Frequently Asked Questions

In today’s Second Life economy, your customers can purchase from multiple channels, including your own Second Life objects, in-world vendors such as Hippo and from web sites such as SL Marketplace. SL Commerce Manager helps you aggregate disparate sales data from multiple sources, providing a complete view of your sales activity.

SL Commerce Manager also provides the fundamental data you need to drive and grow your business. Information such as what products are hot now, and which have fallen off. Who are my top customers? How many visits to my store does it typically require to produce a sale? And by looking at your business over time, you can gauge the effects of promotions and advertising that you purchase, helping you determine whether these expenses are justified. SL Commerce Manager provides the essential business data to help you succeed in Second Life commerce.

SL Commerce Manager works with the major product vendors in Second Life, including Hippo and Apez. More vendor types can be added in the future. In addition, SL Commerce Manager works with the popular Marketplace web site from Second Life.

As customers make purchases from your vendors or Marketplace, the vendors automatically post a notification of the transaction to the SL Commerce Manager web site. This allows you to have a real-time view of your sales activity.

SL Commerce Manager also includes an optional Visits module. The Visits module operates as an in-world object, automatically detecting when Second Life avatars visit your store or parcel. Visit data is correlated with Sales data to give you a complete picture of your sales process.

All of the SL Commerce Manager data is protected by a login name and password that is tied to your account. No other users have access to your data unless you grant them access.

The web site itself uses secure HTTPS, which encrypts the data that is sent between your browser and the web server. You can see the secure web certificate when you log on to SL Commerce Manager.

The SL Commerce Manager web site runs on the Microsoft Azure platform. Microsoft Azure is Microsoft’s “cloud computing” offering and provides a highly scalable, secure platform. SL Commerce Manager runs on a parallel, load-balanced platform that operates in multiple, geographically-dispersed data centers. A failure in one data center would be detected and the remaining data centers would take over until all parts of the application return to normal.

SL Commerce Manager was developed by Chris Shipman, a Second Life resident since July, 2006. Chris is an applications developer and architect for a real-world software company that focuses on enterprise-scale analytics and reporting applications.

Chris’s applications process millions of data transactions every day at some of the largest companies in the world. The same practices that have made those applications successful have been applied to SL Commerce Manager, bringing enterprise analytics to Second Life residents for the first time.

SL Commerce Manager is sold in Second Life or on the Marketplace web site. There are versions of SL Commerce Manager that enable you to track Sales, Visits, or both. Your purchase enables you to track data on an unlimited number of products or visitors for a period of one year. At the end of the year, you can resubscribe to the SL Commerce Manager service to continue using the system.

Your purchase allows you to create a single login account and password. Additional login accounts can be purchased for associates, sales assistants, etc. that you wish to have access to your account.

SL Commerce Manager is sold much in the same way as Second Life land. To purchase land, you usually pay an up-front fee, and then a monthly, ongoing “tier fee”. That’s because land in Second Life represent computing resources for which there is an ongoing expense. It’s natural that the land owner would pay that expense for the time that they own the land.

SL Commerce Manager doesn’t have a “monthly tier fee”. Your only cost to use SL Commerce Manager is the initial fee, which provides access for one year. But because running the SL Commerce Manager web site is a significant, ongoing expense, we must charge a subscription, so that customers pay their portion of the expense as they continue to use the system.

We will try to contact you either via email or Second-Life messages to alert you to your subscription expiration. However once your subscription expires, SL Commerce Manager stops accepting new data from Marketplace, your in-world product vendors and from SL Commerce Manager visit sensors. However, you can continue to log in and access your account and reports.

After 30 days, your account will be locked, preventing anyone from logging in to view reports. During this time, you can renew your subscription from an in-world terminal.

After 90 days, your data and your account will be purged from the system. There is no ability to recover your data after this happens.