Bio Engineer Archive
Thread: Frank talk about pet pricing...asking for input from people in the business for over 1 month
Just mastered CH and now am one box out from MBE. I have been marketing petstims for the last month or so, and so I am aware of what an incredible joke the pricing guide at swgbioengineer.com is, and therefore am asking you, the community what your thoughts on pet pricing are. I am just starting to gear up for pet sales and wanted to talk to a few of you who actually are in business as to what sort of prices move the pets on your vendor. My questions are:
1. What do you price furniture grade pets, where you just used garbage meat and garbage DNA from the riff raff around cities? If price = X*CL, what is X for you on Furniture pets? (CL= creature level)
2. What do you charge for properly engineered pets, where you have gone out and got the good high level DNA, done pair matching, used top quality meat and flora for the creature and experimented on your 41% crafting station with 14% tools? If price = Y*CL, what is Y for your engineered pets?
3. Do you markup mounts, and if so, by how much?
4. Do you add a premium for lvl 50 pets, and if so, how much?
5. If you train pets, do you charge for their training, and if so, what do you charge? If Cost = Z*(number of commands trained), what is Z?
6. Do you sell bugged pets, and if so, what pricing scheme do you use?
I had heard of Y=500 pet rates, but that yields a 25k Rancor, and I have seen people hawking them for 50k in Corella. What price moves here? It would seem that X would track time and base materials which is pretty minimal. I have seen people estimating 20-30K for mounts, but if you go on their creature level, thats really high, about Y=2000.
I don't know what your problem with swgbioengineer price guide for stims is. That is the exact formula I use, and I came up with it by myself, even though sometimes I raise the price some. But anyways, I mark everything up. I sell rancors for 25k-50k, whatever I can get out of the person. Kimos 80-100k. Kaadus 1k-5k. I just max out my prices and sell for as high as I can.
furniture kimos for 100k?
and people don't get pissed if they see it's untamable?
So far my prices are as follows:
Rancor/Gurrecks 45 - 60k depending on stats.
Kimos - gone from 5k to 8k and about to push it to 10k. With the possability they may get removed as a option to make people are buying them just to have in the house/PA hall. A few say just in case they will be tameable and I keep telling them....no way will SoE do that when they nerf CH so much.
Pet Furniture/Signs - 5k for most of the pets...I don't go less than that as getting 5 dna samples is a pain even doing junk dna.
Mounts - 10k formounts right now. May raise it as getting more and more tells for these. Already seen threads on CH forum talking about selling for 50k-100k.
Prices can range alot from server to server. Specially depends how many other BEs or MBEs are around to supply the demand.
1. What do you price furniture grade pets, where you just used garbage meat and garbage DNA from the riff raff around cities?
... well on the whole all my prices start with the base cost of the resources so furniture pets are where it all starts. I have them around 3000c-4000c as the upper limit for anything from under CL30, anything above is a flat rate of 8000c simply because most of the stuff MIGHT be tamed and finally I have the Kimogila at 15k.
2. What do you charge for properly engineered pets, where you have gone out and got the good high level DNA, done pair matching, used top quality meat and flora for the creature and experimented on your 41% crafting station with 14% tools?
... typically it ranges from 1000c to 8000c, some of my lower end pets are a bit higher than the normal prices (around 6000c for a Dewback for example) because of my pricing method however there's significant savings on the upper ones compared to other prices ive seen. One other point is that I have used both low grade tools and the high grade ones only to find that the higher ones actually mess up more on experimentation than my ones which read as -12 and such. Failure rates at the material stage are lower but it was never very high as a master in the first place.
3. Do you markup mounts, and if so, by how much?
... they cost the same to make as always, they just have a new function so I don't mark them up at all. I still make profit and i can't see the point in squeezing even more cash out of them.
4. Do you add a premium for lvl 50 pets, and if so, how much?
... i just increase the dna cost to around 5000c per sample. That brings my Gurreck and Rancor to around 33k each. I guess this is kinda low on average for Ahazi cause most people in the past have often ordered two or three at a time. I still make a ton of profit though so again, why bother pushing it higher...
5. If you train pets, do you charge for their training, and if so, what do you charge
...I don't train them, most of my customers are CHs anyway. My wife is getting into CH so she might work with me on the bussiness.
6. Do you sell bugged pets, and if so, what pricing scheme do you use?
... only for furniture purposes thus it's just the cost of the materials and a bit of cash per sample needed same as with the working pets used for furniture.
Wish I was on Kauri right now is all I can say 
I dont do furniture sells, I refuse to become that which the devs wish to turn us into...
(in other words no ones named the right price for me here on scylla 
)
Mostly Im not in this to sell pets see, Im in it so my guild has a BE (for pets and tissues, our wookie M WS is already all over me for tissues for a bunch of wookie clothes 
)and sowe have the novice BE for base destruction... comes in handy
I sell non-CH pets for 10k, clvl 15-50 for 12k, clvl 50+ for 25k. Half price of that for furniture pets
The 'system' dosent nessesarily make any perticular sense, but its simple and works for me.
Keetha,
Your price guide for stims is a joke for several reasons:
1. You ignore differences between petstim grades. A's sell for as much as D's in your scheme.
2. You have no accomodation for numbers in the crate. A flat rate regardless of quantity is not very savvy from a marketing standpoint.
