Merchant Archive

Please use an example... I am lost...

Does it charge me daily per item or is it a one time fee?

If I withdraw my sale do I get charged?

What percentage is the fee calculated on?

If this is a stable fee then I can pass on the fee to the consumer.

I wish I knew all the details myself...

All I know is that it is somehow based on the value of the items listed on your vendor. So if you post 1 item for 100 cr. the maintenance will be significantly less than if you posted it for 100,000 cr. It is charged in minutes, just like harvesters. You must prepay your maintenance monies, and it slowly eats away at whatever you paid into it... if it runs out, it starts to degrade... eventually destroying itself, and everything you have in it.

What the actual formula is is beyond me.

ARGH!!!! I had quite a long post, and forgot to copy it before I posted!!!! Got the stupid DNS/server not found error, and lost the entire post... %#%#%^%#$#$

Ok... reposting it in a shorter form.

For Droid and Terminal vendors, this is the formula I've determined:

Maintenance_Cost_per_hour = 1 + (Total_value_of_items / 1000 )

So if you have 0 items, cost is 1/hr. If you have 1 item worth 1000 creds, cost is 2 creds, if you have 5 items worth 200 each, totalling 1000, cost is also 2 creds each.

A total value of 100,000 would be 101 credits/hr

Items in stockroom (attached to that vendor) affect the price as well, but I haven't determined a formula for how they do so exactly.

NPC vendors are (probably bugged) 1 cred/hr regardless of what you put on them.

Things such as Efficiency 2, planetary advertising, and master merchant affect the maintenance cost positively or negatively.

Vendors with a maintenance cost showing as 0 due to efficiency are not ACTUALLY 0, they just cost less than 1 per hour... the client rounds, so I believe this value almost always has a decimal portion that is not visible, which may or may not be factored into the paranthetic remaining time indicator... I do know, if it says 0, the client assumes it will never run out and does not show you how long your maintenance pool will last, but the pool does still drop, slowly.

---

JMnITup wrote:

NPC vendors are (probably bugged) 1 cred/hr regardless of what you put on them.

---

Is that a fact? All I use is NPC vendors... If this is a fact then I am in fat city for a short time. If I build an NPC vendor today will I be locked into the 1 credit/hr slot?

BTW the current cost of running a NON PC vendor right now sound insane. There isn't a way to afford that as you could have an item on your inventory for a good while.

SOE needs to fix that to a one time fee or something easier to deal with.

Well, if they don't fix existing vendors to the new rate, then yeah.... however, they may make an update that fixes existing AND new vendors, in which case you'd be affected... supposedly, this is already fixed and new NPC vendors account for items, but I haven't been able to test... too much of a pain to take EVERYTHING off of a vendor (and invariably have 1/4 of it get stuck unretrievable), destroy the vendor (lose the stuck goods to limbo), remake a new vendor, and place it, then figure out what to charge on all the items you removed... THEN delete the 9 million emails you got from removing the items...

Not to mention you just lost a cheap as heck vendor for one that costs way too much lol

I would like to know how much Eff2 helps the cost and yer also supposed to get a vendor price reduction at master merchant if anyone has actually trained that far to find out how well that helps. I'd also like to kind of know how much the discount for eff4 helps with planetary advertising if anyone knows that=P

If the reduced bazaar rates are any indication of reduced vendor rates... then the price would presumable be 1 cred + 1 cred for every 1200 of total value instead of 1000... not sure if that helps a ton but I suppose given the incredible amount would help. (also not sure if the master would give the same 20% discount of 200 or 20% of 1200 which would bring it up another 240, almost 1 cred per 1500 which I do think is a pretty nice sized cost reduction.)

I created a bazaar-terminal-style vendor to sell resources, since NPCs are bugged for those. I loaded everything into the terminal, checked the Status, and had a heart-attack. It was going to charge me 10,000 credits a DAY.

I simply pulled everything back out and locked my doors. The Devs put me out of business.