Merchant Archive

Merchants. The only business profession with no real business tools.

That is what you might say if you were asked to sum up the merchant profession in one phrase. At the moment, we are torn between being a master of the profession, or scraping by with what skill points we can muster. This of course leads us to ask “what exactly do we get when mastering merchant?”.

Of course, this can be answered in many ways, with the abilities to customise our vendors to a large degree, the ability to place merchant tents, and reductions in rent prices across the board. We can even change our house sign.

But none of this matters, when the basic elements of running a business, and managing employees are missing.

Here is a list of features I believe will make this profession more worthwhile to master, and give us all new meaning in the Star Wars universe.

Records and logs

Currently, there is no easy way of recording your sales, your stock, or even knowing what you can sell at any time in the galaxy. Emails can now be saved, but this means filtering out emails not regarding sales, and the saved data must still be parsed to be useful.



My suggestion is that we are given a new screen, accessible from any vendor, or a new Datapad tab listing the vital statistics of our businesses. This includes money going in, money coming out, and products we have sold to every customer, with a log in a readable form.



The facility to export to a .csv would make this even easier, giving us the ability to create our own charts in other programs.



We should also have a Datapad item showing the current stock of all our vendors. Too often am I asked which resources I have available, and with the current variety of resources in the Galaxy, it is next to impossible to remember them all.




• PAYE mechanism
  
  Apart from those who run their own business, without any outside help, every manager knows that their staff must be paid. There is currently no mechanism that allows this, apart from expensively /tipping your staff, and loosing out in the process. This is also totally manual, and it is easy to forget the odd payment, unless you record every detail yourself.
  
  
  
  
• Subjective sales
  
  Vendors currently work on a very simple principle. If it’s in stock, then anyone can come along and purchase it, regardless of faction, race or name. I would like the ability to deny sales to characters matching certain parameters. And only allow sales to characters matching others. For example:
  
  
  
  
  
  • 10k Carbonate Ore
    
    Sell to: Name=”Dalif”, Expires=”5 Days”
    
    
    
  
  
  
  
  
  
  • 1k Copper
    
    Deny to: Faction=”imperial”
    
    
    
  
  
  
  
  
  
  • 1k Steel
    
    Reduction to: Faction=”rebel”, Amount=”10%”
    
    Reduction to: CustomerPurchases=”10 or more”, Amount=”15%”
    
    Increase to: Faction=”rebel”, Guild=”Someguild”, Amount=”20%”
    
    
    
    This would give us more power to run the kind of business we want, and lessen the “cookie cut” feel we are currently experiencing.
    
    
    
    We could create vendors that are purely for special orders, only sell to members of our own faction, and even give reductions to repeat customers.
    
    
  
  
  
  
• Sturdier stockroom
  
  The stockroom is currently somewhere you would never dare keep an item. This is ludicrous, as the very nature of a stockroom is purely for long or short term storage of stock. There should be no time out, and a vendor should not be destroyable if there are items in the stockroom. There should not even be the option to do so.
  
  
  
  Items in the stockroom should also remember their sale price and description. I’m not sure if it is currently doing this on recent vendors, but tests have shown to the contrary.
  
  


• Multiple vendor administrators
  
  More than one person should be able to administrate a vendor. Not every business is run completely by one person. This of course should be subjective to the merchant skill of each user, and only those with the proper vendor abilities should be able to administrate someone else’s vendor.
  
  
  
  
• Customer address book
  
  There is no way of separating friends from customers. Of course these could be the same people, but you know what I mean
  
  
  
  
• Business bank account
  
  Currently, money a business earns is stored on the player’s bank account. This is fine, but when money is coming from more than one source, and the player would like to separate business money from their own money, there is no mechanism that allows this.
  
  
  
  I propose the ability to open two bank accounts at novice merchant level, allowing money earned on vendors/bazaars to be transferred here. This could be a checkable option at the point of sale.
  
  
  
  Money can also be sent automatically to employees of the business from this account (See: PAYE Mechanism).
  
  
  
  
• Merchant style furniture
  
  There are many different types of merchant furniture, including cash desks, dotted around planets. Why these are not creatable by players is a mystery.
  
  
  
  
• Extra lots
  
  A lot of discussion has been made about this feature (no pun intended), yet we are no nearer to any sort of solution.
  
  
  
  The truth of the matter is that merchants and artisans, by definition, tend to use far more lots than combat style players. We are currently resorting to “renting” lots from other players who do not need their own lots. This is a mechanic I would like to see properly implemented, but the fact of the matter is, we would prefer to use our own lots.
  
  
  
  My proposition is that for each level of management, we obtain one more lot, which would give a master merchant 14 lots instead of 10. This is still not enough, but a step in the right direction.
  
