Merchant Archive
Thread: Merchant Top 5 Issues
Naufragus..so your solution is don't have a merchant profession or completely drop all the skills we have and create new ones.. I dont' think that really falls into what we were asked to come up with. I understand if you feel you are unable to come up with anything constructive within the guidelines but I want to make sure you are ok with not having input into this question.
I feel that I can almost guarantee that merchant isn't going to go away..and they are not going to completely dump the skills we have and give us all new skills. So I again impore you to try to come up with answers that fit the framework we are trying to work in:
I disagree completely that you don't use your skills. If you have 2 vendors or more you are usingyour merchant skills. If you use the global advertising you are using your skills. That you don't have to do something everyday to keep those skills working for you is not the same as them being useless. If you think they aren't necessary ok fine. Please give me a list of things that would make it easier for you to do business with an crafter who might be on the fence. If the crafter just doesn't want to sell to you then fine they don't. But what are the roadblocks when they do want to..but you just can't make it work because......
OK, here is my 2 credits worth.
#5 This issue, to me, is a no-brainer. Take the vendors away. Put a BIG warning on the patch message EVERY day for 2 weeks, telling everyone with the extra vendors, and no merchant skills, that the vendors will be taken away on "X" date, and they should remove any merchandise from those vendors before that date, or lose it. Then, on "X" date, poof the vendors. This exploit/cheat has been going on for FAR too long. If you want to take the kinder/gentler approach, then do like they did with the lost items from the vendors. On "X" date, poof the vendors, and give them a magic bagcontaining all the items that were in the vendors. That way, they don't lose any items, and the problem gets solved. After that date, I think the idea of not being able to surrender the skill until you have removed your vendors is a good one. Then there would be no reason for anyone to "accidentally" surrender the skill, and keep the abilities.
#4 This is one that I would like to seeenhanced. Idon'tthink it should be to hard to put permission sales on a vendor. Could the devsput in a field on the "sell an item" screen, that would allow a standard 25% discount forfactional sales. I also thinkwe should have some way of reserving an item for a singleplayer. Put their name on an item, and only they can buy it.What I would REALLY like to see is having the ability to ship merchandise to the person buying it.Example: Betty Boop orders an Exotic Fleshwrap from me, because myvendor doesn't haveone in stock. If I am online, I make the clothing, and then for an extra charge, I can ship it, and it appears in her inventory the next time that she logs in. If I am offline, then when I receive the email order,I simply create the item, and thenship it to her.The next time shelogs on,she gets an email, with a shipping confirmation button. She can agree to the extra shipping charge, and click "yes, please ship me the item" or select"no, I am a cheapskate and don't want to pay shipping". If she agrees, then the item appearsin her inventory the next time she logs in. If not, then the item stays in the vendor, and she can pick it upthe next time she visits your vendor. I also would like to see the ability of aMASTER merchant to place a shipping terminal in ancrafters house. This would be used for business between the crafter, and the merchant./The crafter would simply make his merchandise, and then sell it to the terminal,just like on a vendor, but the terminal would have a spending limit, set by the merchant. If the merchant orders 120K of weapons from his Weapons supplier, then he can put 120K credits in the terminal account, so that when the weaponsmith fills the merchants order, he just sells his items to the shipping terminal, and the terminal pays the weaponsmith then and there. The items would then appear in the stockroom of the vendor that is connected to that particular terminal.The merchant would create the terminal from the radial menu of one of his vendors. So the clothing vendor, would be connected to a terminal in a tailors house, etc...
I would also like to see a record keeping tool. When you get a vendor sale email, I would like to be able to save it to a record, that would keep track of the customer name, the item they bought, and the price. If it can be automatically put into an email, then give the merchant the ability to transfer those fields into a record for his own use. I am currently doing this same thing by hand, so I can send out thank you emails, and use it for ordering new stock. It would be wonderful, if I could select my recent customers, and have the system send them an email automatically, that said "thank you for shopping at Mackillians, we appreciate your business"
OK, those are just a few of my ideas.
The roadblocks to selling things for someone else are:
Ability to automatically disperse an agreed upon price.
