Tailor Archive
Thread: Tailor pricing rant
Hmm, i'm experiencing just the opposite of some of you. I haven't changed my prices since day one and my sales are drastically increasing. I check the bazzars regularly, as i use them for advertising for my vendors, and I have noticed folks drastically undercutting my prices. No biggie. I still load my items on the bazaar and poof they are generally gone in a couple of days.
I look at other tailor's vendors on my server, and sometime gringe at the prices, then i load my vendor up w/ my prices, and poof, daily i log in to email "vendor sale complete."
I have to say, i'm a little shocked at the 5k figure begin batted around for a leotard, no way do i let them go for only 5k. I started this game out as a dancer/musician and i paid through the nose for my first leotard, i expect others to do so as well. 
The one thing i have never done is send someone else a comment about their pricing, being either too high or too low. I would absolutely lose my mind if anyone did that to me, so i don't do it to others. If customers are not happy w/ my prices, they are free to shop around. I remind them that Walmart has much cheaper clothing than Belk's.
Since clothes don't decay, i do not feel bad at all for charging higher prices, they only have to pay that price once, reminding them of this also helps some. At any rate, i have only had this conversation w/ someone a couple of times. Folks on Tarq must just be easier to deal w/.
I price BE clothing very low becauseat one time I couldget it on the cheap. 3k per cloth (+12 or +13 stats) paid to the BE, and 5k per cloth plus the price of the garment in sales. That's a 66% profit on the tissue alone. I can live with that, particularly if I'm selling in bulk, which lower prices often facilitate.
As our server population slides a little and tissues become harder to find (*shakes fist at chefs*), my prices will rise considerably.
I do think master items should remain close to 8-10k just on principle. That's solittle compared to the huge gobs of cash that you can earn in one hour of missions, it's worth it. But if someone wants to drop stuff on the bazaar, you can't stop em.
ArthurDent you can't really compare buff packs price and clothing price though. Resource quality matters for doc packs, and it takes a while to get money if you are just selling buffs on the market. Also, they have more utility than clothes.
True, but then again, how much harder is it really to harvest a high-quality material vs a low-quality material? Either way you have to do the same amount of surveying, you pay the same amount of maintenence, and the same amount of power, and same number of harvesters to buy (actually less for a doc doing buffs since they use only very small amounts of materials as I demonstrated). The only difference is that you have to spend 5min on swgcraft.com and maybe an extra half hour of travel time per harvest, which is insignificant when you're talking about harvesting a couple hundred k units of something. You can also look at it this way: instead of pulling some random polymer out of the ground, I *could* be harvesting some super duper spawn of class 4 petro or some such and selling that.
True that doc packs require trace amounts of avian meat, but it requires so little that it almost doesn't matter.
The other thing is that although the quality of materials matters, it doesn't seem to affect the price. It's not like you're seeing docs scaling their buff prices. Good ones and crappy ones seem to sell for the same price generally. And finally, selling clothing is much much much more labor intensive then selling buffs, particularly when done "interactively".
As far as "utility" goes. Hmm, not sure I agree. A buff helps you for 2 hours. It may help you earn some extra money during those 2 hours, or it may not. Kinda depends on what happens to you. Then it's gone. Clothing you have indefinitely, help with your immersion, help with clothing attachments, help your earn tips if you are a profession that requires that, and may have indefinite benefits to you if they are BE enhanced. I'd actually argue that clothing has a higher utility then buffs.
I'm picking on docs, but I could just as easily pick on chefs.
I stand behind this comparision.
Songe wrote:
ArthurDent you can't really compare buff packs price and clothing price though. Resource quality matters for doc packs, and it takes a while to get money if you are just selling buffs on the market. Also, they have more utility than clothes.
Message Edited by ArthurDentOnBria on 05-27-2004 11:42 AM
You shouldn't really worry too much about the undercutting tailors. As long as you have your vendor in a good location, have a large customer base etcthings will sell, you don't really think these new tailors are gonna sweep in and take all your business do you?
My prices are probably higher than yours -8k for exotic leotard, but my be-clothing is relatively cheap by comparison with other tailors on my server -44k for +25 doc sunguards/ch sunguards, 17k for 16/4 melee defundershirts, 15k for +15intimdate/warcry shirts.
verticalis wrote:
My prices are probably higher than yours -8k for exotic leotard, but my be-clothing is relatively cheap by comparison with other tailors on my server -44k for +25 doc sunguards/ch sunguards, 17k for 16/4 melee defundershirts, 15k for +15intimdate/warcry shirts.
