Merchant Archive

Oh and to whoever said you can't make money without Merchant. You get a vendor with Business. What more do you need? Oh perks? Well then, that's what Merchant is for.

And to all you 1-star kiddies, I'll 5-star every post you 1-star, since most of the one-starred posts are actually good posts and most of your 5-star posts deserve the [delete] treatment.

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Bermag wrote:
I was afraid this message would be flame bait when I wrote it lol. Not my intention to troll or saying that you who are master merchants are stupid spending points on merchant. I want to start a serious discussion of what the Merchant profession should be. However, just stocking 1000 items on vendor might had some influence over what I wrote (I hate the vendor interface, the person developing this should be forced to stock 1000 items every day until he come up with something better) :-).

I am not saying that merchant is useless, but it is not working the way I think it should work. I think that merchant should be for doing things like Ladygrey is doing. That was also what I thought from the beginning was the purpose of the merchant profession.

I know it is an old argument, but when I see no intention from the devs to do anything about merchant - no visions at all. I am afraid we will only see nerfs (vendor limits) and no benefits. If they are limiting how many items you can have on vendor and increase the limit depending on merchant skill, investing merchant in skills will be more valuable. But still, it is nothing that makes the merchant profession more fun to play, just increase the need for investing more in merchant with no extra "fun".

I see only two useful perks (however, very useful) in merchant, advertise 3 and management. Most of the other is pretty useless or just "fluff".

I have made wholesale agreement in the past but it is to much trouble to make it work. Have no problem with trusting the merchant that is reselling my stuff but there are other problems:

a) limited slots for offering items (can be solved partly by offering crates or using packs)

b) Need to communicate price to seller. With 20-30 differnet items it is a pain. When dealing with sliced weapons it is even worse. The risk that it get wrong is high

c) No easy way to track sales / paying the supplier if you don't sell to the vendor (when I have made wholesale agreements I have offered the item for 1 cr and then get paid when sold).

d) It is a huge burden on the merchant to list all items (anyone who ever visited my vendors know why; I have 1000+ weapons in stock). Also it rqueires that the merchant do it so you can not be sure when your items are up for sale.

Some of this would be a lot easier if it was possible to have admin rights on someone else vendor. Probably a lot easier for devs to do than adding commission sales etc

Also, this forum is maybe not representative for merchants in the game. Most of the crafter/merchant see their crafter profession as their main profession and might not frequent this forum. So there is probably more "true" merchants here than on the crafter professions.

You can't really compare skill point investment in merchant with what you do with most other classes. There are no active merchant skill that you can use compared to harvesting creatures in scout or healing in medic (however, I think that all should be able to use Stim A w/o medic).

What is also very revealing is that most of the people posting here (with sigs) have two accounts. That is the sad fact. If you want to be a succesful crafter you have almost no skill points over for anything else after you have invested in your crafter profession and IMO the necessary points in merchant.

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Alright. Let's address some of the issues you brought up.

a) limited slots. I don't get this. What limited slots? For offering things to a merchant's vendor? It's a non-issue. If you're going to offer stuff to your merchant's vendor, use crates or put batches of stuff into backpacks, labelling the packs with the contents. ie: Light Composite Armor Pieces. The other option would be to place a vendor in your home (if you're a master artisan you can get one vendor) and place the packs for pickup on it. Set a 50k access fee to the house to keep others from wandering in and credit your merchant the 50k when they enter.

b) need to communicate price to seller. Easy. List it all in an email. you can do it like this:

Item Name Unit Price Quantity Total Price (optional) Suggested Retail Price Per Unit

Laser Carbine5000 25125000 10000

Looks pretty simple to me. As for sliced weapons, I'd say forget it. If a merchant wants to sell sliced gear, let them worry about slicing it themselves. Or let the final consumer go and get their own damn weapons sliced. I know that I prefer to get my personal stuff sliced myself rather than buy it pre-sliced. Don't make things unnecessarily complicated for yourself. The most successful operations are simple ones.

