Architect Archive
Thread: How should I price my Items at?
Q-5.3: What should I charge for a building/harvester/piece of furniture??
A-5.3: Short answer: Specific prices that you choose are going to be very server dependent. No price is too high if your customers will gladly pay it and no price is too low if you make a good enough profit.
Copy/paste from ZenDragonMLS -
"Find the vendors for many of the Master Architects on your server. Go visit them. Copy down the prices. Talk with miners and ask them where they get their harvesters and how much they pay. Check the Bazaar for furniture prices. Check the Trade Forum for your server.
Then sit down and figure out what kind of business *you* want to run. If you want to be a low-cost / high-volume guy, then figure out how you can keep your operating costs as low as possible and yet pump out lots of stuff (high-volume means you will need extra lots and/or people to mine for you). If you want to focus on furniture, then you need to make sure that your vendor always has a large selection on it and you need to advertise a lot. If you want to only service miners by making high-end heavy harvesters, then figure out the economics of *their* business and charge for your harvesters based on their payback (e.g., selling someone a money-making machine that never decays for an amount that they can earn back in 2-4 days is not a recipe for long-term success.)
You get the idea: price is only *one* aspect of your whole business model. Think through how you want to play and pick your prices to fit that model. Whatever you do, don't take some "rule of thumb" like "charge X credits per unit of resources that it takes you to build it" and call it a "business model". Take more control over your business than that."
Veers_Intrepid wrote:
well as pawlin said no price is to high as long people buy from you.
but no price to low i have havily to disagree with.
as soon your prices go lower then what you would get from the pure resources, then you make businesslike minus and then its bad for architects anyways. in such case just sell the pure resources and have also no work to do.
also count in some your time and also the value of an item not pure resource costs.
...
I didn't say "no price is too low". I said "no price is too low if you make a good enough profit.".
That is a pretty big difference in the meaning.
By "profit" I do mean income minus the cost of raw materials and your expenses.(like the dictionary would say) So if someone is selling deeds for less than the cost of the raw materials then they are making 0 profit. Thats not "good enough profit" by any measure.
If you don't get paid "enough" for your efforts then that is a measure of not getting "good enough profit". Each of us individually determines what "good enough" is for our profit margins.
