Merchant Archive

Im a DE (lowly level) and a soon to be architect.

I want a small house with a vendor in it.

Obviously I will need to make my house public.

In doing this, do I enable other players to just pick up my furniture in my house and wander off with it ?

Or are people limited to entering, being amazed at the lovely furniture and patroling robots and immediatly start buying things !

And what other tips would you pass on to a naive young merchant like myself.

Regards,

Bob'the Builder

My tip is to forget about selling youself, and sell through a well established full time merchant..

Why do YOU want the headache of Vendor maintenance sapping all your profit.

Why do YOU want the headache of having to sepnd hours advertising your store to even get 1 person there.

Why do YOU want the headache of competing with other merchants who have their droid stores listed on the planetary map.

Why do YOU want the headache of loosing customers forever when they come to your shop and find it empty ?

Why do YOU want the headache of re-stocking your vendors all the time.

Surely just off-loading your droids in bulk to a merchant at 80% of retail is more apealing ?.. Will give you time to continue crafting, finding resources, and hunting / exploring / havng fun.

To answer your question, only the house owner can place / pick-up items, so your furniture is perfectly safe.

If you DO want to be a sucsessful merchant - you will need to get to advertising 3 (planetary map listing) as a minimum, and probably Efficiency 2 as well to reduce the loss you take from vendor maintenance. - I would suggest selling through a merchant and just keep your vendor under lock and key (earning MXP) until you are in a position to launch properly..

You don't need to sell through a merchant unless you're a weapon smith who gets thousands of tells an hour.

Sure, it can be usefull if you want to expand and you don't have enough lots or vendors, but the way it is set up now it's cheaper to just cut the middle man and sell it yourself.

And only people with administration rights can pick stuff up out of a house. Maybe not even them with bugs. Your furniture is safe if you make the house public.

---

ajm317 wrote:
And Ad III isn't that big a deal. I've never used the map to find a vendor, and I'm not the only one. There are more effective methods of advertising.

---

Like what - barking your own adverts in town - Kinda difficult when your at work.. - Unless your an AFK barker of course, in which case you run the risk of geting banned.

More and more people are using the map (at least on Eclipse) as they are tired of the mom and pop stores constantly being poorley stocked - (or god forbid empty!!). The plain truth is that IN GENERAL non-crafting merchants who run stores keep them better stocked than individual crafters can ever hope to.

I have 3-4 suppliers for all of my vendors in my store - and were talking Weapons, Resources, Armour, Clothes, Structures, Furniture, Droids, Food, YOU NAME IT, and generally they are all very well stocked 90% of the time (last night I logged of with over 1,000,000 worth of stock for sale..)

More and more people will start to use the planetary map to find stores, especially those that have many different vendors. I have 5 vendors listed on the map, and when my Merchant partner comes in with me, we will be listed under every single categry on the map.

The one-stop shop is coming !!!!

Building a business takes a while. I think droids are probably one of the harder items to move through a vendor. They're more a special order item. They are also pretty expensive and will cost a lot of upkeep ona business 3 vendor. (And there's no guarantee that the current low price on NPC vendors is going to stay that way.)

Furniture on the other hand is a huge seller and goes great on a merchant. Plants and torches are huge, my friend Vexlorwho's a master architectjokes about becoming a florist. Furniture also has a lot of options that are cheap enough to start selling on the bazaar, which will in turn have people looking to you for more business. You can always leave larger installations on your vendors, but I don't think they will sell all that well. Mostly if someone's looking for a 50k factory, they'll send you a tell.

Oh, if you're setting up a small building as a shop the generic type 2 is a very good option. You walk into an open room, no hallway. Generics seem to be better lighted as well. Unfortunately, that house is halfway up the building tree along with the mediums, so even if you're an architect, you'll need to buy it. If my memory serves me the Tatooine smalls have a similar layout if you happen to live there. I think having a good layout is abig plus too. The otherthing is a good location. You want something close to town and relatively safe, preferably with a lot of traffic.Ifthose areas are clogged up, don't give up and build in the wilderness -- check in the early mornings (things where rentran out overnight and poofed) and after resource shifts (people pull up harvestors). Last night my little area near Theed had no space for a small harvestor.This morningthere's room for four or five small or mediumhouses and one spot I think might take a PA hall.

