Please be advised that Parature will be performing a system maintenance on Saturday, August 4, 9:00pm - 1:00am EST. During this time period, our support portal will not be available.

You may be experiencing some difficulty in listing or purchasing items at the moment. The problems with the SL grid are affecting Shop OnRez. We are looking into making improvements on our end to reduce the impact of the grid slowdown. In the meantime, you may want to postpone listing new items until the grid returns to normal. If you have made purchases that have not been delivered, please check your transaction history. If your purchase status is “void”, you were not charged for the item.

Update: The grid problems also affect llDialog, so parts of OnRez kiosks are also disabled such as the ability to confirm your identity.

Update: Everything seems to be working okay for now.

Some people have reported slow updates on the web or from their dropboxes in world. We have a fix for a bottleneck on these updates that will greatly improve performance on these fronts and will be rolling it out tonight. With this fix your updates will be saved immediately, but it may take a few minutes for your changes to be reflected in search results. For instance if you change a picture or description of your item, the old information might still show up on search results but when a user clicks on the item, the new information will appear immediately.

Thank you to everyone who has submitted feedback so far. Please continue to do so, as it helps us to improve the quality of OnRez.

We’ve had a few questions come in regarding how to customize the new Shop OnRez storefronts, and so we’d like to provide some insight into getting your new storefront customized quickly and easily.

Much like the storefronts on SLB, your OnRez storefront URL will look like this:
http://shop.onrez.com/Seller_Name
Your storefront is available to view as soon as you have items listed for sale on the web. Even if you haven’t customized it yet, other Shop OnRez users will still be able to browse and purchase items from within your store.

At present, we offer a few different ways to customize your storefront to reflect your brand and make the shopping experience a bit more personal for your customers.

If you’ve logged into Shop OnRez, you can access your storefront(s) by clicking on “My Home > Seller Tools > My Storefronts”. For each identity you’ve linked with your account, you’ll have the opportunity to customize a unique storefront specifically for their items by clicking the “Edit” link next to that identity’s name.

On the Edit Storefront screen, you’ll be able to customize the following items if you choose to do so:

• Name: This is the name of your store. It will show up in the “Seller Information” box in the right-hand column of your item pages.
• Tagline: If you store has a tagline, or special phrase you associate with your in-world business, you can enter it here. Your tagline will show up in both the “Seller Information” box, and at the top of your storefront in bold italicized text.
• Description: Here is your chance to tell buyers a little bit about yourself, and the products that you sell! Your description shows up in the “Seller Information” box, and below your tagline (above your items) on your storefront.
• Theme: From this dropdown box, you can select a color palette for the background of your storefront. Presently, we offer four pre-defined themes (see below).
  
• Banner: If you’d like a custom graphical banner to appear above your storefront, you may upload a 724×130 pixel web image (JPG, GIF, or PNG) of your choosing. You may also upload an image with different dimensions, but please be advised that they will be resized (without cropping) to fit in the allotted 724×130 pixel space.

Once you’ve saved your changes, click on the “View” link next to your identity’s name to see your new custom store!

We expect to be rolling out a much more robust and customizable version of the storefront in the future, and welcome any feedback or feature-requests you may have for this section of Shop OnRez.

We wanted to address two questions about the OnRez site:

1. Homepage favorites

Our goal is not to have our favorites on the homepage, but yours. The current list is a stand-in for now. Our plan is to have rotating favorites on the homepage, but we did not want to postpone launch until this feature was completed. I do not have a hard fix on when this will be completed but please know that it’s on our list. [Note: if you think we should add the ability to prevent your favorites from showing up on the homepage, I’d love to hear your thoughts.]

We would like to start changing up the favorites on the home page (it’s a manual task at the moment). The first person who can identify the seller of this product (just reply here), randomly selected from OnRez, and who has 8 favorites picked out not of their own store, will get their favorites on the homepage for a week.

2. Thumbnail Cropping

We have not gotten many questions about the thumbnail cropping yet, but we are expecting them so we’ll try to address this now. All preview thumbnails are now cropped square (we resize the image and then crop from the center), but only thumbnails are affected. When you click through to the item, all images are shown in their original state and dimensions. Why did we do this? The primary reason was that a lot of SLBoutique customers asked for bigger thumbnails, and the best way to accomplish this and maintain the ability to efficiently review search or browse results was to fix ratio and size. We went with a square because of the prevalence of SL sellers to make sales images at 256×256px or 512×512px.

