Merchant Archive

I am a merchant, I am also a tailor. I have made dozens and dozens of suggestions that would improve merchant for everyone playing. That's what we should be doing; not dividing each other up and attacking the people who are "impure."

That's just my 2p.

Work to make merchant better, don't work to nerf someone else.

I'm a smuggler who is also working towards merchant. I sell spice and smuggler supplies on my vendor and I sell spice on the bazaar as well. I sent myself a thank you note that I forward to everyone I make a sale with and include my waypoint. This increased my traffic in my shop quite dramatically, and I get a lot of repeat sales. Follow up with your customer and you'll get more business.

I think the Merchant profession would be great as soon as everything works.

I'm not as concerned about keeping customers or just plain common sense as I am about attracting new customers. I do practice what you said because it does help attract business but it has nothing whatsoever to do with the Merchant profession, it is just plain good business sense.

My big concern is trying to bring meaning to the Merchant profession beyond having multiple vendors. There must be more to the profession.

This is my opinion, so take it for what it is.

If you are a serious crafter/merchant you probably have invested in a cool store with some neat props...perhaps a showroom if you are a armor crafter or weaponsmith or tailor. And you probably have gotten to the point where you have a NPC vendor who barks ads for you and looks personable. That is what I got merchant for at least. I'm a tailor, my highest selling item is 8k, I do pretty good high volume buisness

Then there is my sister, who has her shop across the way from me. She's a chef....her top selling item is 500 credits. She has a little table and cafe set up in her small house and a big clunky vending machine she got with buisness 3. This is perfectly acceptable.

I see no reason to punish smaller crafters by taking away a very basic vendor option from them--especially since I cannot drop my vendor in her house, let her load it up and use it, and let her get the profit from it. When they make that possible, then I will concur that vendors should only be for merchants. Until then, this is really the way it has to be.

I can tell you right now the Business Vendor costs alot more to run than the merchant ones. Unless Im missing something. But at one point it was costing me 200 cr per hr to run my Business 4 vendor. The merchant ones are much more reasonable.

I agree with Ashrid and Numtini, nerfing the already uninspiring busniess tree is the wrong answer. I don't know what the right one would be, but nerfs are already killing the game.

And Marqie, you may not have called Numtini a name, but you were dismissive of a legitimate poster, and that is insulting. The only 'pissing match' style message I have seen here is yours.

Marquis is dismissive, disrespectful of others, and a general pain in the arse.

I'll be overjoyed when s/he is replaced with a decent correspondent.

Oh, and Markie, before you get your panties all riled up...

Yes, i'm a Master Tailor.

I'm also a Master Merchant.

Screwing Artisans isn't going to help us.

Ok, here are some things (they may have been said before) that merchants really need to make the class worthwhile:

1) We need the ability to set up pricing schemes for different people. I want the ability to give a 50% discount to anybody in my guild, or a 10% discount to faction members. At the same time, I would like to give another discount to friends I've made in the game. All of these should be listed under the Management skill tree. Management encompasses a lot more than just adding vendors. That way, instead of just getting a new vendor to place, you can get another function that helps the profession.

2) Advertising is pretty useless except for the planetary map feature. Granted 1 and 2 do help if you have multiple vendors in the same spot, but you can easily get around that by just naming the vendor properly. I don't have a lot of ideas to help out this line, but maybe it could be tied into the email system. I would love it if my customers could send an email to my vendor and get a listing of everything that is on hand. There might need to be syntax requirements so they could get a listing of the specific items they are interested in (for instance, a rifleman wouldn't care about the swords I have in stock). It would also be great to have a database set up that would allow me to categorize customers so if I get a great line of something in stock, I can let those people know about it. Or maybe I could offer them discounts if they are preferred customers. It would also be nice to have the option to bundle items together. As a weaponsmith,it would be awesome to have the ability to sell a gun with a powerup, or maybe a package ofguns. Or a buy one, get one free type deal. Of course, the wholevendorformat would need to change, but it shouldn't be that bad. The format could look a lot likewebsites that allow you to purchase items, put them in your "cart" and then add up the total at the end.

3) The Efficiency line is pretty much useless (as if I need to tell you that). To spice it up, I would propose reducing lot sizes by 1/2 at some point, maybe the 4th box. This, in effect, would let you set up more shops. It wouldn't reduce anythingbelow 1, so harvesters would be unaffected. At the second box I would have reduced travel fares.If the wholegoal of the merchant line is tohave multiple vendors in different locations, you would*think* we would accumulate frequent flier miles or something I would also propose an increased speed for factories at some point in this skill line.

4) I don't have much to offer for Hiring, I haven't progressed up that tree, so I don't know how it works to be honest. I would actually like to see this line merged with Management - it doesn't seem to offer much to be on its own, and it doesn't seem like it has the potential to be expanded upon.

These are all the ideas I have time for right now, I'll write more later. Let me know what you think though

-Maqas Starrunner

Oovik Nokook (Expert Armor) at your service

As a fellow merchant, I am surpised at this thread. Merchanting is about building supplier relationships and customer relationships.

Asking the Devs to nerf business 3 & 4 like that to force artisans to either hawk their high dollar wares manualyor through you is rather like department stores petitioning the local government to ban convience stores so vendors are forced to market their wares through them.

Now asking the Devs to make the merchant skills act as advertised is another matter.

AD1 keeps shutting itself off after awhile

AD2 doesn't work at all

AD3 keeps kicking out like AD1 does

AD4 seems worthless since reducing the cost of AD3 really should be in the Effciency line.

Hiring3 doesn't seem to work since I can't change the vendors uniform at all

Hiring4 I know doesn't work because droping wearables on a vendor just gets me a snappy remark

Fixingthese things alone would make a big improvment over the current situation. As to realimprovments though, how about extra lots for the management line?

Say 1 extra lot per vendor. It wouldn't entirely make up for a small house taking 2 lots but it would soften the blow some. But a Master merchant could have 14 lots taken up by 7 shops (1 vendor each) and either have other structures as ware house space or just a private mansion or some such. But right now, management only gets me extra vendors and just seems like a waste.