CasperVend 2/Introduction

CasperVend 2 is the next evolution of a powerful networked vending system in Second Life. It often occupies the #1 spot on Marketplace under the Business category.

The development and progression of our technology has been brisk - so much so that we are truly pushing forward the technology in our field, and our competitors are forced to try to keep up with us.

Today, CasperVend has thousands of active merchants and a quarter of a million units rezzed inworld.

Mission Statement

CasperVend wants to be the leading vending network in Second Life. It's taken us just one year to reach massive usage and popularity, thanks largely to our enthusiasm to push the limits in the following fields:

• Speed
• Stability
• Resource usage
• Customer support
• New technology and innovation
• Security

What is it?

CasperVend lets you sell stuff in Second Life; however, it's much more than that. It allows you to manipulate, monitor and control every aspect of your commerce in Second Life. It provides a centralised web-based system that allows you to add new products, change prices, and watch your sales, without even logging in to Second Life.

CasperVend is limitless. You can have as many products as you want, and as many vendors as you want. Our networked system is backed up with regular (even hourly) backups, and enough capacity and redundancy to happily support the network if two thirds of our hardware failed at once.

CasperVend will enhance your business presence in Second Life.

Purchase options

CasperVend 2 is available in three flavours:

• CasperVend Free - Free to buy, includes affiliates. All sales are charged a 5% fee.
• CasperVend Premium - L$1995, includes affiliates. Commission free, apart from affiliate vendors which charge 2% per transaction.
• CasperVend Fat Pack - L$2695, includes the Premium vendors and also includes all of our expansion packs except mesh.

Expansion Packs

We have the following expansion packs available:

• Mesh - A product developed in cooperation with Discord Productions. Currently includes two vendors - a 7 panel, 1 prim vendor and a 13 panel, 1 prim vendor. These vendors require a mesh viewer to be able to view them.

• Holovend - Our rezzing vendor. Currently includes one vendor, but will soon be expanded with new models for 2.0.

• Texturevend - Our lightweight texture vendor. It allows you to sell many textures quickly without the need to create a new product for each one.

• Gift Cards - Our gift card system plugs right into CasperVend (and supports all of our plugins). It allows you to sell or give out cards with a balance that customers can use to buy things in your store.

• Lucky Chair - Our unique lucky chair system allows you to connect right into your existing CasperVend setup to give out prizes to your loyal customers!

New Technology

We were the first large networked vending system to introduce single script operation - and we are still the only company to offer ALL of our vendors with only a single script, using 0.002ms of script time each on average.

We were the first to release very prim efficient mesh vendors - permitting a good looking 7 panel vendor using just one prim, and a 13 panel vendor using just two.

We were the first to include marketplace integration as standard; our customers have always been able to integrate their marketplace sales with our system, to provide all of their customers with redeliveries and updates, as well as getting intuitive, clean and informative statistics across the board.

We were the first to add full transaction tracking for our customers (and for their customers). Anyone who purchases from a CasperVend vendor can see a full transaction log showing exactly what's happening with their delivery - this gives huge peace of mind to our merchants and their customers.

We were the first to introduce video support in our vendors - with CasperVend 2.0, users can now view videos either from hosted mp4 files or directly from youtube. This adds a whole new level to vending in Second Life - merchants can show exactly how their products look and work.

We were the first to use precaching on our vendors. The invisible faces of most of our vendors are used to invisibly preload textures so the user doesn't have to wait around.

We continually invest in new technology to keep CasperVend responding extremely quickly.

History

CasperVend was originally released in September 2010 after around one year of development.

It was developed with no intention of being released to the public - Casper didn't like the existing vendor networks on offer, and developed CasperVend for his own use. Soon though, the public interest in CasperVend got so large that CasperVend had to be released to the public.

The 1.0 suite of vendors was released with many of the features our users love today, such as having only a single script in each vendor, and the ability to link CasperVend to marketplace sales.

However, one area that we were and always have been devoted to is providing a good service to our customers - and a lot of this involves developing the service to meet the needs of our customers.

Second Life is a very diverse place, and over time we added new features and expanded the capabilities of the CasperVend network. Eventually, it was clear that our current units were reaching their capacity, and we needed a complete redesign.

CasperVend 2.0 was launched on the 6th of February 2012, after two weeks of beta testing. The final release was first used by 7Seas in their new bait vendors - exploiting the great financial security that CasperVend has, a point where other systems had let them down in the past.