Architect Archive

Hello everyone. I am on Natarius and have a Architecture vendor. He is well stocked with furniture and all kinds of deeds from houses to harvestors. My prices , for Natarius, are VERY competative!! I post sometimes on the Natarius board and get a few customers, but not nearly enough I am smack 1/2 way between Anchorhead and Bestine in a medium sized city.

Question : What are some successful architects who use vendors doing to get "foot traffic" ?? Thanks!

Moglie

#1 Location, Place your sales office where you see lots of foot trafic

#2 Advance enough in Advertizing enough to start a planatary ad campaign

#3 Give people the waypoint to your vendor, any cusotmer for any thing should be given the waypoint to your vendor.

Sell some of your items on the Bazaar for higher than you do on your vendors (usually resources of some sort). Then put your sales pitch in the description of the item with the coordinates of your shop.

For example, sell stacks of 1000 Ore for 3k on the Bazaar, then in the description note:

If you need more of this Ore buy in bulk at my shop (1234, 1234) in stacks of 5000 for only 12k!

Then not only do you get some income from the Bazaar, you get free advertising too. :-)

Bushwa

First get a place close to a city, the more populated the better, but not too close to another architect. Competition is bad for both of you. That is the location part.

Second is diversity, get other masters to place venders in the same house with you. A weaponsmith is a huge bonus, people are always looking for guns. A BE selling pet stims is good, as is medics selling stim Bs. People use a lot of those and buy them all the time.

Third is advertise and not just you, but your partners. Each time someone walks in to get a product from someone else, they look over your vendor too. The planetary map is fine, but many still don't look there. Giving out way points and word of mouth is best.

Fourth offer something truely unique. If you have +40 stations and no one else does, people will take notice. If your weaponsmith has a super powerful krayt gun, people will notice. This is why experimentation is so valuable for architects and those wanting to throw it away and just hurting themselves without know it. As it is, the only thing you can offer as an architect, besides uber stations, is dirt cheap prices. If you sell large houses for 30k, you'll get noticed alright. You'll be an idiot too, but that is besides the point. Lost leaders on huge structures just don't work.

Fifth would be to keep things in stock. Empty vendors are vendors that never get visited again. This is the hard part of this life, but is very important. Your partners will need to be keeping their vendors stocked up too, as you only do well if they are doing well.

My vendor is not necessarily in a "good" location I choose a spot for my house that I like it's about 1500 from town as the crow flies (ie across the bay) but if you run the coast line its more like 2500. I felt that the spot was fine for architectual items since rarely are our goods impulse buys.

The way I built my market:

1) Furniture, it seems very few architects on my server have a good selection of items in stock and keep them in stock. I never competed in the small house market (not when folks sell them for 6k here) so although I rarely made the inital house sale I often filled those houses with furniture. And when the customer wanted to upgrade their house the remembered me.

2)Bazaar, I stock the bazaar with 20 furniture items of varying styles on a weekly basis, I make sure that the description for each item has my waypoint.

3) When I was first starting out and even to a degree today I sent a thank you email to every person that bought an item off the bazaar from me. In that email I included the waypoint of my shop and asked for future business. I only send 1 email per person and I keep a list of customers so that I'm not seen as an email spammer.

4) I wear my title proudly and I stop to answer questions when I'm running around, I send my waypoint to those that ask pricing information.

5) I'm willing to make deals, I do trades for bulk resources on a 2.5 basis and I accept other deed on a 50% face value for upgrades.

6) I post onmy serverboards alot, I don't post price lists (that's an invitation for flames). I let folks know when new resources for mastery furniture has become available or when I have good amounts of stock on hand, or when I have stock of good crafting stations. I also read the boards and send in game emails with price quotes to those looking for structures.

7) I got on the global map as soon as I could very often I am the only architect listed on the global map for my planet.

Don't clothe them?

Just kidding. Locaiton and word of mouth. Once they fix some of the merchant issues it will be easier.

Shylok