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Thread: SWG Market Strategies A guide for Merchants
SWG Market Strategies - A guide for Merchants
Introduction
1. The Idea
1.1. RL and SWG
2. The first shop
2.1. A few tips and recommends
a) Access to your shop
b) Fill the vendors
c) Price estimation
3. What else you need to have an eye on it
3.1. Exploits
3.2. Hypes
3.3. Ingame advisors
3.4. Shortage of trade goods
3.5. Bearmarket and Deflation
3.6. Disasters
4.0 Golden Rules
4.1. No clearance sales and blowouts when in need for money
4.2. Customer Care
4.3. Forcast and analyze the future
4.4. Focus on the main business
4.5. Do not collect
4.6. Think big and get the edge
1. Introduction
This is the English Version of Jacks Merchant Guide, which I posted in November 2004 in the German Forums. I have since then added any new experiences to it and it is still growing.
To whom is this guide adressed? First in line I think of anyone who is eager to play a profession which main goal is business and trade. Being a merchant means no advantage in battle, no healing and maybe not even crafting. No one needs to be a merchant to have vendors of their own. Any novice artisan is able to put up a self service automaton in his flat. Anyone who loots halfway good stuff may sell it anytime in the forum or in the auction chat, without having a vendor at all. Question is, are we merchants obsolete? Certainly not. Most guilds use merchants for their malls, but I speak about actually playing and using the merchant on its own, not only as provider of many good looking vendors.
There are a few ways to play a merchant. You can have a Elite Fighter Profession and be a merchant. It helps you to get hold of the many loots and rewards that only fighters are able to get. Actually the whole game is based upon fighting. You may also make a smuggler merchant, which would help you to beef up the gear of anyone, including the stuff you deal with. Many people craft and have such an awesome number of self crafted stuff to sell, that only a master merchant is able to handle it. I am using the merchant for trading, searching and reselling trade goods.
1.1. The difference between game and real life
There are a few quite important differences between RL Business and SWG Business. I will explain some of them and what this means to our gaming experience.
a) No Decay. Trade and commerce are all about TIME. No one lives forever, trading goods rot away, things get old and useless. There is no actual time in SWG, it is standing still. You can hoard tons of resources, clothes, food etc. and it will never get harmed by attrition. One is never forced to get rid of his stocks, since it wont be harmed and be always as new as in the time of its creation.
b) Hardly any life costs. What does it cost to live in SWG? Nothing. You don't need to eat, you don't need to have living space. Room for your stuff is provided by the bank safe and your inventory, and its free. Later in the game, theres a few creds to pay for a house, but all in all, no one is ever forced to gain money for basic needs. So, anything that is bought, is mere luxury goods. Keep in mind, that no player is actually forced to buy anything to survive.
c) Inflation. It's very easy to gain vast amounts of money by either doing planetary missions or space missions. A few thousand players do that daily, the game generates a vast amount of money without having a real decay. Most shops will never generate more money than a player gets income by doing missions and selling loots and rewards.
Keep these simple points in mind, they affect everything that I will write of in the following chapters!
1.2 The concept - blueprinting your future as merchant
At the beginning is the Idea, the concept and image of what business you will run. Ask yourself what you are going to sell, how you want to sell it, and who's gonna buy it. You can sell anything in SWG: weapons, starships, food, drugs, medicine, armor, etc. Since most players are fighters, there are many weaponsmiths and armorsmiths, but by summer 2005 the Jedi population grew to such an extent, that their number has decreased fast. Lootcomponents and lootweapons- and armor will affect these professions as well, only the finest crafters will survive, and mutate to mere assemblers of what their customers will bring them. The best WS and AS were and still are in most cases members of important guilds. These people get the best stuff to work with and have great connections. At least, experimentation gear has become cheaper and in certain cases obsolete at all, a year before, weapons made by 12 points crafter could outmatch always stuff by poorer workers, since the price was in most cases the same, at far better efficiency. If you are aspiring on becoming AS or WS plan it with care and farsight until you begin to craft for the market.
