Merchant Archive
Thread: Vendor Ideas
I've had some ideas floating in my head about things I'd like for Vendors to have/do and I thought I'd put them up here for general commentary by those of us that use Vendors the most (and heck maybe some good will come of it):
General Vendor Permissions
Vendors should have an expanded range of permissions similar to harvesters, those being 'Stockroom Access', 'Sale Priviledges', and 'Administrator Priviledges' with the last giving another player all the rights of the vendor owner except removal.
Stockroom Access
This would give other players access to the stockroom of your vendor, generally useful if you and another crafter share a shop, and items expire while you're unable to restock the other vendor could resell them or pull stock from the vendor that isn't going to be resold. This should be configurable as 'Resale', 'Retreive' or 'All'.
Sale Priviledges
Exactly as it indicates this would allow another player to offer up items through the vendor for sale to the general public. This would allow a Merchant to set up a vendor for someone else with all the bells and whistles of a Master Merchant without having to go up the skill tree. The trade off? Each person given this access would have a % entered. That percentage would represent the part of the sale price of items that player offered that would be diverted to Vendor Maintenance (and as such would be withdrawable by the merchant that owns the vendor). This would make it practical for a rented vendor to be self-sustaining on sales, and for the merchants to collect $$ for the fruits of their profession.
Vendor Sales
Reserved Items
Reserved Items would be restricted for sale to one character. This would allow vendors to be used for special orders. Perhaps have an entirely different vendor type, a 'Private Orders' vendor which can still only be placed in a public building but on which sales are tagged to a specific individual and only they can buy it.
Stockroom
Right now the stockroom isn't really a stockroom, it's simply a holding bin on the way to recycling. I would change the stockroom/listing process so that if you loaded multiple identical items (judged by serial number & stats) the extra items would be placed in the stockroom and as the items sold they'd be taken out of the stockroom and given to the customer until the 'floor model' was the only one left at which point that one would sell. It would save some of the clutter on those vendors that are well-stocked.
Vendor Metrics
Sales/Views
I keep a lot of these myself, but it would be nice if you could save in a note pad file a list of who bought what and when, and who viewed your vendor.
Global Ads
Please oh please let these reflect the item count on the vendor. This would be a positive change for all players not just Merchants.
Those sound really nice. Master merchant should have their vendors registered on bazaar. Not mixed in with the other items on the bazaar, but a seperate tab to surf through the items on the vendor from the bazaar. It'd be sweet.
Nice ideas, all through the post 
I think that it's a good list of new features, as some is most likely easy to program, and very likely to be granted to us (Especially the one with global ad)... I think all of the ideas af merite, and have nothing to say, other than keep the ideas coming 
My concern with the admin list on the vendor is it effectively takes out the "active" part of merchanting. The merchant can simply place one vendor in each shop, give the respective shopowner admin to the vendor, and watch the money roll in. This seems like a private bazaar terminal.
Don't get me wrong - as a crafter who has no merchanting skills on my main, I would love this feature. But I think it may gimp the class insteadof giving it a boost.
NJ62 wrote:
My concern with the admin list on the vendor is it effectively takes out the "active" part of merchanting. The merchant can simply place one vendor in each shop, give the respective shopowner admin to the vendor, and watch the money roll in. This seems like a private bazaar terminal.
Don't get me wrong - as a crafter who has no merchanting skills on my main, I would love this feature. But I think it may gimp the class insteadof giving it a boost.
I think it increases our ability to explore our nuche which is marketing. The advertising of the vendor, the increasing the visibility of it etc would all be up to the merchant, the crafting partner would be doing the stocking.
Unfortunately I don't see any of these changes ever happening so.... *shrugs*