Ability to automatically disperse an agreed upon price.
Ability to automatically disperse an agreed upon price.
Ability to automatically disperse an agreed upon price.
and... Ability to automatically disperse an agreed upon price.
People talk about commissions, percentages, etc. I just want *some* way to say "When this item sells, give X Y number of credits." I can do the math for percentages myself. Something that would be nice is having a 'wholesaler' skillthats in the same line as efficiency maybe that would grant this skill. Instead of allowing all merchants to do it.
Betatoxin,
You can use my program (linkin my sig) to turn the vendor emails into a colon seperated file that you can load into a spreadsheet.
- Malikor [Dragon Pearl Enclave], TestCenter
I would just be happy to be able to sell more then one item at a time. I got 50 Chairs I'm putting up for sale with the same priceI still have to sell them one at a time. I should be able to flag them all and sell them all at once and this would make me very happy.
This is compounded by the fact that most crafters need master artisan anyway, (or can easily get in to thair template), and thus already have a vendor on witch they can sell an unlimited amounts of items.
What we need is abilities that will be seen as a time saving service, so that when we profit on something, the creator of the item will se that profit as payment for the time we saved them.
The only "quick" thing I can think of, that accomplish this, would be to limit the number of sales one vendor would have. And then have that number increase along with merchant skills, a bit like CH and thair pet levels.
More time consuming ideas would be would be different variants of restricted sales. Like:
Reserved sale [on individual sale]: Kind of a reversed offer. The sale would need an extra input of the name of the person to offer to, and then person would get an email with the vendor location, as well as item price and description.
Restricted sale [on vendor]: Limit the number of items one person can buy during a set time period (to prevent one person from buying the hole stock).
Deny service [on vendor]: completely shutting a person or group off from using the vendor, same as on building ban. So that a vendor in a mall can ban one bad client, with out it affecting all others, or so an imperial weaponsmith wound get rebels buying his mines.
On cheep travel:
I would like to se merchants get a huge discount on travel, but on in a way that could make them able to sell on that discount. That would be like a commando selling his ability to use heavier grenades. Perhaps the merchant skill needed to use a ticket could be included on it, so that even if a ticket was given to someone else with out merchant skill, they would be unable to use it.
Also providing inkstand travel tickets would be another thing that would give merchants a service they could provide, as fast travel to and from customers and providers would be seen as a time saving measure.
4. Artisan/Merchant Liason
-Allow offers to vendor to be on a seperate system from the bazaar auctions... most people that would want to supply me, want to sell on the bazaar too. If it's going to be limited, maybe a limit of say 50? After all, there's no database difference to 50 offers, than 50 items handed to me I put on sale directly. Other than the amount of work for me, and the need for me to actually meet the artisan.
-Allow offerers to set a 'retail price' as well as the price they want. If it's fine, there can be an 'accept offer to sale' (puts it for sale for the recommend retail price) and 'accept offer to stockroom' (does what it'd do now) button, so you can chose. Makes for less clicking and remembering prices.
-Send an mail to the merchant when an item is offered to the vendor. Currently, if you aren't online, you've no idea it's there. We get mails for everything else.
5. Dropping Merchant Skill
This is based on some observations about how discount modifiers work on houses. It seems on houses, it checks if you get a discount when you pay maintence. Perhaps this would be a good time for vendors to do their checking as well. That way it could check everything, and it wouldn't matter if it took a bit of time to process. You don't pay maintence that often. Though someone could put on a lot of money then drop merchant, it seems more feasable than it checking everytime you use the vendor.
Alternatively, it could check when you dropped the skill. But they'd be no saftey net for those that already have, or if they system goes down for a bit.
The things it should check:
-Does hiring level equal the hiring level of the vendor? Perhaps as well as stopping the vendor working, they'd be an option on the vendor menu to 'change to bulky terminal' (or maybe even a choice).
-Does hiring = 4 for vendors in customised clothes? Perhaps as well as stopping the vendor working, they'd be an option on the vendor menu to 'return to default clothing'.
-Does management cover the number of vendors? If not, the one accessed at the check would be the one that deactivates.