Experimentation tapes for WS, AS, SW, CM, Docs and Cooks were extremly expensive. Since only the strongest creatures/npc dropped the best stuff, they were camped day and night by strong guilds. This led to a concentration of the best tapes in the best guilds. If these people chose to sell some of it, they got exorbitant amounts of money out of their loots. With that cash they were also able to buy the best resources out of the resource market. This resulted on excellent crafted items which also could be sold at high prices, since no one else was able to provide such a good product. Only with hard work and good communication can independent crafters and traders deal with the big shots on the market.
Trade goods of secondary interest are houses, furniture, clothes. The history of architects and clothiers is a sad one. Even the best known of their kind, won't stay long in the business. As shops grow fast in the landscape, most of them will vanish soon. In RL, fashion shops dominate the cities main boulevards. This is because there is always new fashion invented and sold with lots of advertisement and there are also saisonal changes. In SWG there is hardly any new fashion since launch even at a real astonishing array of possibilities. There is also a cap of 4000 items you can have in your vendors, and most of all, you need every 30 days to restock your vendors, which is extremly painful. I talked to the devs personally in Leipzig about that issue.
Prices for clothing are extremly cheap in comparison to the production time and only a handful of tailors ever could make a fortune out of their profession. The same counts for architects. There is a vast amount of resources, infrastructure and time needed. The profits are ridiculous. Without decay the galaxy fills rapidly with houses and harvesters. There were promises about architect being important on the battlefield, but that never happened. Worse, there's always new furniture coming as rewards and loots, which is looking even greater as the stuff that can be made by architects. In my opinion, architect is a high risky task, which may utterly deceive your efforts.
Nevertheless, whichever trade goods and services your are going to offer, there is always a chance to have a firm stand on the market. You can specialize, you can focus on stuff that only very few people produce. If this is the case, promote what you're selling. A rl first rank cook once said, that it doesnt help being the best cook in town and nobody knows it. Good publicity is mouth to mouth promotion, but also mass mailing, ad barking in a good frequented city, barking droids, forums etc. may be helpful.
Honestly, besides a mass mail, I didn't do a lot of advertising for my shops. I profited from a very good spot in an extremly fast developing region. It took some time until customers came from other planets too. I opened my shops in July 2004, half a year before the launch of JTL and the vendor search option of the galactic basaar. Mouth to mouth publicity helped my enterprise to grow fast in these early months.
My concept came when it was a "sure thing" to most players that in the galactic basaar was only crap and that it was useless to find anything interesting in it. But basaar prices raised from 3k to 6k in the early 2004 which helped to raise its relevance as platform and I wanted to provide my homecity all stuff its inhabitants would ever need. The city was near dead, but a new mayor came to power and she was quite able. A shuttle was there too and I was given two merchant tents just near it, because the merchant update was due, which meant that only real merchants could use and own tents. I began with about 2 mio credits and goods for about the same amount of worth, which I received from my friends upon telling them that I will go for master merchant. My first investments were foods, meds and bikes. I bought these cheap from the basaar and sold them for a little profit in my shops. One day I found one of the new adhesives for 6k credits which was quite an eye opener for me, as I didn't expect to find it cheap like that. In the next days I found even more extremly underpriced stuff in the basaar and I made a fortune repeating that.
2. Your own shop
Merchants, as already mentioned, can place tents. They have all the options for up to 12 nice looking vendors, very low fees and can sell up to 4k items. Tents are eyecatchers and don't need a big spot where they can be placed. Good shopping locations bring a lot of visitors and people are often interested in other department stores as well. Earlier, the hotspots to place a shop were the suburbs of Coronet and Theed. This was before the vendor search option and more important, before JTL and CURB, which killed buff queueing in Coronet, and enabled easier travelling from one end of the galaxy to the other; today the old galactic capital on our server is quite a dead place.
I assume that every merchant is running a shop, although it isn't necessarily at all. Your own shop is your trademark, visitcard, meeting place and source of income. Most stores are nicely furnitured and represent the owners goods as teasers or his wealth for mere posing.
2.1. Here are a few tips and recommends
a) Keep an eye on easy access to your shop. You should build as near as possible to a shuttleport. Another option is to build near Coronet, Theed, Dant Mining OP or Bestine. The flatter the landscape is around such a city, the better.
Half a year ago, our city lost its shuttle thanks to char deletion of the incumbent mayor. This caused losses of about 90% earnings. The city got the shuttle back within a week, but I strongly recommend leaving when a city looses the shuttleport.
