Merchant Archive

I was boggled by this post yesterday and I went back into my vendors in a panic....but this is not an issue on Starsider apparently.

I am a tailor with over 100 items on one vendor, and 50 each on my other two vendors. The 100 items vendor has over 600k worth of merchandise on her. I haven't done the exact math (math..ugh hehe) but I put about 1000 credits on her when I put her down 2 weeks ago and she still is paid up for 25days. Obviously, my vendor fee is negligible and has not changed regardless of prices.

And I have not trained so much as one box of Efficiency so I am not getting any discounted rates. *shrug* might be just your server? Sounds like a bug...I see no reason to punish a person for selling high ticket items by charging them such steep maintenance fees. Would undermine the whole purpose of being a merchant in the first place.

NPC VENDORS

Pro - Maintenance is bugged at 1 credit per day (0 if you have efficiency 2)

Con - Split resources are bugged and unretrievable - all other items are retrievable on a hit-and miss basis (sometimes you cnat get them at all, others you can get first time, some others take 3-4 attempts..)

Well, that's just #*@~ed-up!

I wish I knew that before I split a bunch of resources into 1000 unit bundles and loaded them onto my vendor. Basically, unknowingly, I've ripped off a bunch of my customers. Fortunately for me, I've tried to always give them what they've already paid for and told them if they ever gotthe other resources off my vendors to pay me at that time.

I've gotta say, I think its simply reprehensible that Sony doesn't WARN us about these idiotic bugs. No, they don't break the game, and no they are not the priority. But it really does distress me to try to run a business in this game and gain a bad reputation because Sony didn't TELL ME that the vendors were going to screw over my paying customers.

Charging like that for vendor maintenence is absurd I would have givin it up along time ago had I known that good thing im only using Npc's.Most of us are crafters also and barely make any money as it is now we have to worry about stock lvls beause we cant afford ridicuosly high vendor maintenece.It should bea flate rate like 5 credits per 10 items or something not what your selling price its hard enough to make a profit now they add that in on top of it.Just because a architect sells a med house for 60k doesnt mean he makes any money.Also are we ever going to be able to drop vendors in buildings we dont ownor let other people use our with admin rights, artisans should only be able to get one crappy vendor at business 4 and the cost should be high.therer i feel better already.

Onasor

Bio-engineer

Ahazi

Ah..I was not aware the NPC's were 'bugged' and terminal vendors were so high.

This, again, really undermines the point of being a merchant. While the 1 credit a day thing is certainly too low, I see no reason to have such a high rate for ANY vendor---and percentage of pricepoints is not good either. I would like to see a flat going rate per day. If a vendor is prolific enough to stock their vendor then why should they be punished? I log on at 10 am and log off at 11pm some day just making clothes so when I'm not online (I work prime playing times like friday nights etc), my customers have a great selection to shop from. I would be very irate to suddenly find I was paying 18k a day or something like that.

Maybe 5 cred per item listed (per day)?

I'm afraid that total stock pricing is going to really hit tailors hard. We have literally thousands of combinations of colors and items, more than anyone other profession that I'm aware of.

However, it remains my guess that the bizbox "overpricing" is the correct one.

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marqie wrote:

Flat fee, and tax is the way to go IMO. So it cost 100 credits a day, and 3% of sales, that way, the "Credit Drain" is based on sales.

I am not sure if I will be able to add to the list, because if, what they say is true, I only have 2 more weeks, until they choose another Merchant Correspondant.

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I would love this. My maintenance fee is about 250, so I'm paying almost 3k a day to keep a vendor running that doesn't do that much sales. A small fee plus a sales tax would be great.

The resource problem with NPC vendors was fixed in the last big patch. If you split resources and place them on NPCs, the customer now gets what they buy. It was posted about here by a few that tested it, but it seems the message was lost among people talking about hiring four and the signs.

Thank you for making this post. I just barely got Business 3, thinking about dabbling in Merchant so I can sell my droids, and when I set up my vendor, it was 1 credit per hour, so I'm thinking "Cool", pop 500cr into it, set for 20 days, put up some droids. Come back today, my vendor is damaged, costs money to repair, and the maintenance fee is up higher than my extractors.

What really sucks, is I checked the maintenance fees again after putting my droids on sale before I logged off, and it was still at 1.

My vendor is currently down, and will remain down until this is fixed. I don't have the kind of income for this kinda crap.

Merchants making a ton of credits is not entirely true. Not all merchants play that way, I know I don't. I am a manager for one of our PA's shops, with 6 vendors set up for a variety of things in said shop. This gives our PA's crafters a chance sell there stuff, and get paid without having to manage their own vendors. In return, I take a small cut of the sale prices, and pay out once a day the remaining to them. I am not a merchant to make oodles of money, I am a merchant because I enjoy the idea of running my own shop. All I can do is hope they don't change it so I can't play the game the way I personally enjoy playing it.

