Merchant Archive

Today my vender is geting fired. I tried advertising it's location by typing in the coordinated for it in the seller's description of every single powerup, droid storage compartment and repair tool I put up for sale in the bazaar. Never got any business at my vender to speak of. The maintenance fees based on the valueof my stock has driven me out of business in just a few short days. I just plain can't keep up with maintenance fees for my harvesters, my factory, the house and now a hugely expensive vender without spending all my on-line time on survey missions to the exclusion of any questing, groupingor even crafting xp grinding.

Iam nowreduced to making crates of electronics of only 6-10 units each (think I'm going to sell a crate of 25 in the baz with a 3k credit cap? Ha!) which is a logistical pain in butt even when the factory is working right or trying to make sales by taking e-mail orders. Guess I can continue to sell droid storage compartments one at a time to eek out a profit, but most likely I will be running from place to place doing mind-numbing survey missions to get enough money to support my harvesters.

I'll keep an eye on changes in vender fees, hopefully it will be a practical option again so that I can spend my on-line time doing fun things and my vender could handle sales while I'm off line.

Tammerlane, Master Artisan and budding Droid Engineer of Gorath

As far as I know, there isn't an issue in selling factory crates from NPC vendors. If you got novice merchant and used an NPC, the maintence would be a very low fixed rate. This will obviously change oneday, but if they introduce a sales tax system, it won't be as bad as terminals are currently.

Just a waypoint in a bazaar message doesn't do that much. Better to have a short sentence first saying what you sell too. Then copy/paste it in all of them (in options, under control, click the keymap button. Then bind 'Chat Edit Copy' and 'Chat Edit Paste' to a key so you can copy/paste). Also putting the waypoint numbers in the item name is a good idea for that sort of thing. The number of times people say 'Ooo, they have a shop' click buy, and realise they didn't write the number down. If the item itself has the waypoint, people are more likely to visit.

Planetary Advertising DOES work if you go turn it on every time the server resets. I can see a definite change in traffic when it is off vs. when it is turned on. Course it is turned off half the day because I can't get on until the afternoon to turn it on!!!!

I never found messages in the bazaar very effective. What I did find effective is putting small items up for sale there and emailing buyers with a description of the store and a waypoint (I think the text is important not just a waypoint. Give them a reason to run out and take a look) I have seen a 300 bazaar sale turn into several thousand credit sale immediately with just one email. It is effective. If only it weren't so blasted manual.

I honestly don't think my problems lie in getting people into the store. My problems are all on the supply side. The tools to get suppliers and manage them are missing. The motiviation for most crafters to act as a supplier instead of as their own merchant is missing. The incentive to use the merchant class is missing.Fix these things and remove the bugs from the profession and you'd start to have something.

Course the whole efficiency tree should be redone cause it is useless.

I used to type in a long blurb about selling items in factory crates at this location blah blah blah...which I typed in by hand every single time. Thx for the copy/paste tip!! I never even thought I would be able to do that in game. Some time in the future when I can afford a vender again I will definitely use it.

Thx again for the tip.

Tammerlane