Resources: hippoVEND Catalogue Vendors Guide

Please note that this document covers the older Catalogue Vendor types. If you’re using the new v1.6 types, click here to view the documentation appropriate to them. Remember that free upgrades are always available at the main Hippo Store!

Introduction

The hippoVEND Catalogue Vendor allows you to do a couple of extremely useful things:

• Give "Catalogue Vendors" to customers to browse and purchase from in their own time, wherever they like, without having to visit one of your stores.
  
  
• Pass out "affiliate vendors" to allow people to resell your products and keep whatever commission you choose to set.

Both are great ways to quickly increase your sales!

Among the many features built into the Catalogue Vendors:

• Easily configure, via your web browser, which products are shown and what commission the vendor gives to the seller (if any).
  
  
• Set expiry dates for Catalogue Vendors, so a particular promotion can be timelimited if you wish.
  
  
• Maintain different commission rates and groups of products for different sets of vendors/customers/affiliates.
  
  
• Users can easily customise the Catalogue Vendor to suit their requirements (slideshow mode on/off, hovertext settings and colours etc.)
  
  
• Sales through Catalogue Vendors are tagged as such in your sales log on the hippoVEND website.
  
  
• Extremely easy to configure and use.

Getting Started

To get going, simply follow these steps.

1. Log onto to the hippoVEND website (http://users.hippo-technologies.co.uk/ to begin). Once within hippoVEND, click the 'Catalogue Vendors' link, under the 'hippoVEND' banner, just before 'Sales Logs'.
   
   
2. This page lists up to 50 'Catalogue Vendor Profiles'. A profile has a name, a commission rate (the percentage of a sale you wish the owner of the vendor when you distribute it to keep), the ability to include up to three ranges and to filter by tag, product name and description if you wish.
   
   
3. To create a new Catalogue Vendor Profile, type a name (e.g. "Gadgets Reseller") into the field beneath the table and click the 'OK' button.
   
   
4. The new profile will appear; you can now edit its commission percentage, it's status (active or inactive and an expiry date) --- along with those of any other profiles if you wish. When you're finished, click the 'Save Changes' button.
   
   
5. For more advanced catalogue vendor settings, click the spanner icon. You can specify what should go in it (filter by range, tag or category), whether it should share sales income (tip: if you do, communicate this clearly to the people you give it out to!)
   
   Please note --- if you change or delete (via the red X button) a Catalogue Vendor Profile, anybody you've given vendors too that use it will eventually lose their ability to sell your products (Catalogue Vendors reset and reload every 72 hours inworld and double-check their settings every time a sale is made, so profile changes for vendors out inworld will ripple through the Second Life Grid very quickly).
   
   Once you've setup a profile, you're almost there. Return to Second Life and ...
   
   
6. Rez a new Catalogue Vendor. It will ask you for the name of the Catalogue Vendor Profile to connect to. Type the name you used in step (3). (Don't worry about doing this in open chat; even if another person overheard you, only you can setup a vendor to connect to your own products.
   
   
7. If all is well, the vendor will connect to that profile and download and show the first product. If you made a mistake and an error was reported, click the vendor and choose 'Go Online' to try again.

You can now take this vendor into inventory and distribute it to customers or affiliates. Every time they rez it, it will remember it's Catalogue Vendor Profile name and reconnect automatically. (If a customer or affiliate forcibly resets the whole device, they'll need to contact you for a fresh copy, as only you can "lock" the Catalogue Vendor Profile into it like this.

• * TIP - If you wish to unlock *your own* Catalogue Vendor and choose a new profile, click it and choose 'Unlock' from the menu.
  
  * TIP 2 - We STRONGLY recommend setting a Catalogue Vendor's permissions to "no modify" before distribution. You can, of course, leave it copyable and transferable if you wish people to spread your vendors around. If you'd prefer to pick-your-own-affiliates, then make it non-transfer before distribution.
  
  
• * TIP 3 - People will not get commission if they buy from their *own* Catalogue Vendor; this is designed to stop people grabbing your vendors just to get a discount. (Yes, they could use an alt, but we can at least make it trickier for them!)
  
  
• * TIP 4 - We'd advise telling your affiliates what to expect when sales are made; e.g. a share to you, a 1.5% commission to us ... and what to do if there is a delivery problem (contact you). The more information you provide your affiliate sellers with, the easier they'll find it to sell your items!

Well done, you're now ready to distribute your vendor. At this stage, we recommend two things: first, *test* the vendor (click the Catalogue Vendor and choose 'Reset' to load the '_config' settings and connect); second, rename the Catalogue Vendor to something meaningful and take it into inventory ready to distribute.

Useful Things to Know

• Catalogue Vendors don't appear in your list of vendors on the hippoVEND website, but sales from them do appear in your sales log (with a little "C" icon next to them; hold your mouse pointer over the icon to see the name of the affiliate who sold the item).
  
  
• A Catalogue Vendor updates itself every 72 hours with fresh product information if it needs to --- it will also check the live price of a product and its commission rate before allowing a sale and if it finds a difference between the price in the vendor and that on the website, it will reset itself and update. (In other words, you don't need to worry about updating Catalogue Vendors, they are designed to run remotely). If you want to force catalogue vendors to update sooner, make a change to their profile and save it. This will cause any catalogue vendors using that profile to update themselves if they’re used before 72 hours.
  
  
• Catalogue Vendors are supplied to you +copy +transfer ... so you can scatter them far and wide and hopefully boost your profile and your sales.
  
  
• Catalogue Vendors will not refund a customer when a delivery fails; this is because the commission will already have been deducted and the remainder of the funds sent to you. Customers will be asked to request a redelivery if for some reason the server fails to make a delivery (if, for example, you have set it offline).
  
  
• People will not get commission if they buy from their *own* Catalogue Vendor; this is designed to stop people grabbing your vendors just to get a discount. (Yes, they could use an alt, but we can at least make it trickier for them!)

We hope you enjoy your new product --- do take the time to explore all it can do. And if you encounter any problems you can't find answered within the notecards, try visiting http://www.hippo-technologies.co.uk/support/ for further help and advice.