A few nice shops are quite hidden and far away to visit. In my opinion thats a waste. In the long run they will have a hard fight to survive since there are only a few goods that are so hard to get, that a journey to buy them is worth it. You can never know if there isn't someone who may sell the same stuff as you do, but does run his business at a much better place.
b) Fill your vendors. Empty vendors are an outrage to any customer and complete emptyness results in loosing your vendor. You should not deceive the customers since they may have come from far away just to buy in your shop. What can we do that customers will come back for sure? We need to have a interesting palette of fine stuff, that is worth its price.
c) Pricing. What are people going to do if the they see a menu card of a restaurant hanging out and the prices are exaggerating high? They will certainly go for a better place to eat, and for sure, they wont ever come back, even if the price will be lowered later. People remember Shops and Taverns well, where they get the best return for their hard earned money.
Pricing is a quite delicate matter. If you craft yourself its easy to lower the price of your stuff to a certain extent. For Noncrafters it is vital to have a look at prices in the galactic basaar, other shops and in the forums. I need daily advise from a lot of people who do or may know different kinds of facts better than me. My reinvestments in goods are about 80% of my total earnings. Merchants must forsee and guess a lot, they are investors and their money must work for them. We got no interests on our money, so money doesn't work for you like in RL. Any money you will ever earn is coming directly out of your actual sales. Biggest failures in stock markets often occur due to unawareness of wherein the money actually is invested in. Knowledge in SWG will make you rich!
The same goes for your sales. If you are way overpriced your money does not work, its in an item you will probably never sell at a this price. The money you've invested or the time getting it won't be rewarded. Many merchants don't care about betraying their customers. They will tell them lies, or they will sell them stuff that is overpriced but "very rare and useful". The merchant does not have to care about that, since such guy will show up no more and he's got his money, that's all that counts. Since I am planning to get a certain reputation as well I can't afford to do that. I want long term relationsships with my customers, and a good customers always get more customers for you, without being told to do that and without being paid.
An Example: Half a year ago, a good customer of mine wrote a very angry letter, wherein he's complaining about my pricing and that not everyone will do Dant Missions in a row and get rich in doing that. In fact, I had a lot of clothes to sell which I bought for 6k at the basaar and having sell them for 20k. It was really expensive but I didn't care since people made such a fortune on Dantooine. Tailors get far less for their work as fighter do while doing missions, or kill NPC. I ended up lowering my prices nevertheless, but I knew, I would stop selling clothes, these few bucks weren't just worth it.
Nice things cost money. Everything has its price. When I wrote this guide half a year before I'd told the people to be independent of so called "confirmed" prices. I'd tell them, that sometimes you must decide yourself what is the right price for a certain trade good. If one sells his attachement in the forum for 10 mio. it is not sure, that you will as well. Today I am convinced that we merchants too are influencing the average price of an item. Sometimes we even dictate prices. But more on that topic later.
3. Other important aspects
3.1. Ingame exploits
Many exploits by players lead to swellings of certain trade goods. Exploits may also be used by crafters. This stuff is not only a danger to a true crafter life and can have an enormous influence on the game environment. There is always a chance that such criminals get caught and banned. Nevertheless, for you as merchant it is important to know of the very existence of such stuff. If you see very rare stuff in great numbers in a players vendor or in the forum, then it may be possible that he has found an exploit. It may be possible that unknown numbers of this stuff is hidden somewhere, only to be released slowly or right away in large quantities. You may loose your investments if you are careless.
We all know of spawnexploiting in the Geocave. There was such heavy looting in it, that the price for Geo stuff should have been very low in comparison to the numbers looted there. Since only a few guilds were able to exploit it at the time (mostly the first Jedi guilds), huge quantities of good stuff was held back by them and so prices were still high. After CURB, and even before, prices went down fast as it was clear that the stuff was now useless or will soon be useless and I've never seen so many Geocave loots on the market at cheap prices.
The same counts for Alderaan flora, ATST helmet and loudspeakers, which may cost on Gorath up to 500k, although one can get as many of these as she wants in short time.
3.2 Hypes
Mass hypes are good for a few people who can profit from it. The big crowd is unaware about that. It may be holocrons in 2003, crystals in 2004, lootkits, kashyyk loots, all kind of rewards, etc. Stay cool! My rule is: what can always be looted at the same place or -worse- everywhere, has to be treated carefully. Think about the worth of it.
