Merchant Archive

Ok, I am a merchant in this game. I have many vendors and a nice little shop. I spend about 20% of my time explaining to people who buy things from my vendors and are unable to retrieve them or use them once retrieved, that sometimes the vendors do strange things.

For example, a person bought 10,000 credits worth of fiber plast from me. I worked hard to provide it, and the buyer worked hard for the credits to purchase it. When the person bought it from me, it was not retreivable. I had to explain once again that sometimes these things happen. Wait 24 hours and try again, if it does not work then contact sony.

I considered giving him a refund, but heres the proble with that. If I give a refund of 10k, I will not be able to get the merchandise back to resell. If I dont give a refund my reputation as a vendor may suffer, because of sonys inability or unwillingness to address this issue.

How do all of you other merchants handle this scenario?

For a 10k purchase Sony would have to handle it.

For smaller purchases I have eaten the cost of the merchandise to keep the cusomter happy. Luckily usually they are able to retrieve the merchandise after a couple of tries and I don't have to deal with this problem too much.

Tonight I can't even add merchandise the vendors are so lagged.

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MorrisMandrake wrote:

How do all of you other merchants handle this scenario?

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I handled it by not being a Merchant anymore. If everyone else "solved" this problem the same way, these bugs might actually get fixed.

It was my understanding that vendors would be limited to "items" priced at $3,000 credits, the same limit as applies to the Bazaar.

Could this be the source of thebug, items priced too high somehow got in and now cannot be removed?

Crellian of The Consortium

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Crellian wrote:

It was my understanding that vendors would be limited to "items" priced at $3,000 credits, the same limit as applies to the Bazaar.

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Uh, no. If that was correct, why would vendors exist, and who would use them? Everything would simply be sold on the Bazaar.

The reason the Bazaar is capped at 3k is to give the Merchant and his vendors a reason to exist.

One guy bought 24k worth of resources from me, and said he could not retrieve. After the second day of listening to his complaints and threats to kill my vendors, I couldn't take the irritation any more so I bought his silence. I gave him half of what he lost in resources, against his promise to share any refund he got.

Sharing the pain seemed fair to him. Didn't feel fair to me -- he doesn't pay when I lose items in my stockroom.

Next time I will insist onthe customersupplying at least 3 valid CSR ticket numbers before I even listen to his complaint, maybe 10. Let SOE share by paying somebody to read his complaints.

Yea I'm not eating 24k unless this guy is a regular customer with a LOT of businesses. Otherwise he and I both are going to be spamming CS with tickets until they fix it.

Just how do you know they did not get it?

/tell ShopownerHey I bought your 24k gun and I can not get it....give me my cash back

/tell customer ok, here ya go sorry about the bug I will give you 24k back to customer

/tell shopowner HA HA Ijust took thisshop owner for 24kall I had to do was say I couldnotretrive the item and he gave me my money back...what loser

/tell customer what was that...did you get the item?

/tell shopowner oh sorry that was a miss tell, ah it was not about you really

makes you think....about giving the cash back

When items are not retrievable a click on refresh helps most of the time

Ok, after a few weeks of getting used to the "Hey whats with your vendors" question heres how I handle it.

• Tell them to wait 24 hrs if they retreived it and it poofed


• Contact sony after 24 hrs if the item is not ther


• Explain that I cannot be responsible for sony's bugs

• If they cannot retreive the item, I tell them to try to retreive from details window, wait a few seconds


• If after a few seconds they cant get their stuff then have them try again


• If all else fails, you guessed it, contact sony

And to be honest, it has not hurt business at all. I have over well over 300k of inventory instock at any given time. I have suppliers that grind away. Why wouldnt they when I am buying 50k of probots once a week from them, or whatever.

I have run into the occasional scenario, "oops I bought the wrong thing." If its a droid, I give a discount on their next droid, and they are usually happy. If was a brand new E11 and they wanted the vibro knuckles instead, i give a refund if item is in its original quality.

Now if they could just get planetary advertising to re-register daily I would be a happy merchant.

Thanks to everyone for their opinions.

I've sold thousands of item from 6 vendors. I've yet to have 1 cannot retreive item issue yet. It must be something your doing to cause that. I know resources have this issue but weapons is my business. After thousands of weapons sold zero had this issue. Just seems weird to me plus I know 3 other weaponsmiths none have had this happen to them. I use terminals and npcs for vendors.

I have not had this issue in quite some time now. It could be due to server performance issues that might have been cleared up.

It also seemed like this would only happen with items that were pulled from crates as well, so I think a few things were patched in that respect as well.

So thankfully I have not had to deal with this issue in the past few weeks.