Merchant Archive

OK my little shop is doing fairly well, im enjoying having a shop as I hate hawking in town. Ive taken advise and for the shorterm dont see me going much past novice merchant....for the forseeable future anyhow.

Now, I sold heaps of stuff last night and my vendor is near empty, as ive just qualified for having NPC vendors I guess i want to know :

Whats the difference between terminal and npc vendors (apart from the cosmetic)

Are NPC's currently bugged ? If so how badly ?

Is there a big difference in cost of operation ?

How do I use the stockroom as well ?

I can now place a contol vendor (one at a time)....just what does that mean please ?

My terminal vendor seems to have done ok, i have it highlighted with 4 torches in the entrance hall so you cant miss it ! and have floating seeker droids with 'news' about items on my vendor.....any other tips to help people find and use it ?

I am thinking about creating the NPC vendor in another room and giving my suppliers access to it so they can drop stuff off and pick stuff up (via the stockroom) or by removing overpriced stuff (so nobody accidently buys it) manually. Basically I pay my miners in mining equipment and Im thinking this may be a way toenable a private transaction ?

Is there a good source for questions like this...I couldnt find a merchant faq that looked upto date enough to trust ?

Regards,

Bob'the Builder

Whew ... lots of questions ... where to start.

First ... you want to switch to the NPC vendors as soon as you can. The other types (the bartender one and the "jukebox" one) have nasty levels of maintenance fees that they charger. Whereas the NPC vendors only charge 1 credit a day regardless of how much is on it. This will probably be changed by the devs at some point but till then ....

The difference can be thousands of credits a day vs 1 credit a day.

the stockroom is the temporary area that vendors store stuff that either dont sell in the alloted week ... or you withdraw an item for sale. You can then retrieve an item to resell or retrieve it onto your inventory.

One neat function is when you have suppliers that sell you regulary. You don't have to do anything special for them or set up any funky admin rights. Each vendor has an OFFER button that they can click to offer to sell you item(s). You can then at your leasure look at what is in the OFFER tab and either buy it or reject it. I have suppliers that drop off hides and fiberplast regularly as offers and I buy the offer as I need to use it. I also use OFFER as a way for a customer to return an item they dont like (I am a tailor so that happens sometimes).

What a lot of merchants do is also use the Stockroom as a free storage area for their supplies that take up no room in the building inventory. What I do is put the factory crates of items as fake sales on the vendor and then immediately "withdraw" the sale to have it moved into the stockroom. I let it then sit there till I need it and when I do, I merely retrieve it from the stockroom. Beat lugging crap around or having it scattered on the floor