Last Month The Relay for Life - Clothing Fair was held in Second Life. Many Clothing Designers participated by either donating  their profits from the fair to the charity or offering an exclusive design with those profits donated.
Many of our merchants may not be aware of the advantages of Spilt Profits for such charitable events, so I thought I would provide a little information on this Feature and how it can be utilized.

I’ve added a tutorial to our Knowledge Base, which is located [here]. It will take you step by step through the process of setting up Spilt Profits.

In the event you’d wish to enable your sales to donate all profits or a percentage of the sale, the Split Profit Feature can be easily implemented to do so on any or all of your listings.
Please let me know if you have any questions on this topic by posting a comment or you can reach me via an in-world IM to “Miss Sheep”.

All the Shop OnRez vendors, including the recently released a Beta version of an 8-panel Vendor, are fully customizable. OnRez seller, Dedric Mauriac, has customized his 8-panel Vendors to make the most of his shop’s space and integrate them with his overall theme.

(Dedric Mauriac’s OnRez Store Front)

Inspired by Dedric’s mod, Killashandra Falta has also thrown her own personal twist on the vendors and created two looks for her shop:

You can learn more about customizing your vendors on our help pages.

Have you customized a vendor? We’d love to see it! Comment here or send us feedback using our Feedback Form. Please include pics, slurls, or urls if you have them!

I hope some of you were able to tune into the SLCC panel on Second Life entrepreneurship I moderated on Sunday morning — we had 4 great panelists with Guni Graef from Anshe Chung Studios, Haver Cole, Shaun Altman and Simone Stern. For those of you who could not attend, Virtual World News was kind enough to put up their notes from the panel at this link.

In the wake of this article from ABC News on making money in Second Life, I also jotted down some notes for SL entrepreneurs on my primary blog Out to Pasture [link].

If you are a Second Life entrepreneur, mark down September 6th, noon Pacific Time, and join us at OnRez island’s Event Center for the first “First Thursday” gathering for SL entrepreneurs to network and share tips and challenges.  (CORRECTION: moving event to Thursdays, since Simone correctly pointed out that I’m an idiot for choosing Wednesdays… good old update day!)
– Forseti

When we went live with OnRez, there were a number of features that were present in SLBoutique that we couldn’t get to in time for our launch deadline. One of these features is back. You can now redeliver any copy/no-transfer items that you purchased by clicking a link in your purchase history next to the name of the item. This is useful if you accidentally delete an item you purchased, or if for some reason, SL eats it.

Note to sellers: double-check that your permissions are properly set when you load your items. If an item is set to copy/no-transfer by mistake, a buyer will be able to have the item delivered as many times as he likes.

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.