Merchant Archive
Thread: You guys need vendors to have admin lists
I have to side with Marqie on this one and will suffer the 1 star as a result. If you want Merchant skills you should work the merchant trees. Part of the charm and struggle of business ownership is buying and selling. We are commodity brokers and middle people. If you take the middle out, then there is no incentive to continue being in the middle. You will destroy the profession.
There was a thread much like this on the smuggler board where someone proposed that merchants sell vendors. http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=smuggler&message.id=26220. This proposal is much like yours, you want to optimize your profession at the suboptimization of ours. When you perform the wiifm (what's in it for me)I see a big fat zero.
Like someone above, I am the Merchant for the PA's crafters. I am basically in charge of all business dealings for the PA. I run a shop outside of Kaadara with 6 vendors in it, and then another Merchant from the PA runs 1 vendor, soon to be 2 more inside. When I have to take time away for days, I have to basically give him my account info and let him manage the shop, because if somebody wasn't there twice a day, then the shop would fail. It would be nice if I could let him have admin to my vendors and visa versa, so we could manage stock on eachothers vendors, reset ad barking or planetary advertising since we both have the skills, and so on.
I disagree with this in principal, but I could agree to it if a 'novice' merchant could operate my vendors for me in certain tasks. I have tons of stuff that takes days to get into the vendor because my time is limited and the interface is 'clunky' (good word!).
If I could hire one of my people to take care of a certain vendor, then I have full accounting if something goes wrong, and I can concentrate on my customers or go see some more of the galaxy than the inside of my showroom.
Oh..and I'm going to be away for 10 days oct 16-26..I wonder what I'm supposed to do with my store?
ArthurDentOnBria wrote:
You realize of course that there is a huge contridiction in the above statement. You say merchants are "middle people" yet you are suggesting artisans that want to sell their own wares should pick up merchant. So which is it? Is a merchant a supplier or a middleman? That I think right there is the whole problem. Merchants are in general NOT set up to be middlemen. They are, in general, their own suppliers in this game, and any other type of arrangement is extremely difficult to manage.
Who said it was supposed to be easy? Interdependence is the key here. You have a pool of skill points to work with, so there are choices to be made in how your character interacts with the galaxy. The merchant is a profession that supports those with no business skills. What is proposed here will eliminate the purists in the profession.
I don't see a contridiction in my statement. I am a Smuggler who is also a Merchant. Yes my smuggler personna supplies my merchant personna. But the merchant is in the middle. Without being a merchant, I would either have to sell my wares face to face, or utilize a merchant, who would also be in the middle. What does a merchant make? They can only profit from the interface of supplier and customer.
Generalizing that all merchants are their own suppliers may be a false assumption.What is proposed in this thread is the elimination of interdependence. Taken to the extreme, why should I have to go to a doctor or medic to get healed? Why can't I rent a bacta tank from them to heal myself? Why not rent holo recordings from entertainers to remove battle fatigue?
Part of the charm and struggle of business ownership is buying and selling. We are commodity brokers and middle people. If you take the middle out, then there is no incentive to continue being in the middle. You will destroy the profession.
Supplying vendors to people for a charge does make you the middle person, just means you aren't selling it directly. In the end of the day it's still your vendor suppling the customer, which is no different than someone going into your shop and buying something from your vendor. The difference is that someone else is filling it with products.
Ultimately you are still the supplier.
Being a merchant would not be so bad (or time consuming) if they solved the 7 day issue and server reset problems. I think a possible better solution would be for the merchant to be able to remotely manage there vendors. Another possible, would be to create a partnership agreement, were others coulsd list items with a percent going to the merchant. But over all I like the way it is set-up. I email my tailor weekly with my requests. All other suppliers I buy crates and put up a few at a time, so I have a supply.
My next issue of course will be space. I buy in bulk and only put a few of each item up on my vendor. Last night I really ran into a space problem.
See my proposal for vendor Admin lists. The discussion is onto the third page and many great posts have been made.
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=merchant&message.id=8203