Linden Lab has updated their policies for selling items in the Sansar Store. And those changes are already causing controversy. Among the changes are:
- All Sansar Store sellers must have a credit card on file for their account.
- Free account holders can only put up to 50 items up for sale in the Sansar Store. If you want to sell more than 50 items, you will need to upgrade your subscription to at least Creator level.
These changes take effect October 2nd, which is not a lot of advance warning time, in my opinion. There are going to be a number of sellers who have more than 50 items listed in the Sansar Store (e.g. SWANZ has 616), who won’t have a lot of time to make decisions. There are also some sellers who don’t have a credit card, and this policy change has put them in a predicament. Already there are several creators grumbling on the Discord server. I quote one creator who is very unhappy about these changes:
I’m starting to see…a message behind the decision : “If you are not confident that you will sell enough to afford the subscription, then you are not good enough, go away.
There’s an in-world meeting today, Wednesday, September 27th, 2017, at 2:00 p.m. Pacific Time/Sansar Time at the Sansar Studios Conference Stage. I will be at that meeting as a reporter, asking the Lindens a few questions about these changes. I’ll post the answers as an update to this blogpost later today.
UPDATE 4:30 p.m.: I’m currently at the meeting in-world, and here are some notes as I remember them. Both Jenn and Carolyn were at this meeting from Linden Lab, and they were able to answer my and other people’s questions.
First, Jenn stressed that these policy changes are not cast in stone; they can and will be modified based on feedback Linden Lab receives, both positive and negative. So if you are negatively impacted by these changes, let them know!
Linden Lab’s rationale for the credit card decision is to avoid having anonymous sellers spam the store and post abusive or copybotted items. Frankly I think this is a good idea, myself. There was some discussion of alternate ways to verify your identity without using a credit card, such as copies of your driver’s licence or passport, and Jenn said they would check back about that.
Jenn said that Paypal support is on the roadmap, but could not give a date when that would be available.
The October 2nd deadline applies to you only if you joined Sansar on or after the open creator beta launch of July 31st, 2017. People who were part of the closed Sansar beta have Creator-level privileges until the end of October, 2017, and they would not be affected immediately by this change in policies for the Sansar Store. But they would be affected after October 31st, 2017.
Gindipple also raised some questions about some questionable restrictions on images for audio items and script items on the Store; Jenn would check on those and get back to us.
And I forgot to mention that banners to promote your brand will be part of the next update of the Sansar software, scheduled for this week.