If you are being successful as a merchant your profit in credits will exceed your capital and maintenance output costs. If it is not, well that could be for a variety of economic factors, most likely reaching to far ahead of your current capacity to support that many vendors and make enough profit to channel enough credits back into your business.

IMHO, merchant professions is there for just that - to be a merchant. If your not familiar with economics or are not succeeding at making a profit, or if making a profit is not your goal you have two choices:

1) Choose a different profession
2) Do missions or something to subsidize your "hobby" of managing vendors.

You need to play the business game to succeed as a merchant just like any other profession requires you to play it as intended to reach its full purpose.

Thanks,

Okay guys there are a couple things worth mentioning here.

1- Charging a flat tax on sales. WONT WORK. The reason for maintenence is not just as a "money sink" it is also to prevent people from using vendors as a method of creating unlimited storage. Now I'm not saying I agree with this method and in fact find it pretty stupid but this is the underlying reasoning no matter what is said publicly. I think the fixes to that are obvious but apparently not to them. Charging only a "tax" when a sale is transacted actually encourages the behaviour they want to prevent so forget it.

2- The phenomonen (sp?) of the warrior class being able to make obscene amounts of money doing missions is reletively new. In the first few weeks crafters held ALL the money on ALL of the servers. That made them the obvious target to knee jerk amateur economic control schemes. Now they have tried to balance out the rest by giving other professions ludicrously easy missions with tremendously high payouts which has resulted in even more money springing into existance, as opposed to the money circulating the way it should. I hear about players that have never sold or even crafted a single item being multi-millionaires and I find that disturbing.

It WILL all get balanced once they stop sticking their own fingers into the stew every two minutes trying to save all of us from ourselves. For now yer just gonna have to suck it up and move on.

merchants,
I beleive the philosophy behind the excessive merchant credit sinks is due to SWG being a pure player run economy. Now, in that environment tight tight control is how thwy are goingto start out because once you allow something in the economoy it is almost impossible to go back. So if they made it easy to be a crafter type tons more people would buy into it to make an easy buck while out adventuring on combat missions.
As it is, it takes a certain type of player to be willing to make the sacrifices to play a merchant, and I beleive they want it that way, for now at least.
We do need to see some balance in order to have sufficient reward for our services to the economy. However, it will work itself out I think.
It is wrong that we are harshly punished, but even in a perfectly balanced game the merchant should be a **edit** hard profession. In the world of real business a start up does not begin to break even until the 3-5 year of operation. In this case, in the SWG universe that has to translate into a significant period of time where you fight tooth and nail to stay alive as a merchant. 70% + of start ups fail and it will be the same in SWG.
Stick with the fight and be the best **edit** merchant around and soon those credit maint fees will seem like nothing.
Soon you might regret asking for sales tax if your losing out thousands of credits every sale to a tax. I am not sure, but time will tell. Merchants make a ton of credits and this is the current method to remove some of those credits from the economy and even at that it still doesn't work and we have multiple millionaires amongst the professions.

Anyhow, I better go get back to my alternate account combat character so I can run a mission to pay for this weeks heavy harvester costs - LOL

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Shakers wrote:

Okay guys there are a couple things worth mentioning here.

1- Charging a flat tax on sales. WONT WORK. The reason for maintenence is not just as a "money sink" it is also to prevent people from using vendors as a method of creating unlimited storage. Now I'm not saying I agree with this method and in fact find it pretty stupid but this is the underlying reasoning no matter what is said publicly. I think the fixes to that are obvious but apparently not to them. Charging only a "tax" when a sale is transacted actually encourages the behaviour they want to prevent so forget it.

2- The phenomonen (sp?) of the warrior class being able to make obscene amounts of money doing missions is reletively new. In the first few weeks crafters held ALL the money on ALL of the servers. That made them the obvious target to knee jerk amateur economic control schemes. Now they have tried to balance out the rest by giving other professions ludicrously easy missions with tremendously high payouts which has resulted in even more money springing into existance, as opposed to the money circulating the way it should. I hear about players that have never sold or even crafted a single item being multi-millionaires and I find that disturbing.

It WILL all get balanced once they stop sticking their own fingers into the stew every two minutes trying to save all of us from ourselves. For now yer just gonna have to suck it up and move on.

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This is not really true, while the storage issue was originally the motivation for this change, they soon realized that it's better to have stuff stored on a vendor then having someone build a small house and just drop crap on the ground. Reason being, if stuff is stored on the vendor....

a) it does not need to be pulled from the db when someone walks into the room

b) they do not need to store x/y/z coords for the item in the db

c) the maximum amount of items per query is 100, whcih is when they display the next button.

This is much easier on the db and the overall serverload.

anyway, not that they realized this they are simply fixing something that has been broken. the flat fee + tax will be just fine. And will give meaning to a c oupel of your skills at least.