Merchant Archive

well, glad i read this thread, because they (the dev's) wont fix what is broken, they just made up my mind, i am not going to get a vendor, to think i was.

i have a medium house and it is costing me about 900 credits on average a day. i said, what the heck is that all about? am thinking of getting rid of it and having no house at all, think of it this way, if more people think like me, not buy a house cause of wicked high maintanance fees, then no one will need to buy furniture to decorate them, putting the architecs out of business.

i am an adult , not a child playing this game,i work for a living, a blue collar worker,900 bucks a day rent does not sit right with me, no matter what you say, and it doesnt even have cable

BTW Holo, I seriously doubt you have even come back to read this thread, but ill try anyhow.

If you input this now, and arent fixing factories and the other 400 bugs centered around the Merchant / Architect / Chef line, just how do you suppose we are supposed to make a living at all?

I challenge you to give me any shred of information regarding financial stability, and how it would even be remotely possibly to mantain any form of income.

Oh, and thanks for breaking us before even coming close to fixing us.

Vendor maintenance fees calculated by this formula are completely unfair to merchants who:

- keep their vendors well stocked

- sell quality items (because quality items are higher priced)

- are attempting to sell items in low traffic areas

Chargea maintenance fee for vendors in the same way harvesters or houses have maintenance fees: a fixed amount. Or usea sales tax.

Or just eliminate the merchant profession and eliminate the limits on the bazaar. No one will play a merchant if vendor fees are calculated in a manner that penalizes good merchants.

Jamga Gibbrad (Ex-merchant because of unfixed vendor bugs)

Yeah, if this goes through I'm pulling up stakes and becomming a combat profession with my remaining skill points. Doesn't cost me ANY money whatsoever to become a combat profession except maybe one weapon purchase a week. And not too mention considering I'm a weaponsmith, I will just craft my own weapons for months on end and just rake in the mission cash with absolutely NO money sinks to me at all. No house, no harvestors, no vendors, no nothing...just pure mission profit. Oh yeah, Wookiee too, so no armor and relatively no clothing.

You know, it's funny how idiots get high paying jobs...but I've met tons of people that would make really sharp developers and they are left playing a crappy game instead of helping to design a good one.

Maint on items right now seems pretty high as is. I am strongly against any daily maint costs on vendors and I do not have any artisan in me whatsoever.

***************It's just that I know that whatever fee you levy will simply be passed onto ME as a buyer in the form of higher prices.****************

Which are already too **edit** high and as far as I am concerned it already takes an inordinate amount of income to own a **edit** thing in this game

Keep adding fees and taxes. Sooner or later you will tax people right out of the game.

As a Merchant I feel that this class is largely worthless at this point. It is too easy for other players to place their own vendors and not need our services. Our advertising is lacking and our custimization control on our vendors needs some work. For the vendor maintenance fees I hope that these will be drastically reduced for merchants and raised for non merchant vendors. Hopefully this will go some way towards making us a viable profession.

We badly need GUILD ONLY VENDORS!

that fees are needed.....sure

the way theyyou want to implement them...... :\ :/

they are going the quick and dirty way in using the same time/value system as for houses/harvesters

there are better ways

-constant daily upkeep

-% provision on sale

-one time fee on vendor placement

-% provision on putting stuff on vendor (no reimburse if owner retrieves item back)

mix any of those together to get a descent amount of credits.

the 1/1000 every 45 minutes system discriminates merchants that work with a low turnaround and/or items that are recognized semi-beneficial (foodstuff anyone?)

maybeyou want to make the merchant class a REAL CLASS and not only a sidekick class that every artisan has.........who knows. would make sense though.

Okay I got to comment again Got so mad I could not think straight

Do you realize that my weaponsmith (the guy I buy from) has at this moment well over 200k in items, maybe well over a half mill on his vendor?? When you tax on a per value basis, you kill off any chance that anyone is gonna keep much on his vendor at all, which means I will have a hard time finding what I need.

You will create a shortage of crafted supplies and move the sales to transactions that are between people to people. It will cause a shift to a "create on demand" where you have to find and contact the proper arstisan for you needs and then wait till they make it for you, instead of visiting your local artisan's vendor and browsing.

DO NOT TAX vendors. We are already taxed on the raw resources. WE DO NOT NEED MORE TAXES. If you want amoney sink, use your imagination instead of brute force please

The best deals are often had a low volume lesser know vendors. Your proposal will eliminate those folks until what is left is a relative few "known" vendors charging through the nose prices.

The best way to compete when you have a fixed top end of quality is by price. Charging vendor maint will insure that becomes much more difficult

I agree with the percentage tax based method. However, apply it not only to vendors, but to the Bazaar too.

For example, instead of charging 20 credits per bazaar sale (a pitiful amount), charge 10% (or so) of the sale price. Then, with Business IV (bazaar tax reduction), you can decrease the tax to 7%. With vendors, make the tax 5% with no skill enhancements. With Management I, make it 3%, and so on and so forth.

You can change the numbers, but you get the idea. The current system of fixed costs or hourly costs doesn't work well at all.

If you're worried about people using their vendors as stockrooms, then simply put a max item limit on the vendors and have it increase based on a merchant skill or two. Then maybe merchant skills will actually be useful (har har).

Well i doubt anyone will read all 22 pages but here goes.

There should be a fixed fee per vendor - say 1k a day.

The first 100,000 in merchandise per vendor is free.

Then apply the (total-100,000)/1000 fee if need be. This way the new guy merchant isnt crushed.

However, I hope everyone realizes why they wont implement a pure sales tax system. Database.

They don't want people storing items on vendors at insane prices to get around the 75 per lot limit. Its pretty obivous.

