Merchant Archive

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LadyGrey wrote:

There have been a lot of really good suggestions made on the forums about how to improve vendors. The only one I have seen implemented was to have the time limit increased from 7 days to 30 days. It would certainly help the merchant community to have some sort of active debate with the devs themselves, about what should or should not be done about vendors. We debate amongst ourselves, out here in the forums, but never once have I seen anything that would indicate that the devs themselves would be willing to have interaction with the players on making decisions that will affect how the game is played. I don't know if that is done on purpose. I suppose that you, the correspondent, are supposed to be our intermediary. But from your comments, Doc, and with all due respect, I don't really feel comfortable with your understanding of the real issues going on. Nothing I have mentioned above is going to be new information for any of the merchants, but seems to be the first you have heard of it. I would venture to say, Doc, that your playing style as a crafter may be a bit different than others. That isn't bad, but you may be making assumptions about the rest of us that are not valid.

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I'm not making assumptions and I asked you to explain so I could have the facts as you see it to report back to the devs. Its true that I rarely have hundreds of items on a vendor to expire each month. It is also true that when I do have items that expire I find it an incredible pain to relist them and revising the methods that are used to re-list and list merchnadise is obviously a priority.

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taloncard wrote:
np why I have massive amounts of stuff on my vendor that may take more than 30 days to sell.


I sell Doc stuff. and weapon powerups
Crafting to restock gets annoying. so I use factories

Weapon powerups come in cases of 10 so run of 1000 powerups = 100 cases not all of them sell in 30 days. Now add the fact that I do more than 1 type of powerup and there are over 600 items on my powerup vendor in about 50 different flavors.


Doc items:
when I can make wound pack b's with 40 uses they last a long long time. I toss 50 of each on the vendor at a time = 300 items
now add pack C's then D's and E's 1200 items on wound packs alone

Add stims at 50 each = anther 200 items (1400 items total so far)

Now add state packs 250 items
Cure posion and disease 100 items
Buff packs too

You get the idea?

There are enough docs that hate crafting to make it worth my while to sell the stuff, My fire blankets sold out instantly for the first week, now they have been sitting on my vendor un touched since then. When these docs run out of fireblankets they will come back. But at 45 uses each that is gonna take a long long time.

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DocSavag wrote:

I guess I need more explaination about why you would have massive amounts of items that take more than 30 days to sell.

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i think that is the problem Doc --- you dont really understand problem....

1) It isnt that All of our items are not selling.....some of them dont sell in 30...

As an example, I am a tailor.....I have say 100 items i could craft....so lets say i want to offer a selection and sell 50 of those....I craft widget A and make10 of them. I make them in red, blue, green, yellow, white and black....maybe the whites and blacks sell quickly but the others dont....They will sell just it may take longer...but i still want to offer a selection to my customers

or i also sell specialty items...some are expensive, some are very specific...if i have an item that is enhanced for say Polearm, a perosn has to come in who wants an enhanced polearm item....it just may take a month or 2 for it to find the right customer...

I also only craft about once a month...so i make say 25 of an item....i might list them all at one time to save the effort of keeping the vendor restocked...i know they all will not sell immediatly but it keeps me from having to worry about it for say 3 or 4 months and micromanaging every item i sell

2) Multiple vendors ---- when you have 3 or more vendors this is what really makes this a problem.... say i have 4 vendors with 200 items each....i sell all but 25 items on each of them....when the limit is up that is still 100 total items i must relist

3) Variable Times --- this is what really makes it super annoying....i list things all the time...so all my items dont get unlisted at the same time.....I might have 25 items come off one day.....another 20 2 days later.....5 a few days after that....it becomes constant baby sitting....I have even tried to just let them sit in the disentigration chamber -- i believe you call it the stockroom - and just restock once a week but that just makes it complete drudgery

4) Variable Pricing --- I have sliced items that have all different stats though named the same....some fetch a much higher price...so i must view each item to relist

5) Horrible interface --- even 50 items can take an hour to relist -- much longer if there is lag

6) Bulk buys --- Many of my customers buy several items at once....like 10 at a time....so i need to have a good stock on hand..with harvetsoprs this is often driven by resource spawns...if a good gas spawns everyone wants gas extarctors....other months they might not sell at all

The thing is I have heard no compelling argument as to WHY we have limits....all that is ever said is the straw man storage mantra. While i can understand why the stock room should have a limit (should be 30 days) there is no reason that our listings should.

