Architect Archive

go visit other architects on your server, look at their prices and you will get a feel for where the market price for each item is.

You could get 100 different answers for how others do it,each with good arguments,but in my opinion this is the only real way to make sure you are not selling to low or too high, it means some legwork, but nobody said it was going to be easy.

I am a low priced architect. A lot of fellow architect have told me how dumb I am. I price furniture items at 3 cr per resource used, I price houses very reasonable as well.

One of the archtiect that is most vocal in telling me how dumb I am prices things abour 3 times my prices for furniture and twice as high for houses. This architect sells about 1 house a day and about 10 pieces of furniture.

I sell around 10 houses and 300 pieces of furniture a day. My "stupid" pricing has allowed me to acculate tens of millions of credits in profits and have a very loyal customer base that always comes back for more stuff. I do have to spend a significant amount of time crafting and tending factories. to keep my vendor well stocked (people hate going to an empty or understocked vendor - keep your vendor full of a good selection of items. I keep a stocking level of at least 4 items of each type odf furniture (as many as 20 of some hot sellers). (I keep 4 of each type of small house, 2 of every type of medium or large house. (this is 4 of every different model - 4 small tatooine, 4 small tatooine floorplan 2, 4 of each of the 4 generic smalls, etc.) I restock at least once daily. If you are going to restock over a longer period increase your stocking levels. Nothing attracts return customers better than having them know your vendor will be well stocked. Many many architects have empty vendors or vendors with 4 pieces of furniture and no houses in it.

If you want to be busy and well liked by customers set prices low enough to give you a reasonable profit while giving the customer a fair price. If you buy resources for 1.5 cr per unit then 3 cr per unit pricing returns a fair profit. I have a number of miners selling me resources at 1.5 cr per unit. The units i mine myself costs me .32 cr per unit so whenever I use my own resources I make a very good profit.

When something requires hard to get resources like endorian wooly hides or some rare ore then charge more for that item. Only a few architect items are like that however.

I do not sell harvesters myself. Many architects make good livings off of selling them. I give top of the line harvesters to my suppliers for free as a "bonus" for them. So far I have not had one supplier stop supplying me so this has worked out well for me. I have all the business I can handle already and the experimentation risk and high quality material requirements of good harvesters just takes up too much effort other than the bonus units I give to my suppliers.

There is nothing wrong with the low price approach. Wal-Mart sells a lot more items than Sears or Nordstrums. If you want to make a lot of friends, keep busy as a architect and make a good living, low prices is the way to go. You can make good money selling for higher prices but you will sell much lower quantities and have less customer loyalty..

Something to bear in mind is the opportunity cost of your time and materials. If when making a heavy miner you could sell the 1k of good steel for 5k and 25k of grind stuff for 3k then thats 80k in materials alone. Then you also haveto figure the time and effort it takes to build the things. If you could easily rake in 20-30k an hour by doing some hunting then you should value your time at something in the 20-30k ball park. For example if you're pricing fairly low with a 5k per heavy profit margin and you make about 10 heavies in your 2-3 hours per night then you're getting 50k profit off of 2-3 hours, but if you could instead do some missions or whatever else for the same profits then you might want to either raise your harvester prices or just go do those missions.

One thing I always tell people who ask this question is to sell at a level you are happy with.
If you find you are spending time crafting, crafting, crafting to keep up with demand, and this is making you money and you are happy, then you have a price level that suits you, even though others may think it is too low. If however you find you are struggling and the enjoyment is just not there because it is preventing you from doing other things you would rather do in the game then your prices are probably too low. If on the other hand you are not shifting anything you have probably set your prices too high, or you have failed to advertise sufficiently. If however the occaisional sale is making you enough money and leaving you with enough time to enjoy other aspects of the game, then your prices are probably about right for you. Only one thing I would recommend, don't go out of your way to undercut the opposition, it never pays off in the long run and creates animosity amongst your fellow architects. Advertising works much better than undercutting.

There are no fixed rules for how you should set your prices, if you are happy they are right, it's a game and the objective is to enjoy yourself, if you aren't doing that then you've got it all wrong.

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Pawlin wrote:
So to sum up... charge whatever you want.

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