Just for comparison, I am also on Lowca and my prices are all around yours. My regular clothing prices are higher than your's. A fleswrap is usually 10K, although I have sometimes lowered the price to 8K when sales are not so good. A +25 doctor's sunguard is 30K. I don't make 16/4 stun/melee and +15 warcry/intimidation shirts very often at all anymore, but a 18/4 stun/melee or a +18 warcry/intimidation shirt is usually 20K. I also make some 19/4 stun/melee shirts, but if you are not a friend of mine then they are very very expensive. That is hard tissue to make.
ArthurDentOnBria wrote:
True, but then again, how much harder is it really to harvest a high-quality material vs a low-quality material?...
True that doc packs require trace amounts of avian meat, but it requires so little that it almost doesn't matter....
As far as "utility" goes. Hmm, not sure I agree. A buff helps you for 2 hours. It may help you earn some extra money during those 2 hours, or it may not...
To answer your question, ArthurDentOnBria, it ismuch harder to harvest good materials than bad ones, for several reasons:
1) There are fewer good resources spawns than bad ones. If a tailor starts running low on leathery hide,he or shecontact a ranger friend and the next day be set. If a combat medic starts running low on good insect meat, he or she can contact a ranger and... oh, there isn't any avian meat with OQ above 700 this week, but next week surely... oh, I guess 810 is better but still not good... etc. Same can be said for tatooine fiberplast, and other "harvester" resources.
2) They *are* harder to harvest. If you don't care about quality, there is no problem harvesting the 400 OQ hide from any big mob on an adventure planet. However, if you care about quality, you are frequently stuck harvesting in low yield planets. Have you tried harvesting avian meat on talus or tatooine? It's *tough*. The same is true for "harvester" resources (fewer planets you can check to get a 90% spawn), but it's not as big a deal.
3) Because they are rarer spawns, it is harder to find a seller. If you just missed out on a spawn, try getting somebody to sell you some of that 995 OQ, 980 PE, 920 DR petrochemical fuel. The seller knows just as well as you do that a spawn like that comes once every few months, so is much less likely to sell it than a stack of 50k hide they can re-harvest next week.
4) Because they are rarer spaws, they are more expensive. Just like in point 3, if you can convince the seller to sell the resources, you can bet that your pocket book will feel the cost. An armor smith has recently offered 50 cpu *AND* a +80% composite set of armor for sets of 10K wooly hide (expected value of about 75 to 100 cpu). When is the last time you spent more than 20 cpu for a set of hide (or even 10 cpu)? I'm sure people try to sellstacks like that to you, but you turn them away because you just don't care, and you can get another stack for cheaper. This brings us to...
5) They are more valuable because people *think* they are more valuable. Functionally, is there a difference between 30-250 and a 31-251 damage weapon? Not really. However, people feel there is a difference, are willing to pay for it, so this drives up thedemand (and the cost and difficutity of acquiring) of good resources.
It's true that doctors use fewer animal resources than tailors (at least I think it is). Don't trivialize the amount they go through though, a dedicated buffer might go through 3000 avian meat in an hour (rough guess, don't quote me), and 5000 herbivore meat. And the market price (whether it should be or not) of that avian meat, herbivore meat, and other resources is probably higher than what your average tailor spends in a day, or maybe even a week. I'm guessing that a chef (the other class you mentioned) goes through a lot more resources making a run of brandy than you realize. And as I understand it, an armor smith goes through about as much animal resources as you do to make a full set of armor/clothing (although I could be wrong).
I'm not saying you are right or wrong in yourutility or pricecomparison with doctors. One thing to point out that if you get a set of 3 hour buffs and run missions, it is entirelyplausible to earn an additional 150k credits from a doctor buff, which more than pays for itself. Furthermore, if you are going into PvP combat or high level dungeons, you need buffs. Just because a set of buffs lasts for 3 hours doesn't necessarily make it the effecttemporary.
(Sorry for the long post.)
Gyopi wrote:
I also make some 19/4 stun/melee shirts, but if you are not a friend of mine then they are very very expensive. That is hard tissue to make.
I've never seen anything that high on the BE vendors I usually visit nor have any of myBE contacts ever been able to make tissues that high
verticalis wrote:
verynice tissue
Well, although my alt Eimi is mostly an image designer, she is also secretly a master bioengineer. I have spent the past 5 or 6 months collecting really good materials so that I can serve the very high end BE clothing niche. Its something that I think can only be done by *only* making tissues (no pets) and only having one client (me! ).