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Okeefe wrote:

"I guess I need more explaination about why you would have massive amounts of items that take more than 30 days to sell. I'm not saying you are doing anything wrong but it is not the way I have done it or seen it done so I don't have a frame of reference to articulate the issue. I've seen posts claiming to have to reprice hundreds of items at a time. Why would you have such a large inventory of items that aren't selling month after month? "

because, no matter how many items you stock a certain percentage is not going to sell, every month. Not the SAME items, just more items. So if you have 6 vendors with an average of 500 items each, for a total of 3000 items, and if you sell even 90% you will still have 300 times per month that have to be relisted. Now, if your lucky you can spread that out over the whole month.

exactly

Our group has aWeaponsmith, Armorsmith, Artisan, Smuggler, and Combat medic, all ofwhich have the capability of producing items for resale. This makes forlarger numbers than the ones in the example above. I know of vendors with over 2000 items on them, I, luckily don't have that many.

I can certainly see you having items that didn't sell but hundreds? Over and Over again? I'm missing some piece of the puzzle.

It's new items every month, does that make it easier to understand? They gave us FACTORIES!! you think we make production runs of 5 at a time? 50? 500? Personally, I use the factories only for subcomponents so I have lower inventories than most weaponsmiths, and yet I run into this. Not only the items, but the "'beep' Auction unsuccessful" emails every few seconds hour after hour, day after day.

"I will tell you that simply telling me you think the devs are wrong about storage issues or misinformed etc is useless information to me. I could repeat that to the devs but it would be a complete waste of everyone's time. They believe what they believe and they have the access to test their theories in ways that we don't have.""

Yes, and as we all know thier ideas bear little or no semblance to anything we could loosely call reality.

i still havent seem any of their evidence that this is happening....the problem DID occur...i do not dispute this...but they made it so vendors can not be placed in private homes...

Lets have them tell you where they are getting their opinions from and what FACTS they base this opinion on.

"Their opinion is that items on a vendor are supposed to be sold. "

Thier 'opinion' is irrelelevant. Reality is what counts, and if the people playing here are being upset by their ideas and opinions, then they need to change them. If they can show us ANY hard goods industry in the world that sells 100% of it's inventory every 30 days they may have some basis for thier opinion.... I suspect that this was simply implemented with the same lack of thought as most parts of the game. Some of those ideasmay sound good on paper, but have no basis in real time play.

actaully ....most retail is now done that way...20 years ago there was a "stockroom" at most stores...they migt have what you are looking for in back...but in todays world of bar scanning and fedex, what you see is what you get....stores know exactly how many items they have and what is sold....if say Walmart is down to its last Widget a buy order is quickly generated and a new shipment shows up the next moring....

We dont have these tools....I am not a merchant because i enjoy baby sitting vendors...i am to the point now that I HATE VENDORS...they are nothing but drudgery

"They gave us 7 days originally and we lobbied for months to get it changed to 30. I'd wager that getting it raised higher than that will be a tough sell and before we try to sell it we need some examples of why it is a big issue and what game play issuesare driving the request."

Ican't even imagine the lunacy that prompted them to set it at 7 days....

Because they copy and pasted the Bazaar code! it was just plain laziness

As with most aspects of this game. no thought, whatsoever, was put into customer service, or how the various parts of the game would add to , or detract from the 'fun' aspect. What has happened is that the game has turned out to be tedious and dull. It's more like dialing in to work.

The BIG question to ask SOE, is WHAT DID YOU EXPECT US TO DO AT THE END OF THE 30 DAYS??????

I think they also forget that this game is "mature" now...there are more people leaving than joining...each passing month it seems to take longer and longer to sell some things

If they can answer that, then the rest may make sense, but I doubt it.

As for features to make re-listing things easier I think that is possible and I would assume that any sensible redesign of the interface would include batch processing of multiple items at the same time. That will help with the job of re-listing items.

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LadyGrey wrote:

The biggest issue that exists, in regard to vendors, is that most people really really want to buy items from the bazaar. They don't want to run all over the place, going from shop to shop, looking for a particular item. They want to be able to just go to the bazaar, look at the listings, and choose what they need. However, the bazaar limits a person to an extremely small offering, where we can only put up 25 items for sale in the entire galaxy. I could easily sell100 items per week in nearly every city in the galaxy. But, since I'm not allowed to do that, I set up a chain of stores, which most players really would rather not use (because the bazaar is much more convenient). And having a chain of stores, spread out all over the place, requires massive amounts of stock. One of the most common complaints about vendors is if they are empty. Empty vendors are bad vendors. So crafters are forced to overstock their vendors in order to keep the customer base happy. That is what drives the number of items on a vendor, is making sure there are a lot of items for customers to choose from.

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this is so very true...i rarely buy from vendors...i have going into laggy stores and having to browse through 15 vendors (which all seem to be stocking basically the same items)...i only goto vendors i am familiar with or that have items that have been placed on them specifically for me...

Inever use the "map" to find items....if i need a resource or an item i find it on the bazaar then contact the seller and make a deal for the quantity i need

I could make 100X as much money selling clothes on the Bazaar....

but as you say there is the 25 item limit

There is also the PAIN of how it calculates this item limit....if i buy something then i cant sell an item..so say i need to restock the Bazaarbut i have bought 10 items, i have to travel around the galaxy picking those items upand then restock the Bazaar...i spent 8 hours on friday doing this very thing

or If i offer something on someone vendors this alos counts against those limits

wouldnt simply making the vendors "Searchable" alleviate the map problem....

i think we are solving the wrong problem with the wrong solution....

it would be better if instead of listing on the Planet Map, the vendors merch got listed on the bazaar....then you could do your shopping from 1 location and only run to the vendors that had the item you where looking for....i just see the planet listing like the yellow pages

i mean in real life i dont spend all day saturday driving from store to store.....i will check the internet for pricing.....try 1-2 stores...call ahead before i drive across town...

an additional solution would be to list the OWNERS of the vendor on the map as well....that way you could message them before wasting the trip

another solution would be to improve the galactic commodities market so most buying and selling of resoucres is done thru the bazaar...not this silly 500 units for 6k crap but a real market that you can buy 100k at X pu withoout have to wade thru 19 pages and buy 20 differnt lots of something

but even if "EMPTY" vendors where dropped you still dont know it it has what you need or is just selling 5 broken electo binoculars..i just dont see how dropping vendors from the map solves the problem

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DocSavag wrote:

What made you settle of 50 as the unit you put on the vendor at any one time? Do you try to keep the number at 50 or do you put 50 and then let the item count slowly go down? Do you restock at specific intervals or do you monitor the inventory daily or weekly?

Do you think that better sales tracking tools would help you manage your inventory better? Aside from unlimited sales time what other features would make this process easier for you? (I think multiple re-listing at the original price is obvous..are there other things that would help?)

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50= 1 factory crate of med supplies

I restock 50 when I notice that I am out or near out. I had tried putting up 5/10 at a time but the crafting got annoying, factories were easier. Also sometimed items (like stim b's) would sell to 1 person in 10 min and clean out my inventory of the item

a for items that would help. Um how about a remote control for a vendor. when I get 10 e-mails saying a acution was unsuccessful it don't help any when I am 3 planets form my vendor.

I don't need the ability to reteieve items form my vendor remotely but relist items would be a big help. also the ability to relist at the previous listing price instead of having to look it up.

Remote management isn't something we have asked about alot. I'm thinking it would be possible thought it might be tricky technically doing it without an actual vendor tied into the "network" I'll ask about that.

The ability to put things back up for sale at the original price I agree is a must as is doing so in mass (batch) those are all things I hope get included in the revamp of the interface.

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LadyGrey wrote:

DocSavag wrote:

I guess I need more explaination about why you would have massive amounts of items that take more than 30 days to sell. I'm not saying you are doing anything wrong but it is not the way I have done it or seen it done so I don't have a frame of reference to articulate the issue. I've seen posts claiming to have to reprice hundreds of items at a time. Why would you have such a large inventory of items that aren't selling month after month?

OK, why would I have such a large inventory of items that aren't selling month after month? I'm making low-cost items, such as shoes and sandals (using that as an example), and selling them for 500 credits each. They are worth 500 credits, no more and no less. I have a chain of stores, spread out over several planets. I stock about 24 of each shoe that I sell, in each vendor. I don't expect to sell all of them, but I need to have a lot on each vendor in case there are a lot of people buying shoes for some reason, plus not having to travel all over the place restocking every few days. I can't afford to set up a vendor with less than a thousand items on it, of all sorts of items. I'm not selling sets of armor for 100k plus, I'm selling things like shoes for 500 credits each.

I can certainly see you having items that didn't sell but hundreds? Over and Over again? I'm missing some piece of the puzzle.

Well, my customers don't bother looking to see which items have been on the vendor the longest, so are just as apt to buy what I just put on, as to buy what has been on there since I set up the vendor. As to the number of items, just think about having two dozen of each personal harvester (there are six personal harvesters), two dozen of each type of low-end clothing (shoes, gloves, helmet, belt, bandolier, pants, shirts, skirt, robe, etc.), two dozen boxes of droid batteries, two dozen each of different size boxes (not everyone wants to buy a crate of 50) of stim-A's, B's, and C's, plus the wound healing packs, bounty hunter droids, CDEF weapons (pistol, carbine and rifle), crafting tools (generic and specialty, and several different grades of each), surveying instruments, vehicles (three different kinds, at last count).

I will tell you that simply telling me you think the devs are wrong about storage issues or misinformed etc is useless information to me. I could repeat that to the devs but it would be a complete waste of everyone's time. They believe what they believe and they have the access to test their theories in ways that we don't have. Their opinion is that items on a vendor are supposed to be sold. They gave us 7 days originally and we lobbied for months to get it changed to 30. I'd wager that getting it raised higher than that will be a tough sell and before we try to sell it we need some examples of why it is a big issue and what game play issuesare driving the request.

