Merchant Archive
Thread: Suggestion: Selling individual items from within crates
I'm not sure if this has been mentioned before (I did a quick search but didn't see it anywhere), but I think it would be immensely useful if Merchants (maybe specifically Masters, as a perk?) got the ability to put crates of items on a vendor and give a "price per item" rather than for thewhole crate.
Then, when a customer views the list they see just the one item and if they purchase it, it is extracted from the crate on completion of the sale.
This would not replace the ability to sell entire crates of items - that is still essential for some commodities.
But it would mean that instead of having to flick through pages of stock, customers can see just the "display model" of an item as 1 entry in the list, greatly reducing its size.
For the merchants themselves, they would be able to restock certain itemsmuch quicker too.
Maybe on clicking "Buy" for an item, the customer is told "there are XX of this item, please enter the number you wish to purchase" and instead of pulling out XX items, it would split the crate instead?
I see this as a great benefit to merchants selling large quantities of unsliced weapons and tailors - maybe even those selling crafted components in bulk too?
Any thoughts on this?
When I make batteries, they come in crates of 25. I prices these crates at 50 credits per battery use. I also split up crates into 10s and 5s, as well as putting up individual batteries. At each of these points, I charge more and more per use until at the individual battery level, I'm charging 100 credits per battery use.
If I could put crates (and RESOURCES!!!!!) on a vendor, and implement a tiered pricing scheme like that automatically, it would be awesome.
It's been mentioned before, but it's definitely worth mentioning again...
We need the ability to allow customers to split crates and resource stacks at purchase time. Even if we don't get tiered pricing, just being able to let the customer pick how much of a single stack/crate they want would be tremendously valuable in cleaning up vendor inventory for certain items.
Hmm, I guess I don't agree with this one. Don't think this is necessary and I certainly wouldn't want this feature. Why? because all it would do is annoy those that want "full crates" and would also mess up pricing. I sell a lot of different crated stuff (for example food, pharma, and pet pharma). Everything I sell in a crate I also sell as "singles". It takes only a few minutes to break up a crate into "singles" and put those in the vendor. And of course, the "singles" price is considerably more than the crated price to encourage people to buy in bulk. Not sure how this would be handled if this feature were implemented.
It would not affect the purchasers of full crates of items if a tiered pricing structure were possible, and certainly doesn't stop the ability to buy full crates, or (as I emphasised) for the merchant to still sell crates separately with an individual price.
e.g.
I have 10 crates of widgets, 25 widgets per crate.
I place 5 crates for sale on a vendor at 2k per crate, and the other 5 crates are put into a "sell by unit" pricing scheme at 100cr per widget.
Customer comes along, wants a crate of widgets, buys one at 2k.
Another customer comes along, wants just 10 widgets, so finds the individually priced widgets and opts to buy one, entering 10 in the quantity field, and pays 1k.
Interesting that you say it's worthless to tailors, as the idea came from a Master Tailor friend - she said she'd love to have a massive stock of items for sale, but it would take forever to put the items up, and would take customers too long to scroll through a list of identical items.
In a perfect world, when you opt to sell an item as "per unit", you would get the ability to enter a finite number of price breaks, e.g.
1 @ 100cr
5 @ 90cr
15 @ 80cr
25 @ 75cr
100 @ 70cr
The customer types in a quantity and the "total cost" field updates in real time, like your bank/cash balance does.
There is scope for improvement with the vendor interface, and to discount such an idea as worthless is a little blinkered, IMO.
Another interesting idea would be to implement a method of selling a collection of items together for a fixed price - e.g. entire clothing outfits including shoes and jewellery, or weapons with 10 powerups, complete suits of armour, etc.
This would, however, be a bit more of an overhaul to the vendor UI.
Not to mention, customization(coloring for example) comes AFTER the Create Prototype/Create Manufacturing Schematic step for tailors - so factory crates would have no colors. Ewww.
On the subject of crated items being useless to tailors.
A simple solution to this would be to add a touch of data to a crate of clothing to mark the skill of the crafter at the time the item was made and then allow colour choice to be made at the time of the purchase.
Cat_Herder wrote:
On the subject of crated items being useless to tailors.
A simple solution to this would be to add a touch of data to a crate of clothing to mark the skill of the crafter at the time the item was made and then allow colour choice to be made at the time of the purchase.
Nope nope nope. Tailoring is all about the look. Our clothes are only useful if we put BE tissues in them, everything else is only about style. Tailors can't experiment and the quality of our materials don't matter. So we have no way to differentiate our stores from each other except for the styles and colors we use and the selection we offer. Our gameplay is centered entirely around combinations of color and style.
If customers could choose their own colors by buying from vendors, tailoring would become boring overnight. Those who choose to tailor usually pick it because of the creative aspect, we would never want our vendors to become basically "design your own clothes and color combinations!" termials. If the only aspect to our profession was running off crates of clothes and sticking them on a vendor, many of us would just completely drop our skills.
Letting any customer customize their own outfits straight off the vendor would gut our in-game experience.