Merchant Archive

I think this might have been considered before but it would be really handy (not to mention profittable) for merchants to have the ability to rent out vendors to people who cannot own it themselves, I've tried this myself with someone but frankly it's stupid needing the merchant to have to refill the vendor and pay the maintaince costs. What they need is the ability to rent the vendor to someone, who can then fill and pay for it themselves, plus also set an additional maintaince fee which goes directly into the merchants bank account. Thus for as long as the vendor is paid the merchant gets cash, reguardless of sales or not.

On the whole the concept of renting out advertising services might be handy as well, suppling people shops with signs, planetary advertising ect..

Tal-N,

I know you've said that you've tried this before, but if you're willing to give it a shot I'd love to stock your stims and BE supplies at Ri-KEA or Bleedoh's Bait & Tackle.

I have a cafe at Ri-KEA, but would like to create a one-stop-shop for pet supplies (crates of artisan food, stims and possibly pets) at the Bait Shop.

If you're interested send a tell to Joeb or Bom or I'll try to contact you.

Thanks,

--Joeb |Ri|
Master Merchant / Master Architect / (almost) Master Chef
Bom Globo |Ri|
Professional Harvester Cash Sink / CH & Ranger Combo #36,284

Tal-N I agree that would be the greatest thing to hit the Merchant tree. Along with helping out anyone that is having issues selling there products because of lack of points. Escpecially you being a BE not having to dive into the Artisan tree requiring you 26 points for biz III, which still sucks.

Once again thanks for the edit button. Make that 24 points.

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If you want to sell your goods, and you are not an artisian, them team up with a merchant. That is the dynamics that are built into this class.

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That is exactly what I'm proposing, teaming up with a merchant. I never said that giving everyone a vendor is a good idea, infact it's terrible if anyone could own their own vendor. That why I'm saying merchants should be able to easily and effectively rent their vendors out to people, I mean you guys can have around 7 vendors running at the same time and I don't think you ever need all of them at once. Most people only ever have 3 running at once.

I've been doing this for a week now, and here is the constant struggle:

I go into my tailor shop with a merchant vendor in it that isn't mine. A customer comes in and wants to try on some clothes that are in the vendor.... ooops, what do I do now? buy them and sell them back? pffft, not a good answer.

Then a customer comes into the shop and buys out my pet stimpac supply and more customers are lined up at the door. What do I do? the merchant isn't on, or is not close by... basically, I'm hosed until the merchant shows up. No way to refill the vendor in a timely fashion.

Now let's say before I go to bed at night I'd like to stock up for the next day. I offer items to the vendor... 25 limit?? oh crap, I sell many moreitems than that in a day. Also it means I can put nothing at all in the bazar until the merchant "buys" the items from the vendor. doh!

And or course the worst scenario of them all, god forbid the merchant actually takes a day or two off from SWG, basically, your business grinds to a halt during that time. Not good, not good at all.

This is the kind of stuff you constantly have to go through when working with a merchant. I agree with Tal, even if you are working closely with a merchant, even if the merchant is excellent, plays all the time, and largely takes responsibility for hawking your wares, there is just something incredibly clunky about the seller/supplier relationship when doing it through a vendor.

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marqie wrote:

I personal do not like this idea. Merchants should run vendors, if you want one, became a merchant. If you want to sell your goods, and you are not an artisian, them team up with a merchant. That is the dynamics that are built into this class.

I could see some improvments made to assist merchants with thier suppliers, but admin control over a vendor, I don't like it. Sorry.

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I agree. I'm going up to master merchant to supply merchants to my PA. They in turn are going up other artisan paths. As it is now, they have to leave stuff for me, send me a mail on pricing. I then have to go in and list everything. THEN once the stuff DOES sell, I have to deal with THOSE mails, then disburse the cash.

I COULD act as a reseller, but I don't have the up front capital to do that, so this is the way it has to be. It's inconvient for both my suppliers and myself, and more than that, it wastes a ton of time.

yes that is an excellent idea and what i have also said before we need an optiont to sell items only to specific players like offers back to the seller we need offers to players so when we fill special orders liek i do 90% of the time we can only list those items for that specific buyer so we dotn have the problem of other players buying our special order items

I personal do not like this idea. Merchants should run vendors, if you want one, became a merchant. If you want to sell your goods, and you are not an artisian, them team up with a merchant. That is the dynamics that are built into this class.

I could see some improvments made to assist merchants with thier suppliers, but admin control over a vendor, I don't like it. Sorry.

ArthurDentOnBria, exactly! Its a pain in the butt. If they kept there current skills and could rent us out a vendor or something that would fix all the madness. It would also increase the interest in Merchant because you could make residual cash from skills that you have earned and there is no upkeep. Perfect for anyone in a PA.

That's another good point about using vendors as a collection point, I know an architect who does this alot and asks you to only take the item which you ordered. However the fact is that anyone can come in and take people orders if they wanted to, what they need is a secure trading option where either someone has to enter a password to get to their item or you have an option for the item to ONLY appear to a certain player when they trigger the vendor menu.

This is amazing...I was planning on posting a message very similair to this.

I'd just like vendors to have an admin list similair to how factories, harvester and homes all work. Maybe split it instead of admin/hopper list have admin/posting. Admin would give full control except for removing the vendor(like harvesters) and the posting list would allow the person to post or remove their own items from the vendor as well as allow them to deposit maintenance fees(no withdrawing).

Here's a question I have. What was the reasoning behind making vendors so hard to use? Why did they make it so you have to destroy the vendor if you want to a) move it or; b) rename it? I don't understand the reasoning behind that.

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Here's a question I have. What was the reasoning behind making vendors so hard to use? Why did they make it so you have to destroy the vendor if you want to a) move it or; b) rename it? I don't understand the reasoning behind that.

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My guess is that it's all down to poor programming, given at how clunky and unwieldy the vendors are I wouldn't be surprized if they're a hack of the bazaar programming so it just bearly works but it's hanging on by a thread. What they need to do in my opinion is utterly seperate the vendor and bazaar programming but allow them to communicate with each other still, that way it'd be alot easier to modify them seperately. The drawback is that it increases the size of the database since they won't be sharing resources anymore.

Or at least this is what I assume the issue is, if they are indeed utterly seperate chunk of code then the person who designed the vendors needs a slap. Then again given at the general state of things which are supposed to help us (got to love that email and chat system eh?) I wouldn't be surprized if the issues are more related to poor planning and rushed development, even so someone still needs a slap.