Merchant Archive
Thread: Reseller Objection/Game Design
My crafting operates in high-volume, low profit per item goods - these being Master Artisan components, powerups, BH Droids, and Chef foods. Sure, I sell a few big ticket items, but fundamentally the majority of my business is done by means of selling many smaller items. Everything I produce reaches true economies of scale when mass-produced in very large quantities. Right now I can sell/distribute off of my vendor which I acquired at Business 3, but if your proposals to change vendors to be Merchant only go through, I get stuck in a world of hurt.
As you should know, there's a tight limit on how many items one can offer to vendors and the bazaar simultaneously. This means that I can only offer 25 crates of 5 Seeker droids(for example) at a time, coming out of a production run which usually totals to around 200 crates. Now, in my present arrangement all of those crates of Seeker droids usually leave my vendor within a day as various outside agents come and pick them up. The Merchant who resells them picks them up at the time of their convenience or they don't get any product whatsoever.
This falls apart when I have to arrange reselling via offering to another person's vendor. It might be 5 minutes until they purchase the offering, or it might be several days - either way I have to spend much more time in distribution than I would have to engage in now - more than is reasonable for certain. The caps in the system place a heavy incentive on the crafter to produce minimally, and far out of economies of scale, simply because they cannot rely on the distribution chain functioning. It's completely out of their control.
In the real world, this isn't a problem - once the order is made, the manufacturer delivers regardless of whether the reseller can immediately handle the items, and from there on it's not their problem. Yet here it becomes a problem, because one reseller being out of sync destroys my ability to feed into a distribution chain without extreme obstacles. That's a major problem - a reseller being detained can completely end my production line. Which is terribly unfair to me, the honest crafter.
My items are mostly too expensive to move across the bazaar, even if the price cap is increased. And I feel that the costs of distribution ought to be born by the Merchant class rather than the individual crafter - you're making all of the money off of the resale already, after all. I assume the cost of production failures, resources, and energy to run the factories, what costs do you assume except those of distribution?
So how do you propose to square this situation in a manner that's fair to both sides? Because if I can no longer get time-efficient distribution, I'll simply stop crafting, and many other crafters would as well - it'd be a more cost-effective scenario for us to pick up weapons and do missions. Prices would soar, supply could never reach demand, and pretty soon you're out of business for lack of things to sell.
So how would you address this very important problem?
I've never had a problem with Merchant Reselling. When I was an Artisan I scouted out Merchants and established ongoing trade relations. So you want to sell without a merchant? Well what about all the people who want a vehicle without an artisan?
I live on Ahazi / Anchorhead, and now I have become quite good at merchanting myself I have started taking on business partners and buying their products in bulk.
If you want to be rich, you have to learn to make deals, and realise you are the manufacturer not the retailer. Approach a merchant and setup a deal. Don't do it through the offers. Have a mutual building where you both have admin to use as a warehouse.
Join a guild and supply them. Get organised! Theres any number of ways to get money for your loot.
Bark at stations, anything. It's possible but takes effort.
To make the big money though, you need others, teamwork and a strategy.
Salahsur wrote:
I know that the Merchant class was designed for reselling, and I wanted to throw something out there to object to the entire concept that crafters should be forced to sell by acquiring the Merchant class or else by having a merchant resell for them.
My crafting operates in high-volume, low profit per item goods - these being Master Artisan components, powerups, BH Droids, and Chef foods. Sure, I sell a few big ticket items, but fundamentally the majority of my business is done by means of selling many smaller items. Everything I produce reaches true economies of scale when mass-produced in very large quantities. Right now I can sell/distribute off of my vendor which I acquired at Business 3, but if your proposals to change vendors to be Merchant only go through, I get stuck in a world of hurt.
As you should know, there's a tight limit on how many items one can offer to vendors and the bazaar simultaneously. This means that I can only offer 25 crates of 5 Seeker droids(for example) at a time, coming out of a production run which usually totals to around 200 crates. Now, in my present arrangement all of those crates of Seeker droids usually leave my vendor within a day as various outside agents come and pick them up. The Merchant who resells them picks them up at the time of their convenience or they don't get any product whatsoever.
