Merchant Archive

If I understand it correctly, only the owner of a building (the character who placed it) can place Vendors in it.

Before you comment on anything else I say here can you please confirm whether this is true. I am relatively new to the Merchant professions.

This presents me with a problem. I have a group of friends and together we want torun a chain of shops. So far we have one on Corellia and one on Naboo. As the future Master Merchant of the outfit I don't want the others wasting skill points on Merchant skills, or even the Business discipline of Artisan.

We plan to own one building each. I will provide the Vendors and they will provide the products. However, it seems that unless I own the buildings it is not possible for me to provide "Vendor support" for the business.

Solution One

I could place all the buildings myself, place then Vendors, give them administrative access and then leave it to them to manage. However, this will not allow them to "drop" stuff. It is important that the manager of the store can place furniture and decorations; store resources, tools and items; display products and move things around. This is not possible if I am the building "owner" right?

Solution Two

Can I pass the "Vendor" from my inventory to theirs through a trade? Then the Vendor counts against my Vendor tally but they can place it in their building with full ownership rights/access.

Is this possible? I have not had time to try it yet.

Please help, I am not too bothered at the moment by the general bugginess of the Merchant profession but I am having big issues with working out how me and my friends can run the business we have been planning for so long.

Solution Three

Can I place a Vendor in a building owned by someone else if I am on their admin list? If so, will they have full access rights to the Vendor?

This would be an acceptable solution but I prefer Solution Two.

Apologies, I didn't see this earlier. Anyhow, we solved this in beta- how you do it is this.

First player places house
drops vendor
/transferstructure (targetting second player)

second player drops vendor
/transferstructure (targetting third player)

and so on.

Excellent. I will have to try this on the weekend.

If anyone else has suggestions or ideas I would still love to hear them.

As far as I know, this is a bug. Clearly the most important thing for merchants to be able to do is to place other people's vendors in their houses. That's just plain huge. It's the foundation of the de facto 'merchant' class in UO -- running vendor malls.