I have never seen any explanation from the devs as to what they actually thought the vendors would be used for, that is, what dynamics they thought were going to occur. Information should be going both ways. However, it seems that a lot of information about the dynamics of the game is treated as "top-secret" and shouldn't be shared with players, because somehow that would "give away" the suspense of playing this game. So players have had to figure out their own ways of using vendors. The biggest issue that exists, in regard to vendors, is that most people really really want to buy items from the bazaar. They don't want to run all over the place, going from shop to shop, looking for a particular item. They want to be able to just go to the bazaar, look at the listings, and choose what they need. However, the bazaar limits a person to an extremely small offering, where we can only put up 25 items for sale in the entire galaxy. I could easily sell100 items per week in nearly every city in the galaxy. But, since I'm not allowed to do that, I set up a chain of stores, which most players really would rather not use (because the bazaar is much more convenient). And having a chain of stores, spread out all over the place, requires massive amounts of stock. One of the most common complaints about vendors is if they are empty. Empty vendors are bad vendors. So crafters are forced to overstock their vendors in order to keep the customer base happy. That is what drives the number of items on a vendor, is making sure there are a lot of items for customers to choose from.

The dynamics that were created by people having vendors is much more complicated than whatever was envisioned by the devs. And because of the poor implementation of the controls for using a vendor (for instance, it takes months before players learn that there is more than one page of items per vendor), the merchants have had to "make-do" with however they can manage.

You know, merchants would really like to be able to sell everything they put on their vendors, but the economy fluctuates, and people sometimes have a lot of money, and sometimes don't. And there will be times when there are lots of new players, and there will be times with very few new players. Some of my stores go for a month just selling a few items, and sometimes will sell several hundred items in a week. Depends on the economy, migration routes, moon cycles, and fads. You can't just say that I need to lower my prices, because my prices don't fluctuate, just my sales do. I just keep relisting the items as they fall off the vendors, and eventually they will sell. But I will keep adding to how much I have, in order to keep the stock up, in order to never have an empty vendor, in order to keep my customers happy. So in the end, I will always have to keep relisting items. It seems like the same items, because I keep the same things in stock all of the time, and I don't know whether one pair of shoes has been there for six months, or one month. It is just a pair of shoes.

As for features to make re-listing things easier I think that is possible and I would assume that any sensible redesign of the interface would include batch processing of multiple items at the same time. That will help with the job of re-listing items.

There have been a lot of really good suggestions made on the forums about how to improve vendors. The only one I have seen implemented was to have the time limit increased from 7 days to 30 days. It would certainly help the merchant community to have some sort of active debate with the devs themselves, about what should or should not be done about vendors. We debate amongst ourselves, out here in the forums, but never once have I seen anything that would indicate that the devs themselves would be willing to have interaction with the players on making decisions that will affect how the game is played. I don't know if that is done on purpose. I suppose that you, the correspondent, are supposed to be our intermediary. But from your comments, Doc, and with all due respect, I don't really feel comfortable with your understanding of the real issues going on. Nothing I have mentioned above is going to be new information for any of the merchants, but seems to be the first you have heard of it. I would venture to say, Doc, that your playing style as a crafter may be a bit different than others. That isn't bad, but you may be making assumptions about the rest of us that are not valid.

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Since the devs refuse to have a legitimate, adult discussion with their player base we can assume anything we want.

To take freaking vacation and participate in this game as a merchant I have to literally have someone else log in and manage my account because the devs have zero foresight into, I don't know, the real world.

I am an architect as Fivo, primarily. It cost more time and effort to make things one at a time when I can do factory runs and not have to craft EACH AND EVERY TIME I log in. Not to mention if I don't usea factory literally half my products are scrapped due to even one failure in experimentation.

As a fighter type, I could have 5 houses down holding 750 items. UNDER THE RULES AS EXPLAINED BY TH, I can dump a YEARS maintenance into the houses and walk away, fully able to expect that nothing happens to my structures since I paid the maintenance. Merchants cannot get this feature in any manner -- further indicating that devs truly make crafting gruelsome and not fun as they have no visible insight into the game from a crafter's point of view that I can see. TH mentions that he grinds an architect and "tests" him. I played an architect and merchant solid since Sept 2003. We may disagree on issues for reasons I am not privy to or not, but I am far more qualified to provide insight into Architect AND ESPECIALLY Merchant issues than any of their staff testers, IMO.Making a batch of personal miners and throwing them on a vendor once or twice means squat. I have sold well over 10,000 deeds in this game, not to mention furniture. I fundamentally deal with 1 to 2 hours a night loading the vendor by hand because the devs will not DEVELOP an interface for batch uploading items from my inventory.

Frustrating.

Fivo Asia