Merchant Archive
Thread: What do you feel is a fair sales tax rate for a player city?
To reiterate my point: The problems of a vendor in a player cityis the extra cost (sales tax &round-trip shuttle tickets)and lack of convenience (shuttle waits)as opposed to a vendor outside of a starport.
I don't think vendors in a player city will automatically fail, I just feel that you can pass on the savings to your customers if your vendor is not in a city.
Just as in the real-world. People usually travel long distances to aviod city sales tax at the cost of convenience. Here, it's more convenient to save on city sales tax by running to a vendor 1.5km outside the strport.
As a merchant and a consumer, I would of course like to avoid paying any taxes. It just seems more convenient for me and my customersto setup a successful shop 1.5km from a starport rather than a player city. Especially if I plan on spending alot of money.
For a 10k item, you pay..say 600c rndtrip tickets for the shuttle (including shuttle tax), and another 500c for the 5% sales tax. That's1100c extra not including the shuttle wait times. A customer spending 200k (suit of armor, stocking on wepons, etc)? Now you're paying an extra 10k in taxes. And that's with just a 5% tax.
Keep in mind the sales tax applies even on offers TO your vendor.
If you are having resources delivered to your vendor, you are paying sales tax on that as well as the customer after you sell your finished product.
Sales tax is ok. Sales tax on offers to vendors is not.
Tomasi you assume that you are only travelling to my player city for the vendor. What if you aren't there for the vendor at all? What if you are there to speak to someone or to do a mission or some other reason? The vendor is standing right there by the shuttle port. You have to wait 10 minutes for a shuttle..who hasn't bought something from the bazaar merely bedcause they were bored staring at the ticket droid for 9 minutes???
I am not suggesting that everyone will immediately fly to a city to shop, but having shops in your city is a good way to generate revenue with sales tax because people WILL buy stuff while they are waiting on the shuttle. Not to mention that all the residents of the city will most likely buy from local shops near their homes instead of flying back to the static city to run 1.5k out to the vendor in the wilderness (and those pesky Mountain Squills.. YEA I have a problem with them..is it obvious?!?!?!)
I am saying that player city vendors will get a lot of traffice because people will be passing trough the area for various purposes. If you have a well established vendor selection in your city that in itself will draw people out. Because I can either run 1.5k to your shop, then another 1.3k to someone elses and another 500m to another one..or I can hop a 600c shuttle to a city and visit 10 vendors in the city square? Are you saying that there won't be a lot of users who will do this? Of course there will be. And yes if the taxes are too high they won't buy but if the taxes are reasonable and the merchandise worth the cost they will buy because they are there and they have found something they want to buy.
The point is that people will pay a higher price for convienience. It depends on how convienient it is and how high the cost. Can you compete outside of a city..yes of course. But you will see higher foot traffic in a location 30m from a shuttle port than you will 1.5km from a starport. Assuming that the city shuttle port has a fair amount of traffic in the first place. And that is up to the placement of the city and the reason people have to go there.
Lasalas wrote:
Sales tax, unless a global implimentation, will never work. Even in real life we're buying things from other countries just to save a few percent.
Though in real life money has value. For those with plenty of money in SWG, convenience is much more important than a 10% (or even 50%) difference in cost.
What remains to be seen is whether or not the player cities are more convenient. I suspect that those with a full range of merchants will be. Even without merchants, if your player city is reasonably close to a major city, you still might be better off since your customer can run 2 missions on the way to your vendor and 2 more missions on the way back (since there will be mission terminals in the city). It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Yes, you assume correctly that I'm only going to a player city only for vendors. Why else would I go out of my way to a player city?
What's the draw of a city to a non-resident? Merchants. (some politicians were smart andplaced a city right next to a major POI. ie Krayt Graveyard, Crystal Caves, etc). What's troublesome is that cities cannot have starports. You'll always have a lay-over.
Vendor malls outside starports will never have a lay-over (unless they're on the adv planets/moons ie Dant/Dath). Then, a player cities on those planets will have another lay-over, plus the added costs to go to adv planets.
I can understand your points on foot-traffic, but this was why vendor malls were opened. My own vendor isn't by itself. There are lots of shops nearby.
In a vendor mall,you can havearmor, weapons, deeds, resources vendors all whitin 10 meters of each other.
As for local residents buying from local merchants, that's very true providedthey don't have a desire to leave to adventure somewhere. Again, you'll always have a lay-over even coming back to your own home.