This falls apart when I have to arrange reselling via offering to another person's vendor. It might be 5 minutes until they purchase the offering, or it might be several days - either way I have to spend much more time in distribution than I would have to engage in now - more than is reasonable for certain. The caps in the system place a heavy incentive on the crafter to produce minimally, and far out of economies of scale, simply because they cannot rely on the distribution chain functioning. It's completely out of their control.
In the real world, this isn't a problem - once the order is made, the manufacturer delivers regardless of whether the reseller can immediately handle the items, and from there on it's not their problem. Yet here it becomes a problem, because one reseller being out of sync destroys my ability to feed into a distribution chain without extreme obstacles. That's a major problem - a reseller being detained can completely end my production line. Which is terribly unfair to me, the honest crafter.
My items are mostly too expensive to move across the bazaar, even if the price cap is increased. And I feel that the costs of distribution ought to be born by the Merchant class rather than the individual crafter - you're making all of the money off of the resale already, after all. I assume the cost of production failures, resources, and energy to run the factories, what costs do you assume except those of distribution?
So how do you propose to square this situation in a manner that's fair to both sides? Because if I can no longer get time-efficient distribution, I'll simply stop crafting, and many other crafters would as well - it'd be a more cost-effective scenario for us to pick up weapons and do missions. Prices would soar, supply could never reach demand, and pretty soon you're out of business for lack of things to sell.
So how would you address this very important problem?
I'll tell you what I did. I set up a small house (warehouse) for my main supplier and gave her admin rights. Every day she would drop by and leave crates for me which I would come by and pick up and put in the vendor. Once a day or every other day depending on our schedule she would drop by for a friendly chat and I would give her credits for the sale so far. I kept all the books and forwarded all the sale emails to her. I sucked at it and can do it much better now (that relationship ended because she retired from the professsion) but it is possible on a large scale.
Hand in hand with our desire to reduce the "vendor spam" 
are several proposals for making the offer screen alow more robust relationships between crafters and merchants. Including removing the stupid 24 item limit and making consignment sales safe and workable for both parties.
The relationships ARE possible with the current system but they require a great deal of work by the merchant (keepign track of the sales and the amounts to be paid and inventory management) anyone who says a retailer in this game isn't doing his share of the work should try it for a day and they wouldn't complain about the 10% they are giving up for the service.
For me to distribute a heavy day's worth of production it would take something like 1500 slots of space, or 20 small houses. At best, 6 large houses. Using a warehouse scenario obviously won't work that well.
Now, I know my items leave the economy fast, since the resellers who buy from me are always pretty much begging me to place more items on my vendor as it is. That must mean that they can't keep the items in inventory themselves - so database space as an average isn't a big problem.
And besides, the warehouse thing is at best a terribly hacked workaround, and exceptionally vulnerable to a number of problems. It makes me vulnerable to getting ripped off for a lot of credits' worth of items when I'm not assured payment at the moment of exchange. Given that I have at least a million credits' worth of product investment floating around the market most of the time, that's kind of problematic for me - a single theft or bug episode could really punish my ability to produce for a while.
Workarounds are not solutions in the long-term. If the development team wants to promote Merchant as resellers, they need to support solutions that benefit both the crafter AND the merchant equally. Otherwise they'd better just keep a vendor in the Artisan tree.
I'm not saying you have to do what I did. In my scenarioI was the retailer providing a secure drop off place for the merchandise from my supplier. I never had a problem with the money and neither did my supplier becuse we had a business arrangement and it was in both of our best interests to be honest.
If you are suggesting that you can't do your busniess without unlimited item counts on your vendor then you are going to have to something different soon because I believe they will set a limit. I don't know what it will be yet but I don't think it will be unilimited.
We are asking for better tools for make partnerships with crafters. We are asking for interface changes to make it easier to stock. We are asking for reporting to make it easier to track. And a number of things.
I don't know where the idea came from that they are going to remove the vendor from the Artisan line. The majority of merchants in this forum have never really supported that (though some do) and we haven't asked for that. I'm not saying that isn't going to be their decision, but if it is it is not because of any request from the merchant community. Our only request is that if you are going to have multiple vendors and have adbarking and merchant tents..you spend the same skills points we do to keep them. Thats it.
