Apez.vend Concepts

From Apez

Place the items from your in-world inventory into the iServ's contents tab. It will then deliver items to residents on demand - in response to vendor sales, online sales, redelivery requests by customers or any time you give an item to someone from the site.

Before beginning to use the vend server, it is worthwhile to take a minute to understand how vending works in-world and what the terms used on this site really mean.

Inventory

You probably know that your in-world inventory is all of the items shown in the inventory window - things like objects, textures, clothes, landmarks, notecards etc. The Apez system can't access your inventory directly (you should be worried if anyone could access your inventory without permission!).

For that reason, all of the items you'd like to give or sell to residents must also be placed into an item-server device such as the Apez.iServ (see picture).

Once there, they will be shown on your Apez vend.inventory page and will be available to be associated with products for sale (for example). The iServ will dutifully serve those items to people as requested by the system - for example in response to a purchase.

Products

A product ties together the inventory item to be delivered to a buyer with the price it is to be sold for, pictures to be shown in vendors or online, a product name and other optional information.

To sell an item in-world or online, the vend system needs some additional information about the item - such as how much to sell it for (the price), what image to show on vendors or online to prospective customers, a short one-line description and other optional information.

That is the job of a Product - it is the term we use to describe the association between the item (from inventory, to be delivered), the price, a product name (possibly different from the item name), the vendor image texture, the description, addition information for customers (a notecard for example), etc.

Hence, for each item you'd like to sell, you must create a product from the vend.products page. To help organize your products, each product belongs to a single product collection.

Vendors

One of the many iVend models showing several products for sale.

A vendor is a gadget used in-world through which people can purchase products - by paying the vendor and then receiving the item to their own in-world inventory.

The vendor just needs to know which products it should show for sale - its product assignment. That can be set online or from the vendor's owner menu options. Once products have been assigned, the configuration downloaded and the vendor set online, it is ready to accept payments.

A Sale

There are potentially four different people involved in each sale, although usually there are only two.

• Merchant - this the person who has the items and created the product listing (typically the item creator)
• Seller - this is the person who is selling the product - usually the vendor owner, often actually the merchant.
• Buyer - the person who pays for the product
• Owner - who the item is delivered to - often the buyer, but for gift purchases, someone else.

The simplest case is if the merchant is selling their own items using their own vendors and a buyer purchases one of the products for themselves. Then the merchant is also the seller and the buyer is also the owner.

When payed, the vendor pays the customer's money into the Apez system (as an SL payment to Apez Mann). From there, the sale is credited to the merchant, the money split according to any sharing groups the merchant has setup, payouts made, sale logs entries created, notifications made and so on.