I'll agree with you, if someone was already in a player city, and happen to see something they wanted, they'd more likely than not, buy it. The trick is getting that person to go there in the first place knowing full well that he's going to pay for shuttle tickets, wait time, and pay extra for sales tax.
I'd be willing to pay 10%. It's still low enough that most customers won't really notice it or care, but brings in a nice income. For a lower tax, I'd say 5%. I wouldn't go for 2% or 7% for a very simple reason. 5% and 10% are easy numbers to work with, and it's easy to work out how much it adds to an item.
I really don't see it'd make a lot of odds. There are shops near my old location that already sold for half my prices... it didn't stop me getting a good trade, or stop customers giving me more than I asked for in payment. I don't think they'll really notice sales tax. I'd like an easy to work out figure though, because I plan to always charge sales tax, including face-to-face. This was based on the simple fact that some people will do anything to avoid even 5 credits extra on an item... including insisting I come back to the shop to sell it to them directly. The easy solution is to say it has sales tax off the vendors too. I am not going to live in my shop all day because people want to save tiny amounts of money.
Potential Conversation:
Customer: Can you come back to the shop and trade with me so I can avoid the 5% sales tax?
Me: Sure..be right there.. you understand I charge a 20% travel fee right?
Customer &*#$#$@# never mind.
Me: Have a nice day.
I'm thinking (once there can be more than 5 cities per planet) there could be lots of ways to use city-building as a form of griefing or extortion.
I.e., someone starts a city next to the shop of a rich merchant, and his 10 buddies all build houses in the city too, so they can win every vote 10-3 or something. And the mayor sets the sales tax to 300% or something outrageous, either:
1. to extort money from the merchant - "Pay me X per week, or I'll raise the tax again" or
2. simply to take over the geographic area by eliminating "undesirables" and having a city made up of 100% people from the guy's PA or whatever.
Is there any reason, theoretically, why a player wouldn't be able to do something like this? I'm worried that the combination of player cities plus PAs (i.e., large organized groups with the ability to throw their weight around in unison) potentially will have large unintended negative consequences.
From memory there was a cap on the % of tax that you can levy but I Don't remember what it is. But even if you could raise the taxes to 300% the merchant could just move out of your town.. not a very good way to keep business in your city. There is no benefit for running away business unless you just don't like guy and there are probably better ways of getting rid of him.
I have 3 accounts with one account as politician. Another account is a master tailor/master merchant so this thread is very important to me on both sides of the issue.
First off, our city has an elected senate body. That body brings issues to the mayor (my politician at the moment) for discussion and resolution 3 days prior to the weekly election. Senators are elected on our message board polling system by the constituants they represent. The senate is also made up of no less than 60% commercial interests because commerce is what keeps cities humming (IMHO of course).
Now to the point of my post ...
The taxation is obviously needed so I won't go into that. However, double-taxation (tax on offers as well as sales) is very much a real life system as well. Merchants pay for goods to resell and both transactions, including income tax, are taxed. The mission of the civil government is to keep those commercial interests satisfied and profitable.
My function as mayor, includes giving certain 'kickbacks' to our merchants. The particulars are not yet established because cities just came out but from our last meeting, it seems the city will pay for 1 week of each active shop/residence each week that the shop is active. The constituants and senate will also recieve a bit of a financial pool to fund struggling or startup merchants but will fund that pool themselves until they are confident in the new merchant's skills and understanding.
Our senate understands the importance of fullyfunding the city and the city understands the importance of attracting and maintaining commerce. We all want to have a very immersive Starwars like market and are making giant leaps to that end with large open market areas, merchant and player barking, and workshops near the city center and transportation. The city can not afford to fully fund the merchants but I do not think a city of any worth will remain without a strong merchant community. The stronger that community is, the better the city will be - not just in growth, but in satisfaction for all that reside there and manage it.
So our taxes start at 5% on all sales transactions with the mayor chucking 7 days of coin into each of the shops that the senate indicates. Each week, the mayor will address the treasury contents and costs for the city. If the senate wants to donate a structure, great - as long as I am able to answer the questions of civic costs and communicate that to the senate. The senate determines where the mayor needs to advance on the politician tree this way and also throttles the growth of the city over time. If the city starts slipping, then I trust our merchants to come up with the answers we need.
Of course, our city is in beta right now so .... hehe