Doctor Archive

Do you think a crate of say, Stim B's should cost the same as if they were uncrated?

I think the crate should factor in more because of inventory space saved and time used in crating them for factory time.

So, yes, I charge more for crates and people get mad.

Right now I sell a crate as if they were the same price of the individual stims. So if I sell a stim for, say, 1,000 creds, then a crate of 50 of those stimes would be 50,000 cr. InitiallyI was selling crates for less, because folks wanted a "volume discount". After thinking about it that seemed like kind of a dumb idea. I mean, as you mention, crates are exceptionally convenient for them and factor in that factories are a real pain to deal with at times, in many ways crates of stims are no easier to produce than individuals. So no volume discounts from me.

Many Docs actually charge 10%-15% MORE for crates because you get the Volume = 5 no matter if there are 5 or 50 in the crate.

I always charge less for stims in a crate becuase I'd rather move 25 or 50 stims all at once, than let individuals sit on my vendor and trickle in the money. The advantages of a crate is a good point though. However, personally handling one sale with a single inventory space crate is more convenient for me too, so I figure it evens out and I give the discount as a reward for large volume sales.

Lyrn Pulnvo MD

Scylla

"Volume" discounts are good when a product can be mass produced in such a way that it's per unit costs decrease as you manufacture larger quatities of the product. However, you can't really have "volume" discounts when the costs of manufacturing increases your per unit cost. The current state of factories not pulling from crates effectively increases your per unit cost as you have to consider the time you spend having to manually load the input hopper. The only thing that gets automated by factories right now is the actual assembly phase. However, the product transport portion is still done by hand when you're trying to manufacture in "bulk". Factories will reduce the per unit cost oncethey are pulling from crates. Until then you have to do half of the factory's work by feeding it the components and resources by hand.

Charge whatever you can live with, but the crate taking 5 spaces versus the individual stims taking 50 is not something to overlook. You'd be surprised how much junk some people haul around on them, and anything that saves space is worth it.

Doubly so with factories being so cranky at the moment.

--Voose. Tarq.

It's nice to hear that some people are still able to make crates of stims. Factories are still major broken for me and won't assemble items at all. There any special trick you use or does the game client just hate me? I tried redeeding and everything and taking the items out of the crate and loading them by hand.. a couple minutes pass then the factory would tell me something like "ran out of liquid suspensions" while it was making stims...liquid suspensions are in there...sigh..and yet they want to focus on nerfing medical exp gain...

Volume discount for me. More as the crate size goes up.

Right now, my 10 unit crate has a 15% savings and the 30 unit has a 20% savings. Better to have them move crates at a time rather than piece by piece. If you sell on the bazaar it means you can post at more locations before you run into the item limit. Plus, the discount helps on Maintenance costs on your non-NPC vendor.

Volume discounting works well in the real world where packaging costs are expensive. By buying in bulk, the customer gets one large container rather than the twenty or so smaller containers that would be necessary to sell that same bulk of product in smaller portions. Because the supplier saves money on packaging, they can sell bulk quanitities cheaper.

There are no packaging costs in SWG and so their is no savings on the manufacturing cost for selling in bulk. For some reason though, customers sometimes have a hard time grasping the concept that individual stim prices are not lowered in cost when sold in bulk.

I charge the same for stims regardless of the bulk (proces only fluctuate based on the stats of the stims). The customer is getting the same deal they would have gotten if they had made many smaller purchases but they have the advantage of having to occupy less inventory by using a crate. Although technically you could charge more for this, I tend to use it more as a bargaining counter-point to the customers that demand that they should get a discount for bulk purchases.

Good points there Wyld.

I put a bit of psychology to it. The people in game have come from the real world, so they have bulk order=discount ingrained in their mind. To go counter to this invites a certain percentage of the clientele to walk away without even arguing the benefits.

Additionally, I find a lot of non-backpack wearers who buy Stims until they run out of inventory. In this case, I figure that they will be more likely to buy the crate until they run out of money rather than walk away with cash in their pocket that I could have.

People can also be impulse pressured to buy a crate because of the savings. Kind of a, "I came to buy three, but I can buy 10 and save a bundle". That means quicker turn around for those crates and greater cash from an off world traveller.

I also think of it as permanent advertising to return. A single Stim in a sea of inventory items is one thing, but seeing that crate work its way down to zero seems to me to be a great reminder that they need to find out where they got that nice discount crate.

Plus, anything to keep me from mind numbingly emptying crates and posting tons of items on my vendor has to be a benefit.

Okay, I think there are some things being missed here.

1. Crates take up 1 unit of volume in inventory space, not 5. HOWEVER, any crates that were already made before the patch that changed this still have a volume of 5 and they cannot be changed. But anycrates produced after the patch (i.e. now for example) will take up 1 unit of inventory volume.I know this to be true as I've createdmany crates before and after the patch, but if anyone has any evidence to the contrary, please post it.

2. There is afactory bug that makes them not pull from crates reliably -- but it's STILL better than crafting everything by hand. I'll take a 30% automated process over a 0% one any day. So there should be no additional charge for this over hand-crafted individual stims.

3. Step back a bit from the whole "convenience because they're all in 1 (or 5) inventory spots" factor for a minute. You are making 50 items. You can sell them singly, or you can sell them all at once. Which would you prefer as a seller? Well all at once of course! Hence the reason for a discount. Because someone is saving YOU the trouble of having to sell and manage 50 items versus 1 item.

If the end consumer gets a bonus of having them all fit in 1 space in the inventory, bonus for them! That doesn't mean we should raise the prices. What if SOE makes crates take up 10 units of inventory space? Would we then drop the prices again? My point is that the benefit of them being easy to manage has no effect on our production costs, and thus shouldn't be projected in any way onto the consumer through the sale price. I discount my crates because it allows me to unload a lot of units and make a lot of money in one big chunk. If crates have additional benefits to players, then great. Maybe they'll be more inclined to buy more crates from me. But the way I look at it, charging more for crates because of something that doesn't affect their production cost doesn't seem fair... and I will continue to offer discounts for multiple singles over 1 single unit, for a crate over multiple singles, and for multiple crates over 1 crate. Any other benefit you get like smaller inventory space footprint can be passed on as it is at no additional cost.

I'd be happy to discuss this with any consumers or fellow docs here or in-game.

(Character: Maniweh on Corbantis)

GPF.

Sell them individually, definitely. It's true that the crates are convenient for the patron, and that any imagined "discount" or "bulk rate" is probably just an illusion of saved inventory space. However:

50 stims x 20 credits to list on bazaar = 1000 credits overhead

1 crate x 20 stims = 20 credits overhead

Still, there are better ways.

What I do is carry a crate of the things around with me when I go offworld, especially to Lok, Dathomir, Endor, and I'll be taking some to Yavin. It's expensive to travel to these planets; it's dangerous to be on them. Therefore I'll jack up my price for an advanced super stim B to 1250, instead of 1000. I'll price my advanced super stim Cs at 1750 instead of 1500. And they'll sell within 48 hours, because many customers have nowhere to turn to. Either buy my stims, which are often the only ones on the market, or fly to Corellia and back for 7000 and buy some cheaper in Kor Vella. Cruel? Maybe. Opportunistic? Of course. As long as they are planets I'm going to anyway, and I have the crates on me... and I can sell them for a higher price here than at home... I make more money. It's called a tourist trap, and it's possible to sell at a reasonable markup over MSRP.