  
  
  
• In game lot renting
  
  Even with a possible 14 (or 10 currently) lots, player still need more. This is due to competition for, and demand for many items, and the structures required to collect resources for, and create these items.
  
  
  
  Lots could be actually rented out to other people, for an automatically paid (agreed and set at purchase) fee per hour. This would allow merchants to obtain a lot, and increase their allowance, decreasing the allowance of the player renting his or her lot.
  
  
  
  This would give the merchant 1 extra lot, and can control it as if it was his or her own. Rent cost on lots should be completely optional, and up to the player renting the lot to decide if he/she wishes to charge.
  

This is all I have currently been able to think of, and of course is open to suggestion and criticism.

We are all in the same boat here, and currently I feel disabled as a merchant, without the basic tools for business. I hope you agree.

Great Post.

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Lasalas wrote:

Records and logs
Currently, there is no easy way of recording your sales, your stock, or even knowing what you can sell at any time in the galaxy. Emails can now be saved, but this means filtering out emails not regarding sales, and the saved data must still be parsed to be useful.



• Customer address book
  There is no way of separating friends from customers. Of course these could be the same people, but you know what I mean

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You can export your mail, so someone will soon create a tool for use to do much of his outside the game.

I have created groups in my friend list to trachk customers and use the comment field also.

Great post,

I would add that Master Merchants should have ability to place vendors in the permanant towns, let us have more vendors and other similar master advantages.

From what I've seen there are not many master merchants.

Its a great idea...I am going to start working on a tool to go through my export email...

anyone have suggestions on what you want to see??

5-star post!

/mailsave will save all of your mail into a text file.

Try out the new /notepad tool too!

Draz, I had been saving all of my customer names into the friends list with a 'customer' comment. But after my friends list grew over 300 names the lag made it unusable. I've just abandoned trying to save the name of all my customers now

We really need to be able to pay maintenance remotely for structures and vendors. (But automatic deductions from our bank accounts would be even better.)

We need to get back the ability for structure admins to rename structure.

We really do need some type of remote vendor management...like a droid we can call and see inventory in our vendors accross the galaxy.

Thanks for all the comments.

I agree, the notepad has proved indispensable for things like a price and stock list, but as we all know, it is hard to maintain unless our stock hardly ever changes. While as a price, it is hardly an equal to a real list, with the ability to say drop a sample of the good inside it for later reference. Something like that could be very powerful.

Would it be asking too much to have a developer skim this over?

Draznar, do you have a wish list you'd like to add any of these to?

Laslas,

Good stuff. Can you cross post this to the Top 5 discussion? Or just a response in there with a link to this post?

I like a lot of these ideas, but had some thoughts on one or two.

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Lasalas wrote:

• Customer address book
  There is no way of separating friends from customers. Of course these could be the same people, but you know what I mean
  
• We can do this, sort of. The use of groups in the friends tab is essential to this. The main problem however is that if you log into another character from your account the groups get wiped.If they would make the friends list persistent for each character, it would address this issue.
  
  
• Business bank account
  Currently, money a business earns is stored on the player’s bank account. This is fine, but when money is coming from more than one source, and the player would like to separate business money from their own money, there is no mechanism that allows this.
  
  I propose the ability to open two bank accounts at novice merchant level, allowing money earned on vendors/bazaars to be transferred here. This could be a checkable option at the point of sale.
  
• The other way to do this would be to have vendor sales go into house maintenance, and make it possible to withdraw house maintenenace like you can withdraw vendor maintenance. That was each shop's money would be distinct:
  
• The added benefit for SOE is more of a time-sinkfor merchants. The downside is that malls would become a real bear to manage.
  
  
  

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Lasalas wrote:
Draznar, do you have a wish list you'd like to add any of these to?

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Leave me out of this. I am to busy moving to a new mall. then I find out I my only be able to have 150 items on each vendor... I really do not want to use 4 vendors to sell power-ups...

Great post.

My friend and I have created a tool that I am now using that parses my emails, allowing me to create targeted customer lists based on types and amounts of purchases that I can cut-and-paste directly into the in-game email command list. I can also use it to look at past sales and purchases, read old emails, create lists of suppliers, and give me aggregated totals for purchases by customer, by product, and amount.

This tool, which is written in java, will be available to the merchant community over the coming month. It will require a small paypal payment for the full version, but I am pushing to make sure a very tasty demo is available soon.

Oh..did I mention it writes the data into a neat database that can be exported to just about anywhere, allowing deep technical analysis of your business along with nifty graphs and charts?

I will post more about this program over the coming weeks, feel free to message me if you want more details.