporting Magic Boxes is putting merchants and customers in a Catch-22 predicament. Obviously that is going to add to the frustration with the Lab.
Product Scramble
Somewhere in the process of the transfer something scrambled parts of the Market Place’s (MP) database. Merchants are seeing the product images for their products in MP Stores other than their’s. They also see other people’s products in their store.
It is completely confusing as to what product the customer is getting and which merchant is getting money from which sale.
I haven’t seen my store scramble, but I stopped trying to transfer products after 2 or 3 because the web site was so slow.
See JIRA WEB-4587 – Incorrect items showing up on my marketplace store from other merchants but with my listing texture and vice versa.
Search Confused
Also, search results are confused. Searching on various terms produces none-related results at times. Other times it simply fails returning no results even when the search term should have thousands of hits.
Slow
Form the forum I see people have actually timed the process. While not common some have seen it take up to 8 minutes for a MP page to update after a click. In many cases the web browser runs out of patience before the site can respond, producing a ‘server failed to respond’ error.
Down Time
Obviously there are lots of problems. Along with problems come restarts and down time for changes to be made. Today, March 29, the MP was to be off line starting at either 5:00 AM or 9:30 AM, depending on which Grid Status report you read. It was planned to be down for about an hour, but the maintenance got put off to Monday April 2. That change was announced at 5:17 AM today, Thursday. Confused?
Merchants are frustrated as fixes and “maintenance” has taken the MP down about a dozen times this month, four times since the DD roll out. Each time costs sales.
Summary
One can assume the involved Lindens are doing the best they can. Or one can make lots of negative assumptions. Whichever, our decision tells others more about us than the Lindens. However you handle it, it is a frustrating experience.
As of today I am finding the Market Place running faster. But, it still seems slow to me. I’m creating more folders preparing to move stuff into DD.
LL haven’t ceased support for Magic Boxes.
What appears to have happened is some form of communications breakdown between LL and their Customer Support provider. An official comment on the matter has come out ouf LL from Commerce Team Linden on the matter of the incorrect statement from CS which states:
“We are so sorry for this response. We are reaching out to you directly to help you with this issue and are already working to make sure that everyone in support is aware that we will continue to support Magic Boxes until they are officially retired. Thank you for bringing this to our attention”.
Thank you for passing that info along. 🙂
No probs 🙂
The message is buried in a forum thread and hard to find…
For about 2-3 weeks now my sales of one specific product is up like 1000 %. So I really can´t complain. But there is no specific reason, no change in ranking.