3. I have personally done over $2M credits in sales at up to double your rate (0.1*ch*eff) on Flurry, which has many practicing BE's including Sinnyl. I see ordinary doctor meds selling for what you charge, and petstims are in my mind simply a harder product to make at the same grade level as a regular med.
I am very interested in everyone's responses regarding the pets. Seems like most are going on gut numbers which don't track CL. I think the idea of linking cost to the dna sampling is a good one, with the 50th creatures requiring either a Kimo intermediate or risky field sampling, and commanding a premium. I think 5K per 50th DNA sample is a pretty good number, considering losses, incaps, and crit failures and sorting for decent pairs. Looks like 500c per CL with a premium of 5Kx3 samples is good
Likewise I think the floor of 5K for furniture is probably a good one. At some point you can be doing something more productive for your time, like making high end pets or fishing for petstim D meat. I am not comfortable in selling via a vendor bugged stuff because I dont want to deal with complaints and returns.
2. I usually charge HAM x1.5 to 2 for good pets other than Rancor/Gurreck. I just base it off how well they turned out. For Rancor/Gurreck I generally say its 25k+ depending on stats normally figuring to sell them all for 25-60k. Almost always in the 27-35k range though on Rancor/Gurreck.
3. I don't mark up mounts at all yet. Like Tal-n I don't really see the point of marking them up? Maybe when they are in the game and I see how they work. If they take 10x the work to make then sure I will mark them up accordingly. If they take the same work as I know I am pretty dubious about gouging people for 30k on something I would normally charge 5k for.
4. As above I just say my Rancor/Gurreck start at 25k and go up from there. I figure its plenty of profit to me and don't much see why others would charge 100k for them, heh. To me the funnest part is doing all the DNA work and then getting to work on these types of pets.
5. I am a CH 2/2/0/1, so I don't train pets. If I did train pets I would just throw it in for free.
6. I sell bugged pets if people request them, the cost is almost always HAM x1 for them.
Your price guide for stims is a joke for several reasons:
Well that is totally out of order for you to say that. Byany definition 'good business' is anything which brings you more income than you have outgoings so don't presume to apply you ideals of what is a decent amount of income to someone else.
Tal-N,
By your definition, a fortune 500 company which shows an annual profit ofone US dollar is a 'good' business. I don't think you will find many clammoring to buy stock in such a 'good' business.
Most of us will have a different idea of what good business means, and it is pointless fighting over it, unless say, you enjoy just squabbling for squabbling's sake (and if that is true, we should take it to mail). Perhaps had I selected some other phrase like 'needs a lot of work' instead of 'is a complete joke', you wouldn't have felt the urge to rush in to the rescue for a guide which is rather arbitrary and crude. As it is written, that guide needs work, and I really don't think you can honestly sit there and defend it as written. The rational man's response to constructive criticism is to revise the flawed work rather than attack the language of the critique.
When I see phrases like 'don't ask me where I got it, this is just what I use', I don't really think 'hmm, this is an authority on the matter, and I sure am glad he posted his guide'. To be constructive, I would modify your guide to have factors for number in crate, pet stim grades, and current market prices. From my direct experience I know you can maintain a regular clientele at about 2x those prices, and I think the prices in that guide underprice petstims by a factor of 1.5 to 2. Just look at something like fish meat...on the server boards I visit, I see regularly the stuff going for 100c or moreper unit for big stacks. So 25 fish meat at that price is 2500c alone, which in the 0.1*ch*eff forumla is about 800x30 right there-half the effect is in the fishmeat alone! Add in the other components for a petstim D and you will be hard pressed to break even with the 0.1*ch*eff formula. SO you must have different factors for the different stim grades, particularly in the case where you have outrageous material costs such as fish meat.
So you got a choice here...revise the guide and make it better, or just get all huffy about phrases like 'is a complete joke'.
I"ll preface all of these answers with a few statements. I base my products worth on my time. I don't care if they don't sell, but they all DO sell out.
1) Housepets are 5k unless they fall into another category
- Combat pet alternative (ex: Rancor 30k, Gurreck 25k, Razor Cat 15k)
- Kimos 30k
- Mounts (full price of the mount version)
- I provide free naming of housepets with purchase
2) Combat pets I don't use a formula, but guidelines
- Non-CH pet 10k-20k
- Rancor 40k-60k
- Gurreck 30k-50k
- Just about anything else 20-30k
3) Just set up a mounts vendor, though i haven't decided on pricing yet. Most likely its going to be 20k minimum, but if stats prove to be important expect that to jump to upwards of 50k. Again, I'll reiterate that i base my pricing off my time. If i sell zero mounts at these prices /shrug some other chump can have the 'work' it is gather DNA.
4) Already answered this one above. Rancors and Gurrecks are in demand and you can see the mark up I give them.
5) Yes, I will train pets, but usually they find another MCH to do it. If I didn't make the pet, I charge 10k for a full suite of commands.
6) All bugged pets are sold specifically off of my Housepets Vendor to avoid confusion with the Combat Pets or Mounts vendor.
Of course you can throw the vast majority of this system right out the window when the new cloning system goes live. We're supposedly going to have alot more to tinker with, and we're going to have a dramatically smaller market because of the death of the CH-dabbler. We can hope that maybe something will squeak into the game that makes the CH-dabbler want to stay a dabbler... but i doubt we will. Though I guess the possibility exists that the player population gets smart and does something Sony isn't realizing could happen.... Rather than have CH-dabblers, we might see all them become MCH's then dabble in the other professions.