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glennblackphotos
Posts: 160
When I see certain products for sale there is often information like lights and clothing used missing, it would be a lot quicker to be able to quickly add a comment or question beneath the product rather than raising a flag with tech.
just an idea.
Comments
Not entirely sure but I think DAZ3d leave it up to the vendor/PA to decide what to put in the list of items used in promo pics; some vendors/PAs are much more dilligent and helpful than others in this regard. I imagine that non-DAZ3d stuff is never included in the list; I can't imagine DAZ wanting to advertise products from their competitors.
PAs can list up to 12 "items used" for a product, even if there are 10 promo pics. And yes, items from other stores can't be listed.
Moreover the promo artist (who sometimes is not the PA) may have used custom or heavily tweaked lighting, poses or items, so listing those would not be possible (or not really useful if they were modified)
I beleve DAZ has decided that contacting tech support is the best way to get an answer from the PAs if they didn't list something, or use the forums to ask about it.
You would actually contact support to try and find out what lights or clothing was used in a promo? On the very, very rare occassion I must know what what used in a promo, I just ask in the forums and can usually get an answer.
Interesting. The two options that you say DAZ prefer are the slowest and least convenient for the client. Contacting DAZ can take 10 days or more for a response these days (their own admission), and that is without factoring in how long it takes the vendor/PA to respond. Asking via the forum can sometimes be quick but sometimes produces no useful replies at all.
And you think that asking on the store page would be faster than the other options are?
Probably why there isn't one. Having all the unanswered questions and problems directly linked from the store page would look bad.
I couldn't see this more than cluttering up a store page; this format should be in the forum, which is made for product questions that aren't support-related.
It would be cool if the Store Promo Pics were actually posted in the DAZ Gallery with the relevant products used and then linked to the Store product image placeholders.
Jumping to conclusions Daywalker! My statement was an observation about your statement.
If you must know, I agree with the OP that it is convenient and useful for clients when vendors (as some do) provide a list of items used in promo pics. I accept that exhaustive lists are not practical, but the basics would be nice.
And are you going to compensate the PAs for the extra time involved listing the however many different products used in however many promos? They could probably be halfway to making their next product in the time it would take to make a dozen gallery pages.
Isn't this a question of customer service? I have always heard that in the USA "The customer is King".
I accept that it would take more time on the part of the vendor, but developing a good reputation with clients is a fundamental part of good marketing (or so I have been told). I know that I am always happier to buy from a vendor that a) produces good quality items, b) presents them well, and c) provides helpful information.
If I want to create a scene similar to one of the promo shots I would like to know more than just what the main item is.
In the end, it's the vendor's choice concerning how much extra work he/she does, but it is the client's choice about whether to buy or go look for something else.
It takes me all of 15 minutes to fill out sometimes quite exhaustive product lists for the renders I do so that claim that the PAs are going though hours of gut wrenching hard labour to call out the products they used in a render and thus loosing precious time which they could devote to making more top selling products isn't flying. I didn't just fall off a turnip truck you know.
And my promos average 21-25 per product, and some are redos.. and that comes from images that are take up about 1gb of disk space because i run a lot of renders then choose the best ones, containing products from this store, other stores and things that people gave me to use in renders but aren't available for release. If someone has time to scour through a scene for every single product used, more power to them, but unless you're actually making products, you won't know or have standing to say how easy something is to do... especially when there's only 12 slots.. I don't have time to play "pick 12 products", especially when I'm not receiving any benefit from cross-promoting someone else's product that I paid for.. unless they gifted it to me for use in promos.. then they'll get credit.
Uh-huh and that claim being made repeatedly in the forum is losing PAs or the alpha-beta testers that often actually create those renders lots of precious product development time too.
No, that ain't working either.
I had a strange thought. Wouldn't it be fun if you went into a highstreet shop to buy a shirt and had to stand there as the assistant told you that to wear it like the window model did you need to buy trouser from Fred Bloggs down the road, and a belt form him in the market and a pair of shoes at premiers shoes the other end of town ... oh and you should also really have your hair cut by the new guy in the Next street and so forth. I wonder how long that assistant would keep his job.
