Merchant Archive
Thread: The aim of being a merchant ?
Can I ask everyone.. What is their personal aim of becoming a merchant (and presumably a master merchant)
Is it the persuit of wealth ?? - if so what the heck are you going to spend 10,000,000 credits on???
Is it the FUN ?? of providing the service to others ?? (click, click, click, click, click - I love being a merchant buit hate the vendor interface...)
Is it just to serve your personal community / PA (This is my current motivation - all my profits go to my PA)
I want to hear why YOU are striving to be a merchant...
Weath, power, influence. 
Actually I just like doing it for the enjoyment. I find it interesting to be the guy that sells the steel to the Weaponsmith, who makes a shiny new sword out of it and sells that sword to some player who is very pleased and goes off to fight with it.
Plus it seems interesting to be able to go hopping from planet to planet to see what you can pick-up cheap here and sell for profit there. Its a shame we don't get better rates on interplanetary travel though.
Also at some point I hear we will be able to buy our own spaceships, so I need some way to pay for that. 
Vredek wrote:Plus it seems interesting to be able to go hopping from planet to planet to see what you can pick-up cheap here and sell for profit there. Its a shame we don't get better rates on interplanetary travel though.
You know, that is a pretty good idea. How about we throw out the bazaar discount we get on Efficiency I and III and replace them with a travel discount.
As to the orginal question, my goal from day 1 was to create a city and merchant seemed the best way to do that.
With my first store I created a supply chain
scouts/miner-->store-->crafters-->store-->scouts/combat.
This had the net effect of building a community of people who started to depend upon each other.
I then used my second store to create a trade route to the city site as well as increase the traffic flow to that site.
When I announced the city, I had a large group interested and it gave the city a good kick-start.
After just one week, the city has almost 70 houses and is certainly the largest player city on Chilastra (if not all galaxies, I haven't checked though) and is much larger than most other cities in the game.
I think my goal is to earn enough credits to not worry about where my next credit is going to come from and to be able to travel and enjoy my experience without fretting over the costs.
At the same time I love making a good deal. I love finding stuff for people who don't know how to go about tracking it down for themselves. And I love working on business deals that involve swapping factories and amounts that are well above what I am able to do in my RL life where I worry about my bank balance at the end of the month
Hey, plus someone has to SELL those mounts, speeders and SPACESHIPS
But I'm not sure I'm especially interested in the entire profession per se. I might very well just go with the Efficiency and Advertising trees alone, unless there's a great incentive for me to pursue the other trees and/or for the hell of it, just because I've got skill points open and Merchant XP rolling in.
As a Master Artisan it's easy enough to pick up; it's basically a free set of class abilities.
Reduced costs on bazaar and maintenance prices are aa boon.
The ability to tend a shop while out of the house, have someone else sell for me, is always a bonus.
In addition, in the Star Wars galaxy it's perfectly legal for me to own a vending machine that sells beer, bringing us one step closer to Asia without the SARS.
/shrug, -Pogo
MY first reason money - I am the treasurer of my PA and I need lots of cash - The PA members gave me some sweet deals and my venders pull down some cash for me.
Second reason is someone beat me to WS novice and flooded the marked with cheap weapons - no cash and harvestors dont work
Third - I want to own a cantina - I now hold fight nights on Saturdays at 9PM
Fourth - I can now grind without missions - some how not having to worry about where my next cr is coming from allows me to relax and enjoy the game
Lowar Zek
Shrub Pub Owner (BRIA)
It is amazing the me the number of people who say "I don't want to be a merchant, I have to be to sell my stuff" and the number of people saying "I am a merchant but I have trouble getting stuff to sell" yet neither side is making much progress getting together.
Crafters do NOT have to be merchants to sell there items, In fact being a merchant and selling your items in your own shop is not even the best way to do it because you spend too much time on the upkeep of the business and not generating items for sale, plus a single prodcut line store gets far less traffic than a multi product line store any day.
