Ilan gave a short update about progress on the Marketplace.
Oren has finished implementing all the required components for integration with PayPal. The Marketplace won’t open just yet but all the critical parts have now been implemented. The purchase history and sales history pages are also done, as are all the notification emails.
The plan is to roll out a build early next week that will include this code but with the “Add to Cart” button disabled. It will include the ability to define a connection to a merchant’s PayPal account.
Note from Ilan: the aforementioned update was rolled out on July 29: http://www.kitely.com/virtual-world-new ... rovements/
Marketplace refunds
Merchants can decide whether or not they wish to offer refunds; if they do, they may wish to advertise this on their shop’s “About” page, and maybe in the item description.
Merchants will be able to refund payment on a per-item basis to give buyers KC back. This option can be used up to 30 days after each purchase.
Refunds are only in KC even if items were bought for USD.
Cider asked what happens if a purchaser doesn’t have a Kitely account and bought the item for another grid. Would the refunded KC go into their Kitely Market profile account? And what if they paid cash? Ilan emphasised that all transactions are with a Kitely account. “You can’t buy if you don’t have one.” However, how items will be delivered to other grids is still an open question.
If a merchant refunds an item, that item will become unexportable. Further down the line Kitely will automatically remove that item from circulation inside Kitely.
The goal is to enable merchants to know that if they gave someone KC as a refund then the item that was bought and all the copies that were created of it inside Kitely will be reclaimed so the buyer won’t get to keep something after the KC are refunded. If the merchant doesn’t get to keep the payment the buyer doesn’t get to keep what was bought (but that functionality is not yet implemented).
Payouts to merchants
The way Kitely has implemented payouts is that once the 45 days withholding period is over, the money becomes cleared. Payouts are automatically deposited on a weekly basis for cleared funds if they exceed $10 (if they don’t they will be held until the next deposit slot to check again).
There are cases where a person decides to sell things for USD but either didn’t define or has problems with their PayPal account. This means that Kitely cannot transfer real money to that merchant. In those cases Kitely will notify the person so that they can resolve the problem preventing payment in USD. If 90 days pass after a USD purchase was made without Kitely being able to deliver it to the merchant’s PayPal account then the cleared but undeliverable USD will be converted to KC and paid into the merchant’s Kitely account. “We had to do that to avoid holding money indefinitely and opening ourselves to all kinds of regulations.”
Marketplace transaction history
Marketplace transactions will appear in multiple places in the interface: the current History page, and some new Purchase History and Sales History pages. Eventually, users will be able to export this information. Besides this, buyers and sellers already receive emails with the information.
Shelenn and Cider asked about the export format of the pages. Ilan said that this was yet to be decided, but tab delimited text files made sense – something that can be easily imported into Excel.
Cider hoped .csv would be possible, and an open format for Libre/OpenOffice, and Shelenn suggested that comma delimited seemed to be the most versatile.
Creator and owner attributions in OAR files
Shelenn asked a technical question related to the marketplace. On another grid, they lost creator and owner attributions to the region owner when an oar was made and copied to another region. Will that problem happen with Marketplace items at Kitely?
Shelenn gave an example: Suppose user A buys a widget in the Kitely Marketplace. It is delivered to user A’s inventory. User A places it in region 1, then copies (via the save and upload oar function) region 1 to region 2. Are the creator attributions retained for the object that was purchased at the Marketplace?
Ilan responded that the Marketplace retains creator information. The buyer will become the owner.
He went on to explain that Kitely stores all the information the OAR file format supports, including creator information. So when an OAR file is saved in Kitely, it includes all the information as it exists in Kitely (ownership, and creator info).
When an OAR file is uploaded, creator information is retained. However, previous owner IDs of parcels and objects are not retained. Instead, the world manager uploading the OAR is set as the owner of all the parcels and objects. Ilan explained: “If you have access to an OAR file you are the de-facto owner of what it contains; otherwise you can’t use OAR files you just uploaded. We will not, however, make you its creator.”
The question is whether the loading grid can set the saved info to an existing user. When an OAR is loaded, OpenSim validates the User IDs and Group IDs in the OAR to make sure they exist in the current grid. (This is standard OpenSim behavior.) If they don’t then it does one of several things:
- If the Owner of a parcel or object is missing, then the owner is set to the Estate Owner instead.
- If the Creator of an object is missing, then either the creator is set to the Estate Owner, or if the creator’s profile was included in the OAR then the creator is added to the grid’s users.
- If the Group of a parcel or object is missing then the parcel or object are reset so that they are no longer linked to a group.
Shelenn asked: “So we need to be sure we know how to include the creator’s profile with any object we sell in the MP? Or do you have that automated?”
Ilan replied that when an OAR file is saved, it includes info such as "Ilan Tochner@Kitely". The objects sold in the marketplace include the creator info of the person who created them in Kitely as part of the object. That information is saved in any Kitely OAR file. However, the loading grid needs to decide what it wants to do with that. “If we detect a user who is a Kitely user then we retain that creator information (when uploading the OAR file). Other grids may act differently -- that’s my point.”
Miscellaneous
Allen Partridge has organised a concert with Effinjay on Saturday August 10th at 10 AM US Pacific, at a small venue on Virtually Human ([url]hop://osgrid.kitely.com:8002/Virtually%20Human/149/239/22[/url]). For more details see: http://www.kitely.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=564
Shelenn and Minethere recommended joining the Kitely Virtual Google+ group: https://plus.google.com/communities/111 ... 4656181042
Ilan mentioned that he would making a presentation at the OpenSim Community Conference: http://www.kitely.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=535. Shelenn will be volunteering at the conference. For those unable to attend, there will be a live stream.
