PrimBay
PrimBay is a new marketplace for virtual worlds. It's a central place for people to find stuff they love, and for merchants to reach out to more customers than ever. It's now open for beta testing by CasperTech users, and is currently open to the public.
What is PrimBay?
PrimBay is a clean, sharp companion to the CasperVend system in Second Life. You can search, shop, browse and sell - it brings the best content in Second Life directly to you.
Our Goals
- SPEED - PrimBay has been written from the ground up wholly optimised for awesome speed. As with our inworld vendors, we prioritise speed and efficiency because we believe it is key to good business.
- SIMPLICITY - The front page of PrimBay is simple. Just a search box. Find what you need, quickly and easily
- POWER - We've designed the site to be massively extensible, laying down the groundwork for much more to come.
What else to expect?
Current Features
These are the current features on PrimBay:
- Full purchase support, by L$, Credit Card, or PayPal, including an (optional) device which can make payments automatically, similar to the marketplace.
- All merchants can get a pack to promote their primbay listings, and in the future, their PrimBay storefront.
- A demo button will be available on listings, no need for a separate listing!
- Ability to share listings in social media.
Future
This is our intended path after release:
- There'll be a special edition of caspervend designed for primbay-only merchants.
- Every merchant will be able to create a "store front" - a special subsite of PrimBay with their own logo.
- New site design - Yes, believe it or not, the current PrimBay site design is nearly 3 years old! We have commissioned a redesign, but for now we'll launch with what we have.
- Custom image uploads - merchants will be able to upload new images to their products instead of using the SL texture.
- Auctions - PrimBay has been designed with auctions in mind, and we will implement these in the coming time.
- Quantities - Quantities are not currently displayed on listings, but this is intended to happen.
- Multiple store fronts - Multiple brands, one avatar.
Register for PrimBay
- In order to register, simply visit a terminal: https://www.primbay.com/terminals.php - click the terminal, and use the Register button.
- You can then login to the site at https://www.primbay.com/.
Note: There is a minimal featureset, in order to focus on speed and relevance. Much more will come.
Resetting your PrimBay Password
Simply use the "Lost Password" option after clicking a PrimBay terminal, follow the link (or use the "go to" option on the popup) to the website, where you will have the option to reset your password.
The PrimBay terminal acts as an inworld "authentication" tool, verifying that the account requesting the change is the correct account. This is why you don't see the lost password option when you just go to the PrimBay site directly from a boookmark.
How do I use PrimBay?
- First, find a PrimBay Terminal
- Then, click the terminal to be taken to the website
- When you find the product(s) you want to buy, pay the terminal to put a balance on the site
- Select the products and use the checkout
Merchants: All proceeds from the sales of your products (minus the PrimBay commission, of course) will be sent directly to you - no need to wait or to initiate a withdrawl process.
Customers: If you've paid too much money in and want to withdraw what's left, simply use the "withdraw" option on the popup menu after clicking the PrimBay terminal.
Promotional Signs
Promotional "find my store on..." signs are now available! Simply buy them (for free!) on PrimBay!
Currently, these promotional signs will point the user to all of your products. If your sign is on an adult-rated sim/region, then it will automatically allow the user to view adult-rated items on PrimBay.
In the future, when storefronts are fully enabled, the sign will link to your storefront automatically.
Prepare Your Products!
Products are listed via CasperVend's product listings, which means if you already use CasperVend you just need to add a description, keywords, select appropriate categories, tick a box, and the information will automatically be sent to PrimBay in about an hour.
The description field when editing a product is now formatted, and has an editor, so you can make pretty descriptions.
Please take care to also ensure that the "not suitable for children" tickbox is checked correctly for each of your products.
Listing Schedule for Products & Rentals
Currently, products are set to update to PrimBay about every hour. If you've JUST made changes, please note that any changes you make to your products will take up to 1 hour to appear on the site, depending on when you made the changes, versus when the PrimBay update cycle happens.
Rental listings will list / unlist / re-list on the same schedule as everything else - hourly - however, if a listing is already rented, another customer will NOT be able to add the same rental to their PrimBay shopping cart.
DropBoxes and Multiple Grids
A DropBox MUST be rezzed ON the grid where a delivery is made TO, WITH the product in it. So no, a person cannot buy a product in Second Life and have it delivered to Avination.
Currently (January 2014) PrimBay is only available on Second Life. Support for Avination will be added later.
The Fine Print
PrimBay's Privacy Policy and Terms of Service
Want A Terminal?