Find someone who is running a multi-line storefront and come to an agreement with them that makes you money, makes them money and gets your product out to as many people as possible. It makes sense for both parties and it is good for the player economy.
Hear hear Chataka! The pure merchants want to sell for you so you don't have to stop crafting. Look us up sometime. 8)
I don't know why I enjoy being a merchant, I just do. Maybe its the fact I can run a business virtually stress free, because if I don't sell anything, I can run out and grind some missions to cover my operating costs.
I still find serious bugs and problems with the proffesion though. I have items in a phantom vendor that I don't know if I will ever be able to retreive or at least delete. I keep retruning them to sale (on the non-existant vendor) so they dont clog up my available items folder.
With add barking my vednors like to turn to the wall of my house which to me is aestetically unpleasing. I had a rash of people buying items and not being able to retreive them. I replaced them like the thoughtful merchant I am out of my own pocket. I often have problem retreiving items from my local vendor if I take them off sale. Usually returning them to sale and takign them off once again will clear the problem, but not always. It would be nice if we could transfer items from a planet market to the closest local bazaar market. Let it take a week and cost 20 credits per item (as thoughit was sold throughbazaar). But there needs to be some way for people to recover items from a deleted or bugged vendor.
My first merchant (actually gotten in business 3, but still in use as a merchant) ate up a bundle of maintenance cashbefore I realized the cost of operating him had skyrocketed to 37 because I put a house for sale in it - close to 1800 per day. That's more than a medium harvester costs to maintain. I could post 90 things in the bazaar for that price. I put one small harvester for sale for 999 credits, and his cost went to 12, or about 600 per day. Those costs are way too high to be able to turn a decent profit. If harvesters sold for 5k and houses for 40K maybe, but the market is flooded with harvesters for as low as 500. I usually buy them in hopes of reselling, but so many grind those out to advance its hard to make enough missons to keep those cheap harvesters off the market. Vendor maintence needs to be scalled son 10 fold. One house posted for 10Kshould bump your maintenance costs to 4 (200 per day) not 37.
I tried to use premium sales in the bazaar. Each time it took 100 credits from me, to tell me I could not post for that price. Finally when I posted for under 3K credits, it accepted - and billed me 100 credits (the whole ordeal cost me about 500). I was under the impression premium sales would let you sell for a higher price in the bazzar... What IS premium sales suppsoed to do?
The "vendor list" on houses does nothing. Not sure how it is supposed to work, but I beleive it is supposed to let someone place a vendor in your house. The game will not let you place a vendor in another person's house - period. You can have admin and vendor privilages, but it just does not work. Someone else thought it might give you access to another persons vendors. It does not do that either. I've heard of some people who managed to get one into another person's house, but I have had no luck.
When checking your own vendor you have the option to see just the individual vendor, all vendors for the planet, or all for the galaxy. But your patrons cannot do this. Whats the point of being a Merchant with numerous vendors if you can't allow your patrons to see all your wares. even in the same building they have to go to the specific vendor to see what goods are available. Makes a merchant far less functaional than a bazaar. I woudl really like to see merchants be able to form an alliance and allow patron to peruse not only goods from my vendors, but from all thevendors of my merchant organization.
And I have heard nothing from the Dev team about adressing Merchant problems. Thus I am a msot distressed Merchant at the moment.
For me, it fits what I want to do. I love weaponsmithing and I LOVE running a business in this game. Without merchant, I wouldn't have stuck with it this long due to boredom. I am not the type that likes standing in front of a crafting station idly and just grind. I sell, I talk to customers and enjoy interacting with them. The skills I obtain from merchant allow me to optimize my current business and make item selection easier for my customers through the use of categorized vendors. I am quite enjoying it right now.
I aim to please.
I thought that taking the most poorly designed profession that also has the least features actually implemented yet and starting on the most out of the way and most sparsely inhabited city would be challenging and later rewarding.
Surviving without Fedex missions is the real challenge right now.