MurfThrelklya wrote:
I'm a weaponsmith, just poking around this board to kill some time and came across this bit about removing vendors from the business tree. Personally, I think it is a terrible idea. I'm not saying that I would give up crafting, but I would definitely stop selling. I'll make stuff for my guildies and mysef, but I'm not going to answer tells from the hundreds of people that contact me when they can't find my vendor. And I'm not going to let some merchant skim my profits, for no other reason than I could do it myself before but it was taken from me. And no one is getting access to my shop when I havemy personal krayt weapons stored there. I'm not going to spend the skill points to pick up merchant either, I already have too many invested in non-combat professions. In fact, I might just give up master artisan and the business tree, and get more combat skills.
Which then begs the question, what is the point of the business tree? If you take the box vendor from artisan, you might as well take the CDEF's, the air cakes, the travel pack, the bone armor, the small harvestors, the droid batteries and anything else that is a precursor to a higher profession. Artisans can sit around and make fireworks, chance cubes and crafting tools, yay!
You might say "Big deal, who needs you?", but with all of the holo grinding going on, you aren't seeing as many career crafters anymore.If because of this inconvenience the game looses more crafters, good luck finding the armor, clothes, weapons, droids, or other things in the type that you want and the quality that you want. Iknow I don't speak for a majority, but I'm sure I speak for a sizable minority that is sure to make your lives hell when we pull our products.
I don't know what you would do with the business line and I've never been in favor of removing vendors from it. I do however suggest that if you are serious about selling merchandise at a high volume then a merchant should be involved. You can be your own merchant if you want to spend the skill points for both the crafting and the merchanting (and not do a lot of other things) but a merchant should be in the picture becasue selling large numbers of items is logically what the perchant profession should be about.
As for crafters stopping crafting.. people are not going to stop wanting to buy stuff and as long as there is a market SOMEONE is going to try to sell to that market.
When they "Fixed" the resource shifting issue (they weren't shifting at all at launch) and the resources started shifting every 5-8 days like they were supposed to people said the crafters would just quit. Some of them did I am sure but others came along to fill that void..most of them probably not realizing that it was impossible to craft with resources shifting all the time.
This will work the same way. There will be a portion of the population that just stops crafting. But those who are crafting now and not selling as much as the "top" performers will find themselves wtih a lot more market share suddenly and they would have to adapt to meet it.
....you know....it IS ok to reply to a topic WITHOUT quoting every post in it's ENTIRETY.
And who exactly from the DEV side says that the merchant class was created to be a reseller??? I've only heard that from people bitter that they can't have a shop and vendors as cool as mine...
I don't know that anyone ever said a merchant had to be a reseller. But there are some who suggest that they shouldn't be reselling at all which isn't supported by the design of vendors or the game. Some merchants are resellers. Others are crafters who are selling their own merchandise. Both ways are fine. But be willing to expend the skill points to do both if you want to handle all of the responsibilties involved in both making and distributing merchandise.
As for your opinion of my quoting style. I consider it confusing to reply to a specific comment in a post without you being able to see what I am refering to. If I post a follow up to the original topic that isn't dependand on what someone else said I don't quote it. Sometimes I do only quote portions of the post but it is far easier to post the whole thing. You can just skip my comments if that practice causing you too much heartburn I guess.
My personal point of view, is that part of the role of a Merchant/Retailer is to capitalize the system. Crafters have already put money into making their goods, and if they are willing to sell wholesale, the merchant should pay up front. The Merchant's role is to take the rist. This forces Merchants to make the best deal possible, and stock only goods they can sell/know will sell.
However, because the merchant is taking this risk, and providing the crafter with steady, on the spot income, the crafter must be generous when negotiating the wholesale price of the goods in question. It's a two-way street, and merchants and crafters who need each other will find a way to make it work.
Yes, much of this could be solved with improved vendor mechanics...but a couple of hundred years ago, stocks in the largest companies in the world were traded under a tree on Manhattan Island...in paper, on a promise and a handshake. It took a while to evolve systems that handle billions of transactions a day at near instantaneous speed globally. And yes, while this is Star Wars...we do have to accept some limitations and have a little patience.
SunLao wrote:
Yes, much of this could be solved with improved vendor mechanics...but a couple of hundred years ago, stocks in the largest companies in the world were traded under a tree on Manhattan Island...in paper, on a promise and a handshake. It took a while to evolve systems that handle billions of transactions a day at near instantaneous speed globally. And yes, while this is Star Wars...we do have to accept some limitations and have a little patience.
