by Jen Shikami » 01 Apr 2009, 12:48
Hi, not sure if you've been in on any of the (many) times this has come up in Social Chat. There are a few reasons we aren't offering mega bulk bait. The three most important reasons are customer support related:
1) Our customers already get plenty confused by the existence of two different sizes of bait. Three would just make our customer support that much harder and cause more waits for bait replacements while we try to figure out which they need.
2) Customer's experience on rare occasions when mega bait is lost: When bait fails to load, not only are we typically diagnosing bait type as in #1, but meanwhile the customer is frustratedly baitless -- and with mega bulk bait, also quite likely to be broke. Tempers already flare when people lose a bulk load. Now imagine the customer reaction and degree of patience if they just dropped $1,000 or $2,000 on bait and then crash mid-load? (or some other X factor which can cause bait loss...)
3) Our experience on rare occasions when mega bait is lost: In the case of regular or bulk bait loss as in #2, we're typically willing to quickly replace someone's regular bait or bulk bait load on trust -- that is to say, without asking them to get into transaction numbers and logs and the like. But $1,000 or $2,000 worth? That's much more money, especially in SL terms. We've already experienced scammers trying to demand refunds for having supposedly bought the fishing area kit multiple times when all logs point to the contrary. Combine that temptation with the fact that it's tough to know if bait really loaded or not, and it's a recipe for customer support agony, I think.
To further expound on #3 there -- I DO NOT mean to make it sound like we're automatically suspicious when a customer reports something's lost! Quite to the contrary, 99.9% of the time we'll take their word on it! We want you all to be happy, after all. It's no big deal to replace somebody's lost LOLcatfish, occasional bait loss, or no-transfer purchase. But I think it's reasonable to feel that there's a big difference between those situations and something that costs multiple U.S. dollars.
The other item worth noting is not so much a reason for/against bulk bulk bait, but rather a point to make about that proposed pricing: We've analyzed this before and decided that bait is really cheap enough as it is, considering the discount on buying bulk plus the 20% fishing area owners get.
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