Cool Vendor v1.91 Version 1.91

Why yet another vending machine ?... Because I could not find any satisfactory one (i.e. reliable, fast, user-friendly and easy to maintain) in SL so far...
Networked vendors ?... No good ! They lag badly and are too often the victims of the many email problems between objects in SL.
Other, classical vendors ?... Well, if you can show me one that would never fail to deliver an item or that never spuriously reimburses the customer for no apparent reason (discouraging them from buying your product and making you loose sales), then please tell me where I can find it...
So, I scripted my own vendor to sell my own items, and the result of this thorough designing, scripting and extensive testing (now 4 years of 24/7 usage in my shops with ZERO vendor downtime) is the Cool Vendor. :-)

Features:

- Copy-ok, Modify-ok with lifetime updates: you buy one Cool Vendor once, and you can have as many vendors as you wish, modify them as you see fit, and get free updates for them.

- Easy configuration: only two notecards needed: one for the options, one for the inventory.

- Customers-friendly:
o Comprehensive interactions via blue pull-down menus with detailed instructions in them.
o Allows the "right click to pay" action, but still asks confirmation to the customer (do they want the item for themselves, as a gift to someone else, or do they prefer to abort the transaction and get a refund): this is VERY important to avoid mistakes from the customer (buying the wrong item, or buying a no-tfr item for themselves while they wanted to give it to someone else).
o No badly configured fast-pay dialog box (only one fast-pay button, corresponding to the exact price, is enabled), like so many badly scripted vendors suffer from.
o Comprehensive error reports and instructions whenever illegal/inappropriate actions are performed, encouraging the customer to retry instead of discouraging them.
o Low lag and high reliability (see below).

- Multiple inventories capability: you may have up to 12 inventory notecards in each vendor, making it possible to change the vendor use at initialization time.

- High capacity. Typically (and depending on how long are the item names and pictures lists), the Cool Vendor may hold up to 250 different products or so

- Gift vendor: no-transfer items have never been so easy to sell... Your customers will be able to buy your products and get them delivered to a third person as a gift. The vendor not only uses -three- web databases to find the recipient's key but, because these databases are far from exhaustive, it also allows to deliver a gift to anyone in its vicinity. Your customers will also be able to give either the legacy name or the username of the recipient.

- Optional hovering text to display the item number, the item name, the price and a comment line. The hovering text may also be auto-hidden after a configurable delay.

- Multiple pictures per product: if you choose so, the vendor display may switch automatically between several pictures for each product.

- Optional preview feature for sounds, animations and 3D models of objects.

- Default selection when idle: you may configure the vendor so that after a delay without any user interaction, the vendor auto-selects a default item of your choice, or so that it rotates through the inventory.

- Shareholder feature: you may share the revenues of your sales (configurable ratio from 1 to 100%) with another resident.

- Can IM you and/or send an email to keep track of your sales. IMs also include comprehensive error reports whenever needed.

- Configurable thanks message for the recipient

- NEW: Possible restriction of the vendor sales to residents pertaining to a given group (to setup vendors for group rebates or freebies).

- Updatable vendor: both scripts and contents can be updated via the use of an updater (for scripts, whenever a new version of the vendor is issued), or an uploader (for items, inventory and info notecards, and textures).

- Reliable: baring any SL database problem, which would make all the in-world vendors to fail anyway, and after a successful initialization, you will never experience failures to deliver items, or spurious reimbursements, like so many badly scripted vendors suffer from. Thorough checks are done at initialization and item delivery times, and any error would be reported to you (and should an error occur at delivery, the customer would of course be reimbursed automatically).

- Very, very, very (!) low lag: The Cool Vendor works even in the laggiest sim. It itself generates very little (if at all) lag

- No spam: the Cool Vendor does not spam people around it with shouted/said/whispered text. It uses IMs to communicate with the avatar interacting with it

- Modular vendor: the Cool Vendor may have as many prims as you wish or need: from a one prim, button-less, menu-driven vendor, to a multi-prim one button/selector per product vendor

• Reliable, user-friendly, stand alone, low lag vendor
• Gift feature to allow buying no-transfer items as a gift to someone else
• Shareholder support, to share the revenues with someone else
• High capacity (up to around 250 items)
• Fully modular, customizable and modifiable