Kitely Market Update and Other Improvements

We updated Kitely today with several features and bug fixes that were requested by our users. We are also making good progress on the Kitely Market, which is expected to open at the beginning of September.

Today’s release includes a full implementation of the shopping sequence: the shopping cart; buying through PayPal; viewing the shopping history and sales history (for merchants); email notifications; and sending payouts to merchants. However, since the market is not yet ready we have disabled the “Add to Cart” button, so you won’t be able to actually try out these features just yet…

Merchants: Setup Kitely Market With Your PayPal Account

At this time we ask all store owners to enter the details of their PayPal account into their store. We will use this PayPal account to transfer the store’s earnings to you.

For security, we require these PayPal accounts to be Verified. Learn how to Verify your PayPal account.

Enter your PayPal account details in the Manage Store page:

Store PayPal Account

Change PayPal Account

As agreed in theĀ Kitely Mentors Group meeting (July 3), Money that you receive from buyers using US Dollars (USD) will be withheld for 45 days before being cleared for payout, in order to get past PayPal’s 45-day transaction-dispute window. It will then be transferred to your PayPal account in the next weekly payout date (once it exceeds the minimum payout amount).

Once the Kitely Market opens, you’ll be able to start selling on the Kitely Market even if you don’t have a Verified PayPal account, since the money that you earn will accumulate in your store’s Balance. However, this money can’t be transferred to you until you enter the details of a Verified PayPal account. If you don’t do so then we’ll keep your earnings in the store’s Balance for 90 days, at which point we’ll convert them to Kitely Credits and add these KC to your Kitely account. Therefore, we recommend that all merchants setup a Verified PayPal account and enter its details in their store.

Other Improvements

We made several improvements to the system in response to our users’ requests:

We’ve enabled the OSSL functions osGetGridName() and osGetGridNick().

We fixed a bug where invitations to join a group weren’t saved as Offline IM’s if the receiving user was offline.

We fixed a bug where when an avatar gives an inventory item to another avatar that is in a different region, the receiving avatar got two copies of the item.

There are two Store pages: “View Store” and “Manage Store”. To make it easier to switch between them, we added a direct link from the View Store page to the Manage Store page. This link appears only for the store’s owner.

It is now possible to include “hop://” URL’s in world descriptions. These are URL’s that, when clicked, automatically start the viewer and enter a specific region in a specific place.

When paying for a subscription that includes Unlimited Free Access worlds, the subscription name in PayPal now mentions those worlds. This is important for users that receive reimbursements from their employer using the PayPal receipt. For example, a subscription that uses the Free Plan with one Unlimited Free Access world was previously called just “Free Plan” in the PayPal receipt, but now it’s called “Free Plan + 1 Unlimited Free Access World”.

When viewing a world page, if the world has a premium price (X KC / minute) then that price is shown below the “Enter World” button. However, the price didn’t appear if the user had skipped installing the Kitely Plugin. This bug has been fixed.

During signup, we didn’t accept email addresses whose domain names start with a digit, e.g. “37signals.com”. Now we accept such emails.

Kitely Plugin now supports newer versions of Kokua. The difference is that these versions install themselves using the filename “KokuaTest.exe”, which wasn’t recognized previously.

And finally, we have removed support for Mac OS X 10.5 in Kitely Plugin: the minimum supported version of Max OS X is now 10.6. This was done because that version of Mac OS X is very old, and it frees up resources to support newer versions of Mac OS X. However, users of Mac OS X 10.5 can still start the viewer without Kitely Plugin.