Business And Economy Archive

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Dazzydoodle wrote:

One of my favorite reselling flame war threads

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IG29 wrote:

I can see both sides to this, but as an artisan that has been playing for a few months, reselling is sometimes a necessary practice. Crafters at my level can only make a limited range of products, so I have found the occasional good deal on something on the bazaar on one planet and brought it back to my home world to sell. Since, it costs money to retrieve that item and bring it to a new location, I feel no issue with marking up the item to cover both my cost and to make a profit for the item and the service combined. I should point out that reseliing is a vital part of the real world economy, so why would it be different in a virtual economy?

I think one of the issues is that people are confusing the concept of the seliing price and the market price. Everyone is talking about the original crafter's selling price, "the fair price", but the market price is completely out of the control of the producer. The selling price is up to the consumer and what they are willing to pay. If you sell your products at a price lower than what consumers are willing to pay, than you are encouraging reselling and not making as much profit as you should. If your prices were more in line with the market price, then reselling of that item wouldn't even be profitable and it would go away. So basically you are banning people because you don't know how to set your prices. The price you set should at least be high enough that you feel you have been adequately compensated for your time and cost, and that it will not matter to you if someone takes it and makes more. But to be a successful merchant, you also need to keep track of what's available and what people want and adjust your production and prices to match. If you do so, than you will hardly ever have anything resold.

Azhei Daegon- Lowca Server

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And also people impulse buy quite a lot. Many people can't be bothered to shop around. This creates a huge opportunity market for products whether or not they're cheap or expensive. I've lost sales because the buyer didn't want to leave their planet.

I really don't understand any objections to people reselling items bought from others and made by others.

There is a whole profession devoted solely to that concept - MERCHANT. That is precisely how a merchant is supposed to make money, buy from one, sell to another. Buy cheap, sell dear.

Granted most people take Merchant as a secondary profession to augment their crafting trade, but nothing says you have to do that, and there is no reason why my only non-combat skill couldn't be merchant, and my only livelihood the selling of drops I find, and items purchased from others. No reason at all.

When I was a Droid Engineer - no hang on, nothing sold then When I was a Weaponsmith, I made a ton of money on low end and medium end sales - and I am still selling off stock at this time. I based my prices on the market prices. I went out and did copious searches of the vendor locations on the bazaar terms and priced out a reasonable price for every weapon I could make, then wrote them down in a little reference book. I based all my prices on those values and everything sold fairly well. Sometimes I would have someone visit my vendors and buy a whole stack of weapons - far more than they were likely to use - and I presumed they were reselling them. I was quite happy, I sold say 10 ALRs at 11k each and made 110k profit, they will resell them for some markup value and make more. When they buyers look for another weapon and check their trusty ALR they have been using - my name shows up. Why would I object? If the buyer wasn't clued in enough to realize they didn't buy the weapon from me, but still bought it, then the price suited their needs or they woudl have bought elsewhere. There are precious few monopolies in this game and where a perceived monopoly appears it doesn't take long for someone else to rise up and offer an alternative.

Now I can understand objecting if someone shows up who is in the same business and just buys up your stock and resells it. I recall hearing of a woman doing that, bought out someone's merchant then put all the goods up on their merchant instead and stood outside the first person's shop and pointed people to their shop after telling them this one was out of stock. Obviously aggressive (and ultimately pointless) tactics for sure, but /ban will fix that in most cases.

If something sells too fast off your merchants, consider raising the price a bit until sales are steady but not too fast. Thats the market's acceptable price. If you don't care about profits then sell it all at whatever price suits you as long as you can continue to do business - but don't object if someone makes it their business to resell your items. You got paid, and if you want them to not find that a viable tactic - raise your prices to theirs.

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Klak wrote:

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bluejanus wrote:
I have made ridiculous profit on buying resources and reselling them for higher.

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really? i just visited your resource vendor last night and it was all 1 cpu resources...

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Heh I don't think you visited my vendor. Not even the grind is at 1 cpu. Most of the ridiculous profit was done via trade windows rather than the vendor. So it wouldn't show on the vendor anyways.

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VisaKhart wrote:

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Famas wrote:

In a pure capitalist system like SWG, only the strong ones who sploit profit survive (hence why RL free capitalism is BAD). One can either complain about getting shanked in the economy by sitting around doing nothing or take part in the shanking.

Its just a game so it really doesn't matter. Gives people a chance to practive buy low sell high stuff anyways.