Prominent examples of overpriced items were Adhesives. They were maybe rare in comparison to more common lootkit items, but actually their rarity was quite relative. They could drop like holocrons, crystals and other stuff from many NPC at any time. If thousands of people are killing NPC everyday, drop rates cannot be low. The same counts for other stuff from Corvette, DWB, Geocave, Krayt, DJM, Necrosis loots etc. Often, the effort is lower than one thinks. There's people who get AV-21 powerplants ungrouped, Krayts can be done alone and respawn fairly often ...and so on
Another hype was steel and ore for the shipwrights in the early months of JTL. You could even see that when architects had no more mineral harvesters in stock. I dealt with these resources too, but it was obvious, that there was also another opportunity. I was sure, that many people began for mineral mining, focus on that kind of harvesting alone. I opted for everything besides of mineral and ore and soon stocks in the whole galaxy were full of steel and ore, while the stocks for other resources went rapidly down. I sold my stuff almost as good as steel and ore did, since there was more demand on it than ever before.
If you invested tons of money into slicer components you will find some of this stuff now in large quantities. All people had to do, was waiting for devs to change droprates for it. They knew that it could not be that a single slice would cost up 5 mio. only because the level 2 component was of such a rarity. I bought maybe dozen slicer components for more than million, and ended up finding that stuff for a fifth of that sum after the BH-Love Patch
.What saved me, was a ton of cheap bought slicer components at the basaar which helped me to generate a considerable sum, before the whole thing was killed by the devs.
3.3. Advise from players
If you are an investor, you got to have imagination, or call it investors phantasies. Sometimes you need to listen to your stomach, and not get influenced by others. You need to be ahead of the crowd in SWG. If you count on others and are dependent to pricemaking in forums you are too slow and your profits will be much less than they may possibly be. Ask yourself: Who are they guys that make prices and dictate price in forums and their vendors. You may want to be one of them, you may want to guess the worth of the items you come along correctly, and have a good sense not only for the present prices but also on future price changes.
The price for holocrons wasnt always as low as they are now. There was a time where there were only a few on the market, and good holocron spots where yet to be found. The price for a holocron was 500k -800k per piece. When the Jedi population grew stronger, holocron got rarer each day and I bought a few to resell them for 1 mio. each. There were people who strongly disagreed, even friends of mine. They told me, that they would give them to me for even 400k. But when I ordered a few they disagreed. I bought later a bigger quantity of holocrons, but somehow drops improved and I was lucky to resell them without loss.
When I began my merchant business, I had friends coming everyday telling me this and that was too cheap or too expensive. But I needed money fast, I had maybe 50-100% profits on my sales, but sometimes much less, I had no time to wait. If you have a weapon for 500k for sale, it will be bought in maybe 4 months, but if you sell it for 300k you will have it sold a few hours after putting it in the vendor. Assumed, the weapon did cost 250k, it's only 50k profit instead of 250k profit in 4 months. But these 50k added to the initial 350k may be better than months without money. Moreover, you want to play that game more often than just a few hours per month. Don't forget the fact that at 300k the buyer is happy too and will visit you soon again, since it was a good deal for him too.
I have some long term investments running. One of my concurrents is a specialist on long term investments. Normally I am fine with 20-200% profits, her profits are often 100% but at a much higher scale. She buys stuff from me when it costs 1.5 - 3.0 mio. and sells it for 7.5 mio. Thats a much bigger risk, but she's crafting too, so she doesn't care about reselling it in one or two weeks, it can be four or more months until that stuff gets sold, but the profits are good too. The last rewards day brought a ton of goodies which helped me getting a few mio. each day, just reselling fast and buying every single low priced item I've found. For me it was 2 mio. profit for a single item, for her it may be 4 mio. since she bought in my shop too.
A few weeks ago, smuggler revamp affected the slicing system and introduced new slicer components to the game. The night before the revamp was due, I made one of my "tour de Galaxies" and bought every AUK and WUK crate still available. Prices for slicer components went up like mad, since the advantages especially in pvp were obvious. I ended selling each crate for 500k at the initial cost of 25-50k. Later, drops of rare slice components flooded the markets and prices went down again. As you can see, you need luck, but you need the sense for fast and easy money too.
