Merchant Archive
Thread: Are Merchants Resellers or Shop Keepers?
Which I think the best solution people have come it with so far is to allow Merchants to rent Vendors to people. The Merchant would have control of the Vendor, however not the goods. I personally like my idea of the /grandvendorAccess command, which would give a merchant 24 hours to put stuff on the vendor. That way there is a constant need for interacting between merchant and crafter. The crafter isn't limited by the 25 offered items, and the merchant has control over their vendors, because they simply don't /grantAccess to the vendor if they don't want to deal with the crafter, or host sales for that crafter any more.
Anneke Rose (Mayor of Sanctuary)
bpeter3 wrote:
The way the skills are set, it's definitely set up so that you're a seller of your own goods.
Offers screen is clumsy and gives you no notice of stuff being offered unless you're online. I've gone days not realizing that one of my temporary suppliers has offered. 25 items as people have mentioned limits one's ability to be a reseller since you can't get large quantities of items from a wholesaler.
No way to offer someone else's items on your vendors. Basically, if you want to resell something you need to buy it and sell it. This can mean a huge investment to get items on your vendor that may/may not sell. Ultimately, this makes reselling difficult and risky. Sure, you can get items (for no cost) from friends on good faith and tip them once it sells but it's hard and requires alot of trust.
Yes that is true which is why the number one suggested thing over the past 6 months has been consignment sales support which would allow the secure selling of merchandise where everyone gets paid at the same time by the system and not put the burden on the merchant of keeping all the records and paying the crafter after the sale.
Empress....that is an interesting suggestion using a temporary /grantvendorrightsto allow someone to place items on your vendor..but you still have to work out payments and things. The system would have to know who is sellling the merchandise and pay them when the sale happened. And for my money as a merchant I would want the ability to charge you a percentage of the sale or a flat rate whatever makes sense for our arrangement.
Stupid Tab key.
Numen wrote:
Your last 2 paragraphs point out 2 flaws in the system as to why the game mechanics aren't there. The purchases either have to be in good faith or the merchant has to buy everything up front. Neither of these are good system and therefore is a bad game mechanic. The next is the ability for the crafters to get you there products. The offer screen is far from a perfect system. 25 items limits crafters to basically crates. This takes out architects, tailors, armorsmiths from reselling. Weaponsmiths can easily. Docs maybe because of the ability to split crates. But putting massive amounts of stims for sale on a reseller isn't possible.
I agree with everything else in Numen's post, except the highlighted.
To address the entire issue (including the original post on this thread), Merchants in this game have been given skills to be Retailers. We accept offers, re-price and sell goods to the public, advertise, manage staff and a shop and capitalize the whole operation. Key word there: capitalize. Merchants who want to run a shop have the choice of re-selling the goods of others (admittedly, this could be handled better by the game mechanics) or selling items crafted by themselves. Controlling more of the chain of production (moving from retail into production or from production into retail) is called Vertical Integration, and many companies engage in it to reduce the overall costs of the operation.
However, there are choices that are completely open in this game. A crafter can concentrate on crafting only, relying on resource providers to supply him and on Merchants to retail his goods. Or a crafter can Vertically Integrate in either direction or both of the supply chain - harvesting their own resources and/or running vendors to sell their own goods. The trade-off here is that the self-sufficient operation cannot focus as well as individuals running separate operations. The crafter who spends time gathering resources, stocking vendors and advertising wares doesn't have much time left for actual crafting. The overall costs are lower, but the quality and quantity of what they offer may suffer. Specialists can concentrate more of thier time on any one of the three activities, and therefore expect better results. A specialist Merchant (Retailer/Reseller) will pay a higher cost for goods than the self-sufficient crafter, because he has to provide profit for everyone else in the supply chain. However, a good merchant will have stocked vendors, good location, planetary advertising, an inviting shop and work to become well known as a source to the public for XYZ products. The increased sales volume from all this activity should counter the added costs of buying wholesale instead of producing your own goods to sell.
So, other than wanting better game mechanics to handle the options available, Merchants can be whatever they want to be. Forget what may have been "intended"...it probably didn't exist. It's our own creativity inusing the mechanics the game offers that makes it fun and interesting.