Start a business 3 box as soon as possible, but it's expensive and you'll want to lose it asap. My advice would be to shoot for novice merchant, that will give you two NPC vendors. You can use one for furniture. The other I would probably build a few cheap droids with basic functions that are easily described and use it as a springboard to special orders. After novice if you have the points, I'd look into advertising 3. The rest of the skills aren't really very useful sadly.

For resellers, I think furniture would be a good option to sell wholesale to someone if you don't run a shop. Droids, I think people are going to want to talk about the options. I spent a long time talking with my droid vendor before deciding on a droid in particular. But then I'm not really bullish on vendor sales of droids either. I think most of your traffic is going to be in tells.

The other possibility that hasn't been mentioned is that as of today, provided it made the transition from test to live servers, you'll be able to put a vendor in someone elses house. I would guess that vendor malls will be opening quite soon where you'll be able to place a vendor in someone elses house that has one of everything.

Good luck!

FInd a merchant, one that does it as a job, not a hobby.

One advantage is that they sell all sorts of things, not just one type of item. If a client comes in for a "wigit" and in the same shop, sees another vendor that sells "wogots", there is a chance it will sell, because they are there, and they did not even know they needed a "Wogot"

I sell more dusters than I can keep stocked, and I do not sell clothes, I sell powerups and food. but they see it and say, hey, I want one, done.

Over specialized shops (one vendor or onetype)will, and are becoming more and more of a pain. The lack of rapid movment makes shopping a pian in the butt if you have to run all over the place for stuff.

You can do it. I would recommend that you sell others things until your droids are really great. Sell extra resources, pick up loot off humanoid mobs. Put the occasional item on the bazaar in your local town. Sell it more than you would at your store and don't sell as much (if resource) as you do in your shop. There is a note feature you can add to items you are selling. Put a little blurb about where your store is and the items you sell.

I'm a weaponsmith too and my store works great. I always make sure it's stocked and have been finding other elite crafters who wish to excahnge goods so that we each can have more varied stuff in our shops. Important thing is though to make sure you keep your store stocked.

And I haven't got my ballot box yet but if it does what i think you can make a survey to see what people who come to your shop most want.

Look, if you asked me what I was, I'd say a merchant.

But the people here are not an unbiased opinion.

Don't bother to try to sell your stuff through a merchant unless you find that the time is really pressuring you.

First of all, at lower levels you'll be hard pressed to find a merchant who'll want to distribute mouse droids.

At higher levels, well droids are not an impulse buy, so I doubt you'll see much effect from people coming in to buy something else.

As for Ad III, I still maintain it's not that useful, and there are other ways to sell besides yelling in town square. Forums, descriptions in the bazaar and of course placing your shop in a high traffic area are examples. I got Ad III and registered my vendor and I have not seen a noticeable increase in sales (I'm not the only one either.)

Another note to keep from being flamed...

I'm sure the pure merchants here have successful shops that do lots of business.

I'm also not saying that I feel the middle man should be cut out.

What I am saying is that the way the game is set up now you can cut him out, and it is reasonably easy to do so.

1) Without good advertising, word of mouth and planetary map vendor listing no one is going to find you. A house, is a house, is a house. Even in high-traffic areas people rarely run into other peoples houses. I usually only go in the real big ones just to see what they look like inside. No one goes in a small Tatooine house just to explore. We need to be able to distinguish houses that have vendors from those that don't.

Not true. My vendor sold fine when all I had was business III.

You don't need in game advertising, and most of my customers just wandered in the store while walking by.

Maybe you need a better sign.

Also, I was the +30 +15 guy.

Might have had something to do with it I admit.