This video demonstrates how former SLBoutique merchants should update their old vendors and turn them into OnRez dropboxes.

A word about categories: while you’re browsing around OnRez, you might notice that some items appear to be in the wrong place. When we migrated over everyone’s data from SLBoutique, we had to automatically assign items to categories based on the tags that were listed with the item. So, if you had items moved over, it would be a good idea to double-check your item listings and make sure your products are listed in the proper categories. As more and more people begin to list their items, the accuracy of the category system will improve.

7-24-07 3:00am Eastern time: Account and data migration continues to progress nicely, and we are running through our test checklist in preparation for opening Shop. Today’s account migration took longer than we hoped, so barring a major hiccup we’re expecting to open up around 2pm Pacific Time, in time for evening shopping. Thanks for your patience!

10:50AM UPDATE: our old hosting company, whom we dumped in favor of working directly with L3, has completely flaked out and actually been shut down by L3. We had not finished moving all of our boxes over, so we have to put a few things on hold while we finish this unexpected task. Given this, it is best to conclude that OnRez will be going live tomorrow (Wed, July 25) rather than today.

6:30PM UPDATE: the rest of the servers have all been moved over to new colo and we’re in testing phase. Our expectation remains that OnRez will be live tomorrow.

7-25-07 9:20AM UPDATE: We are opening up OnRez to a small group for testing now that SLBoutique is fully migrated over, and once we’ve passed those checks, we expect to open the service up to everyone this afternoon (Eastern time).

Remember these old SLBoutique ATMs? Well, we’ve given them a face lift as well. If you own one of these, you’ll find that we’ve updated them to display some information about Shop OnRez. They are no longer accepting any deposits, and you can no longer link your avatar here (there’s no SLBoutique to link to!).

I’ll be in contact with SLBoutique ATM owners soon to let them all know how to acquire a new Shop kiosk once they’re ready for mass distribution. The nice thing about the new ones is that Commerce Leader doesn’t have to own them, so you won’t have to wait on us to place them or move them if you decide to redecorate.

You might be asking, “if the ATMs aren’t accepting deposits, then what happens if someone tries to pay Commerce Leader directly?” and the answer is that your best bet is to wait for launch, however any payments made to Commie will be made available in your Shop balance once we go live.

Tomorrow we finally open Shop OnRez up to everyone and the whole team is quite excited. But first things first — today we’re focused on switching SLBoutique over to the new system. SLBoutique will be down all through today, and will return tomorrow as Shop OnRez. We are migrating all user accounts, money balances, images and listed products. We’ll also be doing some final testing before Shop goes live tomorrow (Tuesday, July 24th).

We’ve had a great group of people helping us beta test the new site, but if you run across any bugs or frustrations when you start working with Shop OnRez, please let us know through our customer support portal at support.onrez.com and we’ll try to be as responsive as we can to work out the kinks.

We’ve made a lot of improvements with the new ecommerce site, with usability a big part, but to give a quick written preview while you wait for tomorrow:

• The product delivery system is much more robust.
• Shoppers can now find products through both category browsing or search, and gift giving remains extremely easy.
• Sellers should find loading and managing their goods dramatically easier, especially with the new batch edit tools which allow you to edit listing information on more than one product at a time.
• Shop OnRez provides free, customizable, inworld scripted vendors, which come in search and no-search modes right now. We’ll be adding multi-panel vendors shortly. Virtual businesses can finally efficiently manage their sales across the Web and Second Life from one location.
• We’ve also dramatically improved our customer support systems, and are going to continue holding office hours inworld. Office hours will move from Sheep Island to the new OnRez sim opening up tomorrow.

When the new site goes up tomorrow, we will link over to a FAQ covering the transition from SLB to the new Shop.

Thanks for your patience and support while the team has worked to finish the new site. We hope this first week is not too bumpy, and are really excited for the amazing things ahead. To us, we feel like we are finally crossing the starting line.