-Do they have advertising 1-3 as approproate? If not, it can simply turn off the options it relates to.
Merchant Tent: There needs to be some sort of check for if someone has dropped efficiency four. This is a tricky one, as you don't want to stop non-merchant admins paying maintainance. Is there any way the system can differentiate between the owner and other admins? Could the tent perhaps check this the first time of the day the owner walks inside? There's clearly some sort of registering of owners walking in, from the way residency works in cities.
DocSavag wrote:
Merchant Top 5:
3. Terminal vendors are not initializing properly.
We are currently researching this issue. Additional information about this
bug would be helpful in tracking it down and fixing it.
I had this problem, but only when trying to install a terminal vendor in our guild hall, which is owned by someone else, but which I have admin rights to. In my own home, I could place a terminal vendor with no problem.
4. The lack of tools to make good business arrangements with Artisans.
We would love to have more detailed ideas about tools to help with these
arrangements.
It would be nice to have a system in place - either separate from "offers" or as a sub-component of it - that would allow an Artisan to place something on the vendor, pending approval of the Merchant (for quality control purposes, as well as making sure people aren't throwing Basic Camps up for 2,000 credits apiece, although this approval could be waived through Admin-like controls for people that the Merchant trusts). The Merchant approves the item and, when purchased, a certain percentage of the sale goes to the crafter that created and placed the item, and a certain percentage goes to the Merchant.
5. Currently it is possible to give up practically all of your merchant
skills without having to give up the vendors that you received as a benefit
of those skills.
We would like to see some suggested changes that would address this
situation. We agree in principle that Merchant Skills should not be
surrendered without the loss of the benefits of those skills.
What if the vendors stay in place, but the costs of vendors is variable so that the higher-end vendors take a lot to run. Part of the Hiring could be a reduction of Vendor Fees, above and beyond the "Reduced Vendor Fees" ability, so that someone with an extremely high Hiring would pay the same for all the vendors, but if you lost the Hiring points, then your 3PO Vendor goes from costing 12 credits per hour to 100 credits per hour. Of course, it's still possible for a non-Merchant to keep their vendors, but it wouldn't be cost effective to do so... they'd likely downscale the vendor to one of more reasonable cost and, thus, less sophistication.
One of the problems of our profession is that there is no way to expand or grow. You can only have 10 lots, I traded lots with someone on another server so now I have 20 lots.. but it would be easier if Merchants could have "Merchant Lots" which does not use up the personal lots allowed. Maybe Master Merchants could have an additional 6 to 8 lots or something like that. I cannot grow or expand... I have a travelling vendor for weddings and set it up at various locations but really how is a Merchant's buisness supposed to 'grow'?
I don't buy that often from other players and resell their items because everyone HAS vendors!! So my merchant skills are great, but they don't really give me any tools to expand, grow or offer anything to other players for using my vendors to sell their goods.
I think it would be nice to add someone to your vendor who supplies you with goods and then they automatically get their cut of the item sold. But ya gotta get rid of vendors before Novice Merchant!
We get plantary add campaign but what would be better is a wider/better advertising system for Merchants which would help other players without merchant skills to sell their wares. A special barker who barks ads from the starport or in the middle of nowhere. I couldn't get players to come to my shop on Rori but there really is no way to really advertise either.
rambling now... sorry
Just get rid of vendors from the artisan starting branch and make it strictly Merchant only who can place vendors.
JamGod wrote:
I dont see why people without the skill should even have the stuff. A simple "If you drop this skill then your vendors/merchant tents will be deleted" message should be all thats needed!
Mainly because it will cause economic ruin and will be very prone to mistake and bugs. I don't really want to hear a 1000 stories about master weaponsmiths that lost 3million in sales because they dropped Management IV and forgot they had 6 vendors instead of 5. Personally I would much rather deal with the questions like: "Why can't my customers buy stuff from my Protocol Droid after I dropped master merchant?" or "Why is it costing me 5000 a day for my Merchant Tent" These are easy to answer questions and no one really gets hurt by item loss. I wouldn't wish item loss on anyone even someone who was really trying to cheat the system much less someone who didn't know what would happen. That is my opinion on the subject.