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:

Direct Delivery does not support selling items which are no-copy for the Merchant.
Intermittent issues with the Merchant Outbox are problematic and really shouldn’t be necessary, since…
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.

Will storing my Marketplace inventory with my main inventory cause problems with viewer performance?

The inventory problems typically seen with the viewer are seen with folders containing many thousands of folders or objects. If you have a very large store with more than a few thousand items, we will be reaching out to suggest you delete listings that are no longer active or active listings that no longer have any sales.

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. We have also created some videos to help you get started.

How can I try out VMM?

You'll need to request access to the Beta via this form. You will be emailed once we have given you access. Once you get the VMM Project Viewer, you'll be ready to go. Just follow the instructions in the Knowledge Base article.

I use a Third Party Viewer. Will I need to move to VMM?

Yes, you will. The TPV development community has been updated regularly on the timeline for VMM, and some of them are planning to include these updates. Please check with your TPV for more information.

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.

What is the schedule going forward?

VMM will be in Beta for at least a month. The next steps after Beta will be:

Release VMM to all Merchants.
A month after the release, automated migration of Direct Delivery listings will begin. Magic Box listings will need to be manually migrated. [Update: this was changed to a week after RC, due to weekend-long outage of Xstreet in early July.]
After migration has completed, Xstreet and Magic Boxes will be shut down.

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 from happening during the migration. Items in your store may still be purchased during the migration, but if an item is currently being migrated, it will be unavailable.

When will my store be migrated?

We will 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).

What will my migrated items look like in my inventory?

If you choose to have your listings automatically migrated, listing and version folders will automatically be created for you. Both of these folders will be named after the "SL Object Name" you can see on your listing.

What happens when I run out of no-copy stock items?

The Marketplace will send you an email to alert you and unlist your listing until you have a chance to add more units.

Where is API documentation related to this feature?

There are two API wiki pages targeted at TPV developers: