Droid Engineer Archive

Indeed, my house and vendors cost me a grand total of 3360cr per week. Four survey missions. Ten minutes work under the right circumstances. I still use personal harvesters, and built my own long ago. All my harvester calculations assume redeeding, and I plan out my harvesting to minimize the impact of redeeding. Until just recently, I had had wind harvesters in the same place for over three weeks, because while they were not on the best concentration of wind, they were still on a sufficient concentration for all that time. By not moving them, I saved the redeeding cost, thus making my operation that much more efficient, my resources that much cheaper.

I'm also opportunistic with my harvester placement. When the resource I'm mining runs out, I don't just break down the harvesters without first checking to see if there's a decent concentration of some other material I could use at that location. Frequently there is, and the harvester's "Change Resource" panel makes for a great high-speed survey of every resource in the immediate area. I can even turn a harvester on for a few seconds to sample a new resource much quicker than I can by hand, especially if I use multiple harvesters to sample different resources all at the same time, with no risk of failing to retrieve a sample. Better yet, doing it that way bypasses the "can't sample on the first day" bug. There have been several cases where I could just leave a set of harvesters right where they were after a resource shift.

So far from ignoring those overhead costs, I have invested a lot of effort into reducing those costs to almost nothing, and it's been working very well for me.

You know, reading my post today it sounds more like a 'wonderful me' post (I'm so special. My customers love me) and not at all like what I was trying to say (I blame it on the fact I had somewhere to go and was typing as fast as possible). So here's another attempt to see if I can't state what I was trying to say.

In any economy the value of what is being sold is set by two parties; the buyer and the seller and is decided by the lowest value they have in common. If the seller feels that what is being sold has more value than the buyer then no sale occurs and no value is established.

It should be noted that this completely ignores any claims of value. A seller may declare something is worth 50k, but if they sell it for 30k they are establishing that to be the value. Likewise a buyer might claim something is only worth 10k, but if they pay 20k then that is the true value. As the saying goes, money talks.

So now the issue comes as to what exactly is being sold. On the surface the easiest thing to point to is a droid but in truth there is more being sold than simply a droid in nearly every case.

First off, there is a certain degree of convenience being sold. Almost without exception anything you sell will probably be sold cheaper by someone else, so when a customer buys from you they are in essence paying at least a bit more to avoid the hassles of searching every single droid seller until they find the absolute bottom price.

Something else that is often sold and overlooked is the degree of personalization. While the majority of my sales are surgical droids with Medical VI and Chemical Crafting modules, I still don't have the pre-assembled. Why? Because not everyone wants the Geeky personality chip. Sure, it's the most common, but I've sold units with Worshipful, Slang, and in one case no personality chip at all. Likewise, when color finally becomes available I will be able to color the droid however the customer desires.

In my case the things I sell are also backed up with my name. This takes work! It is an investment of time that not everyone wants to make. When I started and had no reputation the things I made had less value. To some people the name of the person is unimportant and my work still has not added to the value in their eyes, but to the community at large it has. Similarly, I answer and even encourage questions when people are unsure about something, whether they are current customers or not and while I do not charge directly for the service it does, in the end, add to the value of what I've sold.

So where is this all leading? It's leading back to the idea of being 'undercut'. You have the power to make it so that you cannot be undercut. What you have to do is find out what others are selling and then figure out a way to sell something they don't. Most likely they are selling a droid and not much else. There will almost always be something you can add to increase the value that they don't add whether it be convenience, personalization, or customer service.

In the end, even if they offer everything else that you offer, you have your name to offer, and no one else can offer that.

Great post, Icarus, because it works like that in real life, as well.

I work at a music store, a fairly expensive record store, with less expensive record stores only 5 -10 minutes away, but people still come into our store because our store revolves around customer service, and giving the customer the most information we can provide, and if we can't provide it, to find someone who can.

I try to offer the best service that I can to my customers, at what I find to be very fair prices, something that will put a profit into my pocket... more money than I invested into the resources to make the droids, while at the same time being considerate of my customer's cash flow. Right now, I usually sell my droids for a base price of 5k, and negotiate with my customers if that is more than they are willing to pay for the droid. Now that I just got the ability to make R4 droids, my prices are going to be raised a bit if they want an R4 droid over an R5 droid. But I still want to find a considerate price to bring me a profit, and not to overcharge the customer. There are many factors that you must consider when pricing items, the resources, time, and money spent on creating the item, and just as important, the worth of the item to the person that is going to be buying it. Quite frankly, if a Probot is worth 10k to create, but it's not worth it for a customer to pay that (I know that I would -not- spend 10k on a probot the way they are now, not when I don't have 10k to spend on stuff other than resources and harvestors), then the product is quite simply put... not worth 10k.

It's just like baseball cards. Sure, it only takes a small amount to create something like that, but look how much they are worth, because that is what people are willing to pay.

I sell low to guarantee myself a sale by giving something that makes my product stand out to the consumer, in a market where all items are identical. I sell low to be considerate of the people that will be buying my product. I can't, in good concious, sell something to someone knowing that the value of the item is just not worth that amount of money, even if I did spend that much in resources to make it. That is why no amount of flaming you can do will get me to change my prices, and the way I do business.