If you want, you can get a PrimBay terminal for your store or location. The terminal is 4 prims, and your location will randomly appear on the PrimBay website terminal location page. (The list presents 10 random terminals of each "maturity" rating; your terminal will not appear all the time, but all listings will be cycled through for display each time the locations page is loaded.)
The terminal location MUST be...
- In a publicly accessible location, free of security orbs and banlines.
- Within 64m of the landing point.
- On either group-owned land, or land that has been "set to" a group.
- Scripts must be enabled for the group (if the terminal is less than 50 meters above the terrain).
- Using land & group settings that do NOT allow public rezzing: See below for details
The above conditions will be automatically checked by the bot, and it will inform you if anything is awry.
How to get it
- Get a terminal requester unit here on PrimBay
- Rez it in the location and orientation you want the terminal to be in
- Click it, and select "Activate"
- Wait. Preferrably, wait right there with the terminal requester
- The bot will arrive in a few minutes (more or less, depending on how many requests are in the "to do" queue)
- If needed, the bot will ask you for a group invitation
- The shiny new PrimBay terminal will be rezzed.
Important Info
- All "activate" requests go in a queue. First in, first placed.
- Repeatedly clicking "activate" because you're impatient will keep putting you at the back of the queue.
- If you activate one requester, delete it, then activate a second requester, the bot will arrive looking for the first one, then teleport away to handle more in the queue before coming back to handle the second request.
- If the bot crashes, it WILL pick up the quueue from where it left off once it gets back online. No terminal requests will be lost.
Placement Errors
- "Unfortunately, this terminal location is not suitable - the location MUST be within 64 meters of the landing point. Please correct the situation, then touch the terminal again to activate."
- The location you chose is too far away from the landing point, Placement locations cannot be any farther away than 64m from the landing zone.
- "I'm unable to rez a terminal for you because your parcel is full. Please free up at least 4 prims, then touch the request terminal and activate..."
- You need to free up some prims - delete a few things, or move things off to another parcel - before the terminal can be rezzed.
What Land & Group Settings Do I Need?
You need to prevent public rezzing. This is a security measure, so that random people can't just drop a prim over the PrimBay terminal and take your payments. These are the three combinations of both land and group settings that seem to be the most effective:
| Land / Group Settings | Pictures |
|---|---|
Option One
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Option Two
|
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Option Three
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FAQ / Troubleshooting
- Q. Will it cost money to list my items?
- A. No! You can list your items for free - for each sale we take just take a small commission. If you have CasperVend Free, this commission is 5% - same as Marketplace - and if you have CasperVend Premium, this commission is just 2%.
- Q. How am I paid?
- A. We pay money directly and instantly into your Second Life account. We don't retain your money, so there's no risk to you.
- Q. What items are allowed?
- A. Any product which is permitted to be sold in the grid it's available for is also permitted to be sold via PrimBay. While not exhaustive, items which are explicitly disallowed are (but not limited to) item(s) graphically depicting mutilation, any item(s) depicting or suggesting the abuse or sexual solicitation of minors, any item(s) which are designed to defraud or commit a crime (or entice others to defraud or commit a crime), any item(s) which violate or are intended to violate or entice others to violate UK or international law.
- Q. What about copyright?
- A. We immediately investigate any and all claims of copyright infringement, and - given reasonable proof - will swiftly remove infringing listings. See the Copyright Complaints page for details on our DMCA process.
- Q. What constitutes an "Adult" item?
- A. We define an adult item as anything which is not suitable for children. That's anything to do with sex, graphic violence, etc. This applies to BOTH the product being delivered AND the image / listing on the website. Profanity should be considered in context. We don't consider profanity itself to necessitate a listing being set to adult, but any language which is contextually sexual, violent or hateful, definitely would.
- Q. I have customers who have discounts inworld, will these discounts be available on PrimBay?
- A. Customer discounts, profit sharing, and loyalty rewards will all be honoured on PrimBay. Unfortunately, group discounts will not be available, since group discounts use an LSL function that requires the group tag to be "seen".
- Q. Will we have our own "storefronts" on PrimBay?
- A. Yes, you'll have your own personal storefront on PrimBay.
- Note from Sphynx: Multiple storefronts are planned for the future, but are not part of the initial roll-out.
- Q. How will PrimBay sales show up on our sales histories?
- A. They will be listed as "PrimBay"
- Q. My products were listed before, but now they're not - what happened?
- A. Products are automatically de-listed when we have trouble delivering them. It's possible your products were affected by that. Try paying your vendors and make sure they deliver - once they successfully deliver, they will automatically be re-listed in PrimBay. (If they still don't deliver, compare the transaction log on the merchant link against the tracking page to see where the problem might be.)