This hypothetical shop probably shouldn't have a model in its window with 75% of its items from competing shops. The problem rests squarely on their marketing, not the assistant trying to help the customer get the look they came into the store to buy.
Sorry Chohole, that argument just doesn't hold water. No one is forcing clients to read through the list of other products in the promo pictures; the list is there as a helpful addon if the client is interested. To use your own analogy, the shop assistant would hand you a piece of paper with a list of "other items used" and smile sweetly saying "This may be of interest." You can ignore it or use it as you please.
The goal of promos is to make our products look good, whether content used in promos comes from other stores or its something that's made ourselves or gifted from others. With only 12 slots available to list anything, it's rather pointless to have a discussion on requiring anything since there's no possible way PAs **could** do that. If someone has a question about a promo, the forum is here to ask, but as for me, crosspromotion of products that I don't get a cut of is a favor, not a requirement and spending a major amount of time trying to sell other's products when I'm trying to get my product submitted offers no value and takes away from me working on another project.
I'm not sure where you get that idea from Daywalker. A more accurate summary might be that people would like vendors/PAs to provide names of the major items used in their promo pics using the current 12 slots available to them. I assume that if they make 12 different promo pics, then that would mean one item per pic. If they make only 4 promo pics then.... well you can do the maths.
Some might ask whether one of those 12 slots could be a link to a text file in which the vendor could provide more information on the promo pics, but that might be a step too far for some vendors, whilst others might be happy to provide this extra service to their clients.
Leana has already answered that question: "PAs can list up to 12 "items used" for a product, even if there are 10 promo pics. And yes, items from other stores can't be listed."
Whilst this may be disappointing to the client it is also understandable from the point of DAZ3d, who presumably do not wish to advertise on behalf of their competition. C'est la Vie.
I imagine that DAZ3d encourage vendors to use DAZ3d products in their promo pics, in which case it is perfectly reasonable for them to be named.
Again, DAZ encourages us to use products to make promos to look good including items from other sites. There's no restriction. A good chunk of my promos (including the last 4 products I've released in the store) include items that are either not available or from Rendo. It's not an efficient use of anyone's time to scour promos for what's in it. Since there's a disparity of male items, there's been a few things including hair that I had to pull from other sites, hence there's no restriction to keep me from doing that.
Efficient use of time? Really, you are way off base here. How can you to decide whether it "efficient" or not for someone else to try to identify items in a promo picture?
Let's get back to the original posters issue; it would be convenient for vendors to include a list of items used in promo pics for their products. DAZ3d provides a way of doing this but it is up to the vendor as to whether they wish to make the effort to do so for the benefit of (some) clients.
For me, and I suppose many others, vendors who do provide this service have a higher standing and I'm more likely to buy their work.
You may be right, but I think that's scraping the bottom of the barrel for excuses. Most of us earn our living by providing some kind of service to a client/employer of some sort. If we decided to provide less service simply because our client/employer might ask for an update or change later, then we probably would not keep our jobs for long. Of course, DAZ3d don't require vendors to provide a list of (DAZ3d) items used in their promo pics, so in that sense there is no reduction in service to DAZ3d if they don't do so. However, the buyers may feel that more could be done. In the end, it is up to individual vendors to provide the level of service and quality in their work that they choose to, and conversly, up to the buyers to decide if that is enough to warrent the purchase.
I can decide really easy. I spent 2 hours this morning doing morph corrections eye closes on 6 heads for a product I've been working on and off since November. When I speak of efficient use of my time, I can either spend that time making sure my full body morphs bend better, adding JCMs where needed OR scour through promos to see who made them. I'm not going to do both nor have the time if I want to submit the product for review on monday. If there's a choice, would the customer prefer a better bending shape, or to know where I got a hair from?
That's what's called efficient use of time. To add a promo credit to a list may be convenient to some, but a better bending custom product holds a higher value to most. And that's why I've been selling products in this store for eight years.