Linden Lab Official:Viewer-Managed Marketplace FAQ

The new Viewer-managed Marketplace (VMM) allows you to easily manage your inventory on the Second Life Marketplace using the Second Life Viewer. Items no longer need to be loaded into the Merchant Outbox or a Magic box, and are instead sold directly from your inventory. Here are some commonly asked questions about VMM:

Why are you making this change?

We’re making this change for a variety of reasons:

1. Direct Delivery does not support selling items which are no-copy for the Merchant.
2. Intermittent issues with the Merchant Outbox are problematic and really shouldn’t be necessary, since…
3. There is no need to move inventory items to the Marketplace when they can stay in a Merchant’s main inventory, skipping one additional transfer of goods and making it much easier for Merchants to manage the inventory being sold on the Marketplace.

How does VMM work?

We have created a draft version of our Knowledge Base article to get you started. We will add questions to this document or the draft KB article as they come up.

Where can I try out VMM?

Right now VMM is available on Aditi. You’ll need to use the VMM Project Viewer. For instructions on how to connect your viewer to Aditi, see Preview Grid. You'll need to use one of the following regions:

• ACME D
• ACME E
• ACME F

How do I find VMM listings on Aditi?

We are asking Merchants to name new Viewer-Managed Marketplace listings with VMM at the beginning of the name to make it easier to identify these listings. For example, see Brooke's Bear on Aditi.

How do I tell you about problems?

We’ve created a public JIRA project called Viewer-Managed Marketplace for bugs and suggestions. We’ll also do our best to pay attention to any discussion in the Merchants Forum, but can’t promise we’ll catch everything, so JIRA is the best way to give us your suggestions.

When are these changes going to become available to everyone?

We’re planning to spend at least a month getting feedback and making bug fixes. We don’t plan to make any big changes right before the December holidays, so we won't make this available to any users on the main grid until after the new year, either in early January 2015 or after after February 14, 2015. Migration would not be required until VMM has been in Beta on the main grid for at least a month. We’re not posting a schedule yet, but we will give you at least a month’s notice before any migration occurs (on the forums, in the Marketplace at Merchant home, and via direct email).

How will my items be migrated?

If you would like, you will be able to manually migrate your inventory from Direct Delivery listings. Those of you who do not want to manually migrate your Direct Delivery listings will be automatically migrated--with plenty of warning. For those still using Magic Boxes, you’ll only have one option: manual migration.

How will migration work?

In order to ensure the safety of your listings, we will need to prevent any changes to listings, including purchases, from happening during the migration. We will unfortunately not be able to give an exact date or time for your listings to be migrated, but we will alert you when we start and when the migration has completed. We will plan to run migrations between 9pm and 9am Pacific (our lowest traffic times).