c) no easy way to track sales. Leave this one up to the merchant. A good merchant who pays for his or her merchandise after the sales will keep track in their own fashion and then pay accordingly. I find it easiest to determine with my suppliers ahead of time how much I owe them in total if we agree that I'll be taking their goods on credit. That makes it even easier for me in that I don't really have to track sales. Rather, I just pay the balance to my supplier when I'm ready. For example:

I take 150 pieces of light and heavy composite armor from Crafter X. After adding up the wholesale value we have a total of 2.2 mil owing. I agree that I will pay in two installments of 1.1 mil each. As I watch my sales and my bank account, I see that it's gotten to the point where I am comfortable with paying out the first installment. I meet with my supplier and we make the transaction. I then go back to watching things happen until I feel comfortable enough with my bank account to make the other payment.

That's just one example, and my comfort level with my bank may differ from someone elses. Of course, the easiest way to deal with all of this is my preferred method of doing business, which is to pay for the goods up front. That way I don't have to worry about paying my supplier later and my supplier doesn't have to worry about getting screwed for the money.

d) a huge burden for the merchant etc etc etc. Hey.... let the merchant worry about this one. We chose the merchant profession. We know futzing around with vendors can be a pain in the butt. But to those of us who've stuck with this profession, it's worth it. As for not knowing which of your items are up for sale, don't you think that if a merchant buys 1000 weapons from you, they're going to want to list all of them so they can make the money from the sales? Unlisted merchandies doesn't sell. If you have any doubts as to whether or not your merchant is listing everything they get from you, go make a spot check on their vendor and take a look. If you sold them 100 weapons and there's only 100 or so on their vendor, demand payment because "obviously they've sold enough to pay up"

As for giving someone else admin rights to one of my vendors, FORGET IT! I'm not giving someone else the ability to raise/lower my prices, remove items, put items up for sale. What would stop one weapon supplier from removing all weapons made by my other weapon supplier? Best not to take chances with stuff like that. It's MY business and I'll run it the way I want without someone else putting their hand in. It'd be like a merchant asking for admin to a crafter's main warehouse so they can pick up orders without hassle. What would stop me from snarfing up that nice, shiny crate of flamethrowers while I'm in to get my little order of scout blasters and vibroknucklers?

As to skill point investment, see my other post in this thread. If you don't think the skills are worth it, don't get the skills! I get by very nicely on 3/0/0/1. If you want pretty vendors with nice clothes, build yourself up to Hiring IV, deck out your sexy vendors, then drop hiring again. The vendors will stay sexy and they'll keep the nice threads you gave them. Hey.... if you get tired of the way they look, after a while of being a merchant you should have enough exp to shoot right up that Hiring tree again and change the vendors clothes again. Sure, the merchant profession could use some love from the Devs, but as it stands right now, if you don't like it don't be it. That simple.

Ok.... that's another rant done. Peace and love from your favorite business lady

XOXOXOX

Merchant is a great occupation, but the Merchant Profession skills are not yet strong enough to be a big help at it.

There are serious structural weaknesses in this game that adding the right skills to Merchant could help with.

Serious crafters are largely cut out of 2/3 of the content because they use their skill points up without getting any of the combat ability needed to do a lot of the quests, play with the PvP crowd, or even travel safelyas asightseer. Giving control of powerful combat droids to Merchants (and probably othernon-combat professions) could cure that.

New players are at a loss for where to buy things other than at the bazaar with its lousy interface. New ventures are hard to start as there is no way to give people information that they didn't know to look for.A particular kind of venture, a player event, is particularlyaffected because it is time sensitive to get the information out. Advertising abilities like signs in NPC cities, or barking droids that remain active when you leave town, could cure that. The key element is that they recieve the ad without having to look for it.

Every crafter has to start out by selling their own products because there is almostno support for wholesale transactions. A good consignment sale system could make it possible for a new crafter to work with a merchant to get enough cash out of his product to keep crafting.