Gifts and profiles

[Dundridge Dreadlow]

hence the gift button idea

[Funk Schnook]

Any news on this?

We need the ability to "gift" our own products without being charged.

I ran into a situation yesterday where a customer wanted an export version of an item they already bought. I thought I could simply refund and let them buy the exportable version. The problem is that the refund is done in KCs and I sell in $US, so this will not work.

If I could "gift" the item to the customer, I could create an "upgrade to exportable version" product on the market (just an empty cube) costing the price difference, which customers could buy.

[Ilan Tochner]

Hi Funk,

Ever since we made Kitely fully Hypergrid-enabled, you can send avatars from other Hypergrid-enabled grids items inworld. In other words, the barrier that initially prevented you from doing so no longer exists and you can now simply send items to people from other grids if you want.

Kitely Market is one of our premium services, it already includes a lot of value-add compared to selling inworld and over the next few months we intend to make it even better. We've spent a lot of time developing it and expect its contribution to our bottom line to grow over time. Every non-demo delivery we enable generates money for our company, money we rely on to be able to continue running and developing Kitely Market.

That is one of the reasons why there are no freebies allowed in Kitely Market. It also explains why we don't want to enable merchants to use Kitely Market while enabling them to bypass our sales commission by charging customers using other means and gifting items to them from the marketplace.

[Funk Schnook]

Ever since we made Kitely fully Hypergrid-enabled, you can send avatars from other Hypergrid-enabled grids items inworld. In other words, the barrier that initially prevented you from doing so no longer exists and you can now simply send items to people from other grids if you want.

I'm just experimenting with this now. I set up an account on osgrid to understand how it all works. I found that sending inventory to another AV is a little more complicated than it sounds. When the osgrid AV was in kitley, I had a few issues passing folders (didnt seem to work), but I have to run more tests. I also needed to make items full perms to send them to the other AV which requires some work for packs of 70+ skins etc. Putting items in a box and doing bulk perm changes doesnt always seem to work either (some get missed?).

I also tried putting my items in the suitcase, then going to osgrid and passing the items to the other av. Once again there were some issues with passing folders. It doesnt work. I did have some success with sending individual items though, but I still don't fully understand it. I had another more experienced user there and they were confused about it all too.

Kitely Market is one of our premium services, it already includes a lot of value-add compared to selling inworld and over the next few months we intend to make it even better. We've spent a lot of time developing it and expect its contribution to our bottom line to grow over time. Every non-demo delivery we enable generates money for our company, money we rely on to be able to continue running and developing Kitely Market.

That is one of the reasons why there are no freebies allowed in Kitely Market. It also explains why we don't want to enable merchants to use Kitely Market while enabling them to bypass our sales commission by charging customers using other means and gifting items to them from the marketplace.

OK I understand the potential for abuse, but I think we need to come up with a better solution. My refund scenario (where a user wanted to upgrade to an exportable version) needs a better solution. Maybe instead of refunding KCs to the customer, kitely could give them "credit" at the store that refunded them. Then they could purchase the export version using credit plus $US for the price difference. This would be easy for the merchant and customer, and kitley would make money.

If I have to go in world, set up perms on my items for export (it seems I need to make the items full perm), box them up etc, it's a lot of extra work. Then I have to figure out how to deal with the payment (the additional $ required for the upgrade to exportable version)

There needs to be an easier way.

[Constance Peregrine]

You might have better results passing content to the foreign visitor when they come to kitely rather than you go to them, especially OSG, which is primarily a test grid.

[Funk Schnook]

You might have better results passing content to the foreign visitor when they come to kitely rather than you go to them, especially OSG, which is primarily a test grid.

I tried both, sorry if that wasnt clear in my post (edited to clarify). Still need to do more testing

[Ilan Tochner]

Hi Funk,

Sorry for not addressing the part about product updates earlier:

If you go to your Sales History page you'll see an option to redeliver a product to the buyer. This actually sends the currently listed version of that product variation to the buyer. You can use this feature to see who bought an item variation and send them an update when one is available. We intend to improve that feature to enable delivering product updates to all your buyers in one step in the future.

[Funk Schnook]

Hi Funk,

Sorry for not addressing the part about product updates earlier:

If you go to your Sales History page you'll see an option to redeliver a product to the buyer. This actually sends the currently listed version of that product variation to the buyer. You can use this feature to see who bought an item variation and send them an update when one is available. We intend to improve that feature to enable delivering product updates to all your buyers in one step in the future.

I'm not talking about product updates Ilan. The customer bought a pack of skins which were not exportable, then later decided they wanted the exportable version. (The exportable pack of skins costs a few dollars more)

[Ilan Tochner]

You're right, partial payments for buying product upgrades isn't currently supported. We may support that in the future but, due to the cascade complexity of doing it properly, that isn't likely to happen soon.