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The SWG economy is not pure capitalism. It actually has more mechanism built in to protect the "little man" than most players seem to see.

1) You can not hire anyone.

Nobody is actually working for you. You might have suppliers, but they basically run their own business, like you do. Factories help with mass production, like a staffed factory would, but they only cost the factory owner and do not benefit other players (with a cradit payout), so they count more as a machine. Since everybody is their own boss with their own little enterprise (no matter how well it's run), the SWG economy is very much on an ancient society level, defenitely pre-industrial age.

2) You can not branch out indefenitely.

You can have 5 house stores or 10 tents with one char and you number of vendors is limited. Not so in a truly capitalistic economy. There you would have people running stores in virtually every city on your server, and you would see W@l-M@rt like retailers accumulating Trillions (not as todays richest players, Billions) of credits.

3) You money does not "make money".

There are few real possibilities to invest. Your bank account does not create interest.

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1,3 are a matter of a lack of trust relationships which come from a more organized society
2. Ah but you can branch out significantly more than the number of house lots and vendors. You do this in exactly the same way you do it in real life. You organize a company or corporation or set up franchising. People have done it in SWG.

Also venture capitalism or stocks are not necessary aspects of capitalism.

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VisaKhart wrote:

3) You money does not "make money".

There are few real possibilities to invest. Your bank account does not create interest.

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bluejanus wrote:

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VisaKhart wrote:

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Famas wrote:

In a pure capitalist system like SWG, only the strong ones who sploit profit survive (hence why RL free capitalism is BAD). One can either complain about getting shanked in the economy by sitting around doing nothing or take part in the shanking.

Its just a game so it really doesn't matter. Gives people a chance to practive buy low sell high stuff anyways.

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The SWG economy is not pure capitalism. It actually has more mechanism built in to protect the "little man" than most players seem to see.

1) You can not hire anyone.

Nobody is actually working for you. You might have suppliers, but they basically run their own business, like you do. Factories help with mass production, like a staffed factory would, but they only cost the factory owner and do not benefit other players (with a cradit payout), so they count more as a machine. Since everybody is their own boss with their own little enterprise (no matter how well it's run), the SWG economy is very much on an ancient society level, defenitely pre-industrial age.

2) You can not branch out indefenitely.

You can have 5 house stores or 10 tents with one char and you number of vendors is limited. Not so in a truly capitalistic economy. There you would have people running stores in virtually every city on your server, and you would see W@l-M@rt like retailers accumulating Trillions (not as todays richest players, Billions) of credits.

3) You money does not "make money".

There are few real possibilities to invest. Your bank account does not create interest.

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1,3 are a matter of a lack of trust relationships which come from a more organized society
2. Ah but you can branch out significantly more than the number of house lots and vendors. You do this in exactly the same way you do it in real life. You organize a company or corporation or set up franchising. People have done it in SWG.

Also venture capitalism or stocks are not necessary aspects of capitalism.

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Good points.

I agree that the SWG economy allows to work around these restrictions I mentioned, that's why we see some players being significantly richer than others. However, these restrictions are there and prevent youfrom hiring 100 players that are being told to go and harvest a specific resource and bring it back in order to receive a pre-determined amount of credits. They prevent you from having 100 stores with 1000 vendors who you own, not franchise out. I don't see these restrictions in a truly capitalistic society.

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Pawlin wrote:

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VisaKhart wrote:

3) You money does not "make money".

There are few real possibilities to invest. Your bank account does not create interest.

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There is a fair amount of speculation in the game. In fact the main topic of this thread 'buying for resale' is a case. You have to have money to invest to flip things for profit.

Any form of speculation in the game is a form of leveraging capital. That is money making money.

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I agree. However, this form of leveraging your capital requires market knowledge and activity (checking prices, flying around buying etc.).

I was talking more about money making money by itself, asmoney in your RL bank account would. This requires nothing, except the money being there.

Real world bank accounts make diddily squat.

And in teh real world you have to contend with actualreal inflation which offsets interest gains of savings accounts.

There are two types of re-sellers. One I would call a ‘pirate re-seller’ and this is the one that most crafters hate. They buy usually large amount of product then sell it at a significant mark-up. These people do not work with the crafter and doing this long term can get you labeled as a ‘griffer’ and SOE can take action against them (there are rules against this). I have seen a significant drop in this type of re-selling, as it is become a lot less profitable (thanks to the bazaar search).
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Rules against efficient marketing and merchantdom?

Erm.. show them to me.