There are several influences in the price a of an item: usefulness, beauty, rarity, demand, number of items on the market. To guess the usefulness of an item, read forums. Beauty needs no guessing. What pleases your eyes will certainly please others as well, trust me in this. You can also listen to what people say and visit their homes. What you see there is what others want too, trust me in this as well. Beautiful items cost always alot more than other stuff: Blue Rug, Ornate Rug, Imp Banner, Webweaver Blanket etc. etc.
Especially the blue rugs always did sell much better than the orange while almost none was willing to give away his ornate rug, not even me.
The rarity is also a thing to read in forum or specialized sites. Theres a few differences though. Certain items cost maybe 20 mio. a piece, like attachements. But actually such stuff drops everyday, and it will flood the market for sure. Since the cap is at +25 mostly you will reach it soon, theres enough slots in clothes and armor to have you modded twice. And honestly there arent too many different mods that are still useful. If you deal with attachements you need to be cautious.
Everyone wants to be a Jedi. So Jedi mods are "in". Experimentation tapes were never as useless as they are now, the best going is still stuff for shipwrights. This may drastically change if the Jedi would be taken out of the GCW. Melee profs are broken, and what is left are tapes for the ranged fighters.
Then there are rewards for Quest. One per char. Not all of them are hard to complete and the harder it is to get, the rarer it is on the market and thus quite expensive. The rewards for playing time and accounts are a delicate matter. Be careful and observate the market.
The ADK prices rise and fall. In my opinion the game hasn't seen a more useful, while broken item than an ADK. Everyone that sells me his ADK is said that he should not give it away, the same counts for health crystals. But 10-15 mio. credits is always tempting. Of course there's many people come back and get their ADK while others will have theirs in a few months.
Demand is what is important too for a merchant. If there's no demand theres no money and no fuel for your business. But as merchant your task is to make needs for your stuff. Talk about the rarity, the beauty or usefulness of an item. And after all, if you don't sell it today it is still in your vendor and a nicely filled vendor is always handy.
Resumee:
Pricing is a thing of experience, knowledge and information. You need to know the average market prices, the meaning and usefulness of an item and its rarity. If you are sure, that a certain item is overpriced, sell it for a few bucks less than the others, if prices are too low, buy any stuff that is cheap and set the price as you think its fit. As a master merchant YOU are galaxies' price guide! Don't think the market is always right, the market is bunch of stampeding moneybags always running for the newest hypes and often without any idea of what they are doing.
3.4. Shortage of trade goods
The flow of items can be low. It can be as a result of bugs, silent nerfs which can affect the market more than one may think. On our server 3k buffs came quite late, phrik aluminium was hard to get, T21 were rare and expensive in the winter of 2003 and the lack of tolium gas prevented CM a long time becoming strong.
If you see it coming, immediately(!) adjust your prices and make a "tour de galaxie". Sometimes its better to take this stuff from your vendor and wait. People looking for it will find empty vendors everywhere and prices will go up like rockets. Be fast, time is money and what Franklin said is true for SWG too.
Half a year ago almost all AFK POI's were dead, where people could farm attachements. Only NS and DJM were to be camped and people runned on dathomir like it was in Mos eisley. I did hoard tons of attachments before, as long as they were useful, even if they weren't bought fast in the first, at the time the POI's went down, I had lots of them sold, at good prices.
When JTL hit the market, steel and ore prices exploded. SOE decided that their vessels had to be constructed mainly on these two resources, people saved their for money to able to buy starships and the crafter had to pay dearly for their steel and ore. After a few weeks, there was enough of these needed resources at normal prices in the market, since more people than ever went harvesting minerals.
Atm the drops of pearls and crystals better than good quality is bugged. Interesting situation when you got a galaxy full of Jedi.
3.5. Bear Market and Deflation
Money doesn't vapourize or vanish, it's just not flowing. People hold their cash back and are not willing to buy a lot. It happened before JTL came out, before Rotw hit the market and before the CURB was due. Even if a Beta was tested and TC was used, people were very cautious. If that happens, you as merchant will hit the hard ground too. If anything bigger is announced you must save your money too, BEFORE it hits the TC or Beta Status. Not only you as merchant will need money in unsure times, many others will be low on cash too. Time for some good deals, but do not offend the sellers coming to you, they will stay in the game and will forever blame you, if you did press them out like lemons when they needed help!
