Merchant Archive

I'm writing a windows application to keep track of customers. Basically the initial idea is that I wanted something really simple to retain a list ofcustomersthat I'd like to send a weekly newsletter to and have it produce the names in a format that I could copy and paste into the swg email sender address. I'm not sure how other people send their newsletters out, but adding all my customers to my friends list is not an option.

So far it's very simple, but does what I intended it to do. But I'd like to release this to the public if there is interest. If so, this project could have much more potential.

Here's a screenshot of 1.0 so you can see what it looks like.

http://www.project-xbot.com/swg/customertracker.gif

Post here if you would even be interested in using it, and if you have ideas. If no one is interested I'll probably just leave it simple like I have it now.

I would want it to create a list for sending the newsletter. It would have to create multiple lines for cutting and pasting that are limited to the number of characters that the to field allows.

Neat idea. Right now I just keep track of bazaar vs vendor purchase and if the purchased power.

Right now it creates the list for sending the newsletter, and you can have it send to everyone, or filter for people who buy weapons, armor, droids, whatever you filter it on. My next move was to make it split the list up for how many characters fits on the send field allows.. but I dont know what the limit is. Have any idea what the limit is?

well under the comunity tab>friends list,you can g-mail all that are slected,and using ctrl-c ctrl-v you can copy and past into the messige field.

but this would require that you add new costmers to your buddy list...right now youll get a messige when there online witch can get anoying,ut the new chat fitures will help this as you can toggle that off perpersion,along with put a coment next to each name.

as an answer to your question the limit to names on g-mail....i just sent one to 30+ people

good luck with your program

well under the comunity tab>friends list,you can g-mail all that are slected,and using ctrl-c ctrl-v you can copy and past into the messige field.

but this would require that you add new costmers to your buddy list...right now youll get a messige when there online witch can get anoying,ut the new chat fitures will help this as you can toggle that off perpersion,along with put a coment next to each name.

as an answer to your question the limit to names on g-mail....i just sent one to 30+ people

good luck with your program

Right... yeah, this program was written so I wouldn't have to muck up my friends list. I can see how the new friends list they are implementing would help because you can turn off notifcations for certain people (customers!)

any other ideas?

It's a good idea and I have used a couple of programs that make life easier. Let me think for a bit on this.

How about these?

Making it easier for inputting data byusing acut-and-paste from the vendor-sale email
1.) Have the user 'copy' the text of the vendor-sale email in-game.
2.) Have the user 'paste' that text into an entry field in your program.
3.) The program will parse out from the text and enter automatically the following info:
a.) customer name
b.) what they bought
c.)how much they paid
d.) which vendor they bought from (helps to know which store they bought at)

I like it!

Would it be possible to also track what customers have bought? I also sell energy and I would love to be able to clearly see everytime they have bought, exactly what they bought, and for how much.

Aegyen

I've been thinking how to design and app along these lines recently too. But my focus has been on inventory management and reporting. Tracking customers tho is a goodaddition to that...

If only they would make the emails locally stored, then it could be a simple matter of pressing a button torecord what was bought that day and churn out a list of exactly what to restock, while auto-tracking all the numbers.

But even copy/paste would ease much of the current current inventory pain.

While I dont really want to see anything of importance locally STORED, it would be great if there was some sort of local MIRROR of ingame data ( changing the files should have no effect on the in-game data )

Like :

• Emails


• Waypoints


• Friends list

This could then be read and synced to a local database, and in turn used by a number of different apps.

In addition I'd like to see a full guild list in XML format on this website, similar to the People of Rubi-Ka listings in AO. Makes guild management much easier.

I have a number of ideas for autoprocessing of various emails, some for trade purposes and some for guild purposes. But none are feasible if we arent allowed to access the data.

I suppose it is technically possible to sniff packets and decrypt traffic, but I'd prefer an "official" way, as "unofficial" ways tend to require frequent re-implementation.

I would actually like to have the inventory tracking system as well. If I could put what I have on my vendors in the system when I stock them.

Then (using my idea earlier regarding parsing the vendor sale emails) every time I enter an email, the system tracks my customers and lets me see my customer list and what they've bought.

Then the system takes the item, and removes it automatically from my vendor inventory. So I could know what my vendors have on them at any one time.

This solution would require the user to do a couple of things:

• The user must enter the name of items into the program EXACTLY as they would appear
  in the game's vendor inventory list. (like 'ErdInc-Slitherhorn' or 'Hilagemite (Carbonate Ore) 1498'


• The venor names entered into the program must match EXACTLY the in-game name so it
  matches the emails

But if the user carefully matches the information, he/she could know EXACTLY what is on each of his vendors at ANY moment as long as he kept the program updated when he added items to the vendor and whenever he receiveda vendor-sale email.

I hope this works and would love to have a program that offered me both inventory management and customer management in one program.

Please let me know if this doesn't make sense.