Thoughts about Vendor Systems

It's fitting to bring up this discussion now, because it was while I was in my first store at Mode St. Andres that I invested in the full CasperVend system—the big pack that comes with everything. It was a significant investment for me, the biggest one since I purchased AvSitter. I want to offer some reflections on vendor systems here, and I apologize in advance that this will be a longer post than usual.

First, some general reflections:
  • For starters, no one NEEDS a vendor system. It's certainly possible to set things up for sale without them, and plenty of stores sell goods this way.
  • Second, you don't NEED to buy into one of the big two systems (CasperVend and MD Labs). There are other scripts and script-sets in the Marketplace that will help you sell your wares—and some of them may be better at certain types of sales than the big ones.
  • The main reasons I can see for using a vendor system are: sales tracking/records, statistical data, redelivery, gift cards, and the ability to offer group or universal discounts easily. For designers who do furniture, decor, or other "hard goods" then there is also the advantage of having a vendor that can both rez a demo of an item and sell it at the same time.
  • Whatever system you decide to use, I cannot recommend strongly enough that you make your choice and commit to it as early as you possibly can after opening your store. The longer you wait, the more complicated it will be setting it all up—and, you will lose out on sales/data tracking until you are set up with one system or another.
For my part, I bought the CasperVend system, mainly for two reasons: (1) I had friends who already used it and could help me get oriented, and (2) I was unaware that there were other competing systems out there (though at the time there were three major systems).

I used the CasperVend system for most of my years running Salacity, so I became intimately acquainted with it. When I switched to MD Labs, there were things that I loved about that system, things I desperately missed from CasperVend, and things that I found different but otherwise I was ambivalent about them. 

I'll give a quick run-down of my thoughts on each.

CasperVend

Pros:
  • It really is the biggest—not just in terms of user-base, but in terms of features as well. There's almost no vendor function that the CasperVend system isn't set up to handle. 
  • It is widely supported. There are a lot of alternative vendor models available, so you can customize how you want. your store to look pretty easily. 
  • If you want to set up your own unique vendors, it's possible (using their "headless vendor" setup) to turn just about anything into a vendor.
  • The demo-rezzer options work well. If you're in a situation where you need to be able to rez demos of your products rather than displaying them, CasperVend's system for this is solid and very stable.
  • It is very easy to share sales revenues with others. If you collaborate with other designers, use a royalty or percentage system to pay staff, or for some other reason give a percentage of your sales to one or more users, CasperVend can handle this easily at either the vendor or the product level.
  • The level of sales data it gathers, tracks, and can present in different formats is mind-blowing. You can literally drill down in just about any way you choose to learn about sales trends and other statistics.
Cons:
  • Setup for items is painfully complicated. There are multiple steps required, and items have to be packaged (you can't just sell a folder of contents directly) and put into a dropbox. 
  • Setup for vendors is, at times, similarly complicated. It's not as convoluted as product setup, but it is close. 
  • All of the system connections—dropboxes and vendors alike—will go offline, go into a passive sleep mode, or just stop working randomly. Dropboxes will need to be manually reset or re-rezzed. Vendors are supposed to be awakened and reconnected to the system upon use, but I experienced failure on this level more than once. It's no fun going through your store and manually resetting 400 vendors.
  • Their system is based online—but it is not up-to-date. They've promised a new web panel system for years now, but I was never able to successfully log into it to manage my stuff. Yet, all of the feature requests or trouble tickets about issues with the parts of the system that do actually work are refused on the basis of "we will be fixing all of it with the new panel." So you basically get the old, unsupported system until one day, someday, when they finally get their shit together for the new web panel.
  • Despite its size and scale, CasperTech is still basically a one-person operation. Not an issue in its own right, but it can present issues. On multiple occasions the whole system went down because of crashed servers (a danger in an online-based system), and wasn't restored to function for a whole day or more. I recall once this happened a few hours before a MAJOR event was supposed to open, and they had to postpone the opening of the event until Casper finally got it running again—more than 24 hours later.
  • Another issue with the one-man show is that Casper is reported to sometimes be a dick to paying users. If he's in a bad mood and doesn't like the "attitude" of someone seeking support, he has been known to just block them. Maybe he's bipolar or maybe he's just moody, but this doesn't bode well for users who will, likely, need customer support at some point.
For me, all of the cons ultimately added up to being fed up with CasperVend, and I sank the money, time, and energy required into switching over completely to MD Labs.

MD Labs

Pros:
  • Feature-wise, it offers everything that probably 85% of store owners will need. And the features are very easy to use and find your way around. 
  • In fact, the whole thing is incredibly easy to use. Setup is a breeze, and everything is done in-world—no switching back and forth to a complex web panel for setup. 
  • It's possible to set up vendors to be recognized by the system as "event vendors"—making it pretty damned easy to keep track of how your event booths are performing. This is a brilliant feature.
  • There are no ready-made vendors or things to set up in terms of displaying vendor images, etc. Which means that ANYTHING can become a vendor, if you can edit it and drop a script into it. This makes it really easy to build your own style of vendor system. (To be fair, this is entirely possible with CasperVend too, using their "headless vendor" arrangement.)
  • Understanding that free gifts and group gifts are kind of their own thing for SL stores, they have a module that operates and tracks these separately. And it works as well as the rest of the system.
  • While MD Labs is also a one-man show, the owner is very quick to respond to customer service queries, and is well-reputed for his kindness and patience. He is easy to reach, and very attentive to maintaining his system.
  • The server-side, online components of the MD Labs system are neither essential nor integral to the vendor system as a whole, so vendors will function as normal even in the event of a total system crash online.
Cons:
  • The biggest "con" about MD Labs—for some/many, at least—will be that the data and statistics that it tracks is far from robust. Even if you've never seen what CasperVend can do on this front, you may be underwhelmed by MD Labs' data capacity. In comparing the two, there's no question: CasperVend is by far the superior system for data hounds.
  • There's no demo-rezzer option for vendors with MD Labs. If you need this, and want it to be integrated into your vendor system, then MD Labs won't be for you.
  • Revenue splits are possible, but limited (to just one other user when I was using it, though he had mentioned that it was increasing in a future version). 
  • They've just announced (in the last few weeks, as of this posting) that it is switching to a subscription-based model for payment. That means, if you don't already own a legacy license, you will be locked into subscription payments to use it—and, even if you own a legacy license, you won't get any new features or bug fixes without paying the subscription rates. While this makes sense in many ways, it's also a deal-breaker for smaller shops or designers starting out who don't have the revenues to support a subscription.
Overall, I was content with having switched for the 17 months or so that I used MD Labs. I missed CasperVend's superior data collection and statistical information, but otherwise I found MD Labs to be far less stressful and agonizing to set up and maintain.

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