Do not forget: your aim as a merchant is fullfilling the demands of customer A by getting his desired stuff from seller B and get some profit doing this! If you worked on your reputation before a depression, there will be enough for you to do even in times like this. I also recommend to invest your money broad into several kind of stuff.
My main vendor is a Loot and Rewards Vendor, but I also invest some money into resources, weapons, slicer components, as long as they are "hot", resources, and vendors for other stuff, that I was able to buy for extremly good prices.
This kind of investment will also be important when it comes to the next aspect.
3.6. Disasters
Disasters are often opportunities too. In SWG, a fingersnap from devs can destroy billions of invested money. There can be several ways that this occurs.
a) New and better weapons and items. b) Nerf of certain trade goods c) Nerf by destroying/reimplementation/adjusting of drop spawns
The biggest impact so far came from the expansions and the CURB.
- I invested money in Tie fighter suits before JTL came. I loved them since they looked great but JTL gave every imperial pilot such a suit.
- I sold my ROTJ Endor helmets since I saw a picture of a rebel pilot with this helmet in the booklet, I assumed that the helmet came back as reward, but I was terribly wrong with that assumption.
- Lootkits were as expensive as 5 mio. for complete sets in the early weeks. Then, drops were improved and prices went down rapidly. Today they get more expensive since droprates were put to an end. On the other hand no one ever needs a gong or a nabooian sculpture in his house...
- Before the expansions, no one was willing to buy expensive stuff, but diversification helped me to survive twice.
The CURB hit me hard too, but I wasnt specialized on legendary weapons or Überattachements. All in all, it was in terms of business an impact never seen before in SWG. Most attachements, armor, modified Clothing, weapons, meds etc. were useless or far beyond the strength of aftercurb stuff. The devastation was exceeding any of what I've seen in a game before. Do not forget that Dantooine Missions were nerfed shortly before as well and JTL hit the market too. Inflation was halted like that, but it's inevitable in longer terms. All in all my losses were 30% due to CURB, thats far less than others had, but still enough to be severely harmed by it.
Other disasters come frome my own faults and those of other players. I strongly recommend to be very cautious as merchant and don't trust anyone but yourself.
- My account went down at a time I was unprepared for that. But almost at vendor cap (4k items) it was not hard to shrug that off.
- I began my business in June 2004 but already in the late 2003 I wanted to start a shop in one of the first player cities on Dantooine. I joined the cities' mall only to discover that it did vanish a few months later. I lost almost all of my stuff there. A year later, someone deleted his char and down went another vendor full of expensive stuff.
- I also lost lots of money when I destroyed a few vendors to replace them, but forget to empty the vendor store room before.
- 8 mio. was the cost when I did put an ADK into the vendor for for 1 mio., forgetting a single zero and having bought it for 9 mio.
4. Golden Rules
I do not insist of making rules in this game, these are just rules for myself. You can act as you want to and still be a great merchant.
4.1. No clearance sales and blowouts when in need for money
A few RL investors will tell you that it's better to admit a loss and safe parts your money than falling deeper and loosing it all, or gamble and hope for a turnaround. In SWG and in RL bad liquidity will lead to force you sell stuff at sales prices. Unlinke RL you don't loose your job when having a poor performance with your "portfolio". And you don't need to earn money since life in SWG doesn't cost anything as stated above.
If something's really broken, destroy it and forget about the lost money. Do not make debts. Do missions, or push advertising and publicity. It's normal to adjust prices, but it will you ruin, when you blowout your precious trade goods for cheap.
4.2. Customer Care
Admittingly every big company in the world talks about customer care so much that we don't really need it in our leisure time too. Everyone is caring about a customer as long he actually IS a customer or a possible one. I grew up hearing of customer care all day, so I know what it is. Nevertheless it will help you in SWG too.
The customer is the king as we say here Switzerland and it is my ingame business credo too. You need to fulfill orders as soon as possible and be accurate . You need to be in any situation polite and helpful. Your good reputation is important if you decide to stay longer in that business. Your main customers may also become ingame friends of you and friends are the best thing in any game you play.