If it was sales tax you could store all your stuff on your vendor for $100,000 each as your own personal bank.

Yes you'll you loose 20% profit from selling items on your vendor for 500. However part of the reason for this proposed nerf is the database problems. That fee is somewhat designed to keep loads of small items off the market. However there are 2 options for people selling those items.

Firstly there is the bazaar which will list 25 for only 20 credits for all items up to 3000 credits.

Secondly you can make them in crates of 10 i believe it is now that listing fee is spread out to only 10 credits per stim. I am not certain but i believe all items in a crate or of a factory run contain the same serial number as they are all identicaldecreasing the load on the DB which from SOEs point of view can only be a good thing.

the commision increases the size of the money sink because its better then having either a higher listing fee which would eliminate all low end stuff being sold and definately better then the proposed maintainence change which would kill all merchants whose inventory doesn't sell out every day.

I am not sure maybe a 50 credit listing fee would be more appropriate. The 100 credit fee is designed to try and limit people from dropping every item they have into the vendor as storage. while its not a super large fee if a person wants to put say 100 items on their vendor its 10k credits a week.

Seems I’m getting in on this at the tail end, but I’ll put in my two cents anyway

Quote: We are currently planning for the formula to be: Total Listed Value of Items on Vendor / 1000 every 45 minutes

If my math is correct this is how it looks. I’m sure someone will let me know if it isn’t

Value / 1000 = 0.001 credit every 45 minutes.

1440 minutes a day / 45 minutes = 32 times a day.

32 x 0.001 = 0.032 credits per 1 credit value a day.

Am I right so far? I hope so

Lets look at this scenario: I make a small Tatooine house deed to place on my vendor.

Because people on my server sell them so cheap I can’t sell for more than 10,000 credits (To me unless you belong to a PA and resources are easy to get you lose money selling it for 10,000 credits).

0.032 x 10,000 credits = 320 credits each day deed stays on vendor.

320 credits x 7 days = 2,240 credits a week.

If the deed stays on my vendor for a week it will cost me cost me 2,240 credits in vendor fees just for that one item. At the end of one week the deed is still sitting on my vendor and I’ve lost 2,240 credits.

What do I do with it now, do I sell it for 7,760 credits (10,000 – 2,240) or do I leave it on vendor to pay even more fees?

If I leave it on the vendor I’ll lose even more money, eventually it will be worthless.

If I lower the price to 7,760 credits I just as well give up and move to the poor house.

Keep in mind this is just one item. I personally only sell small houses on my vendors but have to keep four deeds on her because of house types and styles.

To me, having vendor fees work this way won’t help the economy of the game. We as Merchants and Crafters need to be able to set a normal market value for an item such as this small house. This is not to say you can’t charge higher or have sales to sell lower. With 200, 300 or even more different items on vendors how will you ever know what it cost you for vendor fees?

What the economy needs (at least on my server) is for crafters to realize the value of what they make. Architects are a good example of this. A small house should be worth a minimum of 15,000 credits and that is still low if you consider the cost of collecting resources, buying resources, failed attempts at making it and profit. I sell small houses for 10,000 credits. This is not because I want to but because people are selling them for 8,000 just for the sale. Credits are easy to make in SWG. I can do five delivery missions and make the 10,000 credits to buy a house.

What has this to do with vendor fees? Well let’s see. I sell a small house for 10,000 on my vendor. If you increase vendor fees I’ll have to increase the price to make up for it. You could say that’s good for getting selling price up and helping the economy, but does it? If I raise the price to 12,000 the guy next door to me says, "Wait, if I sell for 10,000 I won’t pay as much in vendor’s fee" so he sells his for 10,000. Now the guy without a vendor says "Wow, I don’t have to pay any vendor fees so I’ll go sit on his doorstep and sell mine for 8,000".

Vendor fees have to be added to the profit/loss calculation when setting a price. If you have one vendor with ten items it probably would work. But with six vendors and hundreds of items there is no way.

If you want customers you’ll have to keep items on your vendors that may takea week or longer to sell. Even if you specialize in certain items like Armor or Weapons you must keep low-level items on vendors to draw customers. There’s a good chance if someone buys from you at low level they will come back later.

I sell a lot of furniture and would like to craft only high-end furniture myself and purchase low end from those learning. This would not only benefit me but also help him/her make money. I’d have to buy the item at a decent price so that I could add a small percentage for my profit. How could I do this if the item doesn’t sell right away? Not only do I lose profit but also what I actually paid.

In real life you have those that are paid a salary, by the hour or paid a commission. In most cases those paid commissions are the one’s that really have to hustle sales. They like working on commission because the more they hustle the more they earn. Well I don’t think vendors fall under that category, they do nothing but stand there and hold items for sale. Make a droid I can stock and send out tohustle my goods and commission would be ok. You may say this type fee isn’t a commission but it really is.The more items the vendor sells the more items I keep on it and the more money it makes.

I could go on and on about this subject but it seems the powers that be have their minds made up so we’ll have to live with it. I just hope its low enough where we don’t take big loses and have to live in that poor house.

This is a little off the subject but it’s something I’d like to see. It would be so nice if our vendors were like those in UO. They collect the money from sales and you collect it from them.

I sell from 40,000 to 80,000+ credits a day of items. I spend all my online hours checking extractors, crafting items and filling vendors. There is also the time I spend running back and forth to town restocking and purchasing items at the bazaar. There are so many times I’ve felt I was thousands of credits short but there was no way to prove it since all money goes into bank account. I can’t stop after each sale to balance my account. If each vendor held the sales money we could check them once a day and compare items they sold to the money they collected.