How will you deal with close friends and main customers? You need to make good deals with them, which results in less profits. I advise you to make the initial prices high enough so that you still make profits even if you cut prices for friendlies. Sometimes you will be better off to resell something without any profit at all or donate stuff. It's not a good idea to be extremly greedy if theres half a billion of worth in your vendor.
Two weeks before I bought an Advertisement painting for 5k in a mall in northern Naboo. A few moments later, the shop owner came running and asked me to give it to him since he did a mistake. I agreed since it was obviously a mistake. He told me that I get a 20% voucher on other stuff he had, and he was already extremly cheap. So I not only did something for my reputation but also got something else at a good price.
A resource farmer wanted to sell me 100k steel, 100k copper and 100k radioactive resources. I knew that the copper and the radioactive will take longer to sell it, but the steel is highly demanded. I opted nevertheless for buying everything he had, so he knew that I was giving him cash for all. A week before he also wanted to sell me similar stuff, but shortly before the deal sold his steel to someone else. I didn't took the rest from him then. This time he arrived with the steel too and the profits from the steel deal covered the smaller profits from the other investions.
Sellers expect from you to take all they got for reasonable amounts of cash while customers expect price cuts. Both need to come back to you, customer AND seller. Some people are just lazy and think they can get everything for free. Forget them!
4.3. Analyze the games' future
Investing can be ruinous in SWG like in RL too. But SWG is more stable than RL and your impact on the server you play is in every prospect bigger than in RL. If you are informed well you won't get too suprised on what is coming. New quests and dungeons will be tested in TC first. Information is everything. Use forums and travel a lot. Look at the present and forecast the future, then you will be able to master the SWG business quite well.
A concurrent was buying every blue rug in the galaxy she found and set the price at 3.5 mio. instead of 1 mio. She said, that lootkits drops were to be nerfed and that the rug looks great, and it did. Another girl sold her ornate rug for 7.5 mio, which she bought at 4 mio in my shop earlier. For that money one could buy an ADK, but you can't buy a woman's heart with money. You need to get it by giving her what she's desiring and this won't be plain cash. And women love good looking stuff.
I began to write on in the german forum articles on merchant rumours where I post hopefully interesting hindsights on future developments, recent changes and price assumptions. The more you know, the better. Eventually you become well known and people will listen to what you say which is a good advertising of your shop too.
4.4. Focus on your main business
Many corporations were brought down when investing their money in areas where they had no idea what they're actually doing and where they had a hard stand against companies who did focus on their business only. Always continue with what you have begun, it was the very offspring of your career as merchant. No one would ever buy towels and sunglasses from Ferrari when their cars would be crappy. It's always a risk to invest money in goods you don't know well. You also need to find new customers who are willing to buy from you and you must estimate what they are willing to pay. You can opt for expensive stuff, then the risk is even greater but profits may be great.
I still work with the same methods as a year before and my shops are still in the same locations. Stuff is more expensive though since my profits out of small price selling are too low compared to the work. This is mainly because of the 30 day cycles which cause too much work. I don't invest hours in doing that for just 3k profits on an item.
4.5. Do not collect
A merchant is no collector. Most stamps, coins and art dealers own great collections but compared to what they have dealt with, its peanuts. It's really tempting to amass stuff you like and to pose with it, or decorate your houses and malls. But this doesn't generate money. Once in a while, you will be able to buy stuff, other people only dream of, but if you draw too much from your investing capital, your future earnings will be lowered as well.
I have a museum of my own, and I did collect anniversary paintings. Many people did know that, and i paid the best price for it, mostly 1.2 - 1.5 mio. per painting, at a time when they were sold for 800k. I had several complete sets so I decided to sell them in my vendor at the unbelievable price of 2 mio. each. It took quite long time until I sold a few of them, but I loved them and I found that 800k was not an appropriate price. Every player got two random paintings out of nine different in December 2003. It meant that the actual number of a painting per char, was 0.25 and this would stay like that. Many chars left the game, and the number of paintings in the galaxy declined rapidly. Since I owned the largest number of anniversary paintings in my shop and was still acquiring new ones, most sellers adjusted their prices to 2 mio. too. Some lowered them but I still want 2 mio. Actually I even buy new ones if they are too cheap.
The next bigger thing was buying 20 X-Wing and Tie-Fighter Miniatures for the Museum to display the battle of Yavin 4. This was at a time when they did cost 1.5 - 3 mio. each. You see, it was for fun, not even for equiping an existing fighter char, which cost me a 100 mio. too and severely pressed my business for three months.
4.6. Buy in large scale and dominate the markets
If you come across a person who sells at very low prices, don't hesitate to buy the whole lot. If you don't, anyone using vendor search will buy there first. Most people dont trade at all, they just sell what they find. They will reinvest their money into even better equipment the buy from more luckier people and better crafters. But you need to play alot to have full lootvendors with your own loots. Honestly its a good idea to camp eight hours a day high level mobs in hope of finding +25 LS stuff or good experiment tapes. All you need is time and luck. You may end up with 50 mio. after a month but with heavy brain blessures doing that day after day.
Then you got 50 mio. but do not know what you will do with that. The endgame may be PvP'ing and impressing women. As merchant you don't have to work that much, you only need to read a little and know where and when buying low and selling high, this may also spare you in RL of becoming a gamer junkie.
You can't actually control the market. Maybe if the chinese continue exploiting the game, one man may be able to do that, 5 billions will be enough. When I finished the guide in November 2004 I was wondering how much one single person may dominate the markets if ever. In August 2005 I can say that a few people managed to have several monopolies on expensive stuff and that they continue to achieve even better results in the future.
If you want to get monopolies, you must buy all other items off the market. Which can be expensive and is high risky. You must estimate how many items there are and how many there will be generated and if it's possible that devs may implement them in a new way to the game. The best merchants adjust their prices and create a high price market since they're the only ones who are selling certain stuff. So, sometimes you don't need to buy everything in the galaxy, you can share a monopoly and get fine amounts of money like that.
I was looking for Wookie life day paintings. Again, the ratio of paintings per char was 0.20 uncontinued. I bought as many I could get, and ended up in the shop of one of my main concurrents. I bought a few there too, but she had so many I couldn't afford all of them. I set the prices at 3.5 mio. which is a lot, but a matriarch painting is much rarer than a +10 armor experimentation tape, which is actually broken anyways since CURB. Attachements are great but the flood the market is fast. More interesting is stuff which numbers are constant or declining or controllable.
Yesterday I began a bigger operation, and tried to get 6 monopolies at once. I had a ton of money and I was observing the market for a few weeks. It was a quite a risk, but I gave it a try. I ended up with approximately 100 items for more than 30 mio. I could have bought 3 ADK's for that money, but yesteray it was time for some real gambling.
There are always new opportunities to make tons of money, slicing components was a short lived one, or lightsaber components still is, since theres so many Jedi running around. The biggest shop of all, is the galactic basaar. It is the very key of understanding your profession and your "daily" task. Besides of the coolest deals (I've found endor helmets, blue rugs, crate of free resources, rare paintings etc.), vendor search will guide you well, and you can use your 24 sales slots making 480k credits fast, maybe twice a day.
If you drive to shops on different planets, have a look at any vendor you come by. Not everyone has vendor search enabled and you may make a few good buyings. I did my tours long before vendor search and I think I really got the edge doing that extensively - today its easier. Buying aggresively off concurrent's vendors is also an option. This is what I call an unfriendly takeover. Ok, they guy gets your money, but his vendor is ripped from anything useful and you resell it high, so he won't be able to buy anything back. Honestly this happened to me in 2003/04 when I opened my first shop. You will only be able to survive if your price isn't too high and too low too. Crafters need to make 1st class stuff or be cheaper than others. They work hard and mostly don't earn that much money as good fighters do.
5. Resumee
Being merchant can be as satisfying as any other profession in the game. When I began doing this, I never hoped to play in the galaxies' first ligue of shops. I still love that profession and it is compared to any other mmorpg much more accurate to RL trading. Do not forget that this is a game, but the human mind is still the same. I wrote of my successes but I must say that I did many faults too. My stories should give you more practial hindsights of what I'm talking, not what you need to do as well. Maybe I'm wrong in certain points, find out and do better. I often listen to others for better results, so should you. When dealing with sellers and customers, transparency is important. My father did and it worked well for our family. I tell the people the truth and no lies and I am telling them what my profits are. Actually fraud is very common on our server, I see it everyday and it should be punished by CSR's and unaware people should be protected better by the system .
Thank you for reading.
Pelorus'jack aka Sarendra
