Tailor Archive
Thread: OMG Master Level Items for under 2000 credits
I've been struggling with my price structure.. I'm an accountant in real life, so maybe I just overanalyze it. I've redone my pricing three times now (including repricing everything on my vendor each time). Last Thursday I sold 52 items in on 24 hour period, for a total of around ~20-25K.These were items from the Level 2 in all lines and below. Now, this totally freaked me out. I had people come in and buy 8-10 things at once and my vendor was decimated.
I spent Friday (while at work, ha ha) redoing my prices again. I raised everything up to 10cr a resource, plus additional costs for subcombines and special resources. I came home Friday night, repriced everything and waited to see what happened. My sales *did* slow down, although I tend to think that Thursday was a wacky fluke. However, on Saturday I sold a total of 17 items for ~20K. I did get some more expensive items up (having done Casual 3 and Field 3 last week), but I am pretty satisfied now.
Which would you rather do? Sell 52 items for 20K, or 17?
I'm pretty happy with the prices I have now.. I doubt I will reprice again any time soon. My daily costs are less than 8K, so I don't need a huge cash inflow to stay afloat. Heck, I can sell two crates of RFP and cover that. It's all good.
Ri'a Ocoli, Novice Tailor of Keren/Naboo/Kettemoor
Skill lvl and time.
All I read about is priceing based on resources. Resource should not be the basis for pricing it should be included but not the main component. The time and skill of a crafter is what should cost the most and be added into any calculation. That is how it works in the real economy. ITs like the differnce between haveing and MCSE network certification and just being some normal bloke applying for the same job. Skill level, number of sockets, time of a Master Tailor, paying for the time and effort to get to the level of Master. All this must be thrown in the equation, not just how much a resource cost.
Opportunity cost: It's obvious that if you pay a market rate of 6cr per resource unit and sell at 2cr per resource unit, you're losing 4cr per unit. What's not intuitive is that you're taking that loss even if you get the resources absolutely free. Why? Because you could have sold those free resources at the market rate instead. By not doing so, you're imposing a lost opportunity on yourself of the difference between the market rate and the rate you charge for the finished goods.
Capital expenses: While some formulas account for maintenance costs, none of them include the price of building your infrastructure in the first place. This includes the price of buying harvesters, factories, shops, crafting stations and displays. Even if you make these yourself, refer above to opportunity cost of not selling them at market value. These costs will become more apparent if and when architectural decay is added to the game.
Labor: At the moment, I can run survey missions for roughly 60,000cr an hour. So if I take ten minutes out to make a custom outfit, I'd better be making at least 10,000cr for labor PLUS material costs PLUS maintenance/capital expenses. Now granted, survey missions seem a little out of balance right now and will probably be nerfed significantly sooner than later. Still, any time I spend tailoring should net me an income equal to or greather than what I would make as a fighter of the same level, and for a tier 4 fighter running missions on Lok or Dathomir, that's in the same neighborhood as my survey income.
The saving grace in all this is that at the income levels for advanced players, the price differential between a 2000cr outfit and a 10,000cr outfit is not sufficient to offset other incentives to buy, such as location, personal service, effective advertising, and brand-name recognition. Dior and Armani do not lose sleep at night over Wal-Mart.
Nalinya wrote:
OUCH! Even at my prices, I can barely keep up. And I play 10 hours a day most days. This person will be burned out or will raise prices very, very soon. Don't try and compete with her. Just do your own thing. It'll sort itself out soon..
I'm so sorry this is happening to you guys.
Nalinya
Master Tailor of Valcyn
Your prices are fine, Nalinya. I'm used to paying 10-15K for the master level items, and that price is more than reasonable to me.
I'm in love with the blue fleshwrap, by the way. I ID'd my hair to white and my eyes and lips to sky blue to match it, looks incredible! I've got an idea for another outfit set that might work well in that same (or similar) color. I'll send you an email sometime this week to see if you'd have some time to work with me on it.
Thanks again!
Kae
As a Master Tailor, I typically charge pretty close to Nivea's prices on my vendor, though I'll sell stuff for less to people who approach me and are nice about it. I don't sell thousands of items, but my costs are low and I expect that I'll probably break 500k credits sometime this week...I can't spend that much even if I try. I had someone telling me that another tailor on my server charges half as much (mind you this was also a person I really don't like) and my simple response was, "That's nice. Buy from them." I suppose it's easier once you reach master, you don't have to cater to it, but how much business do you really need?
I guess the short answer is, ignore the undercutter, charge your price, whatever it is, and so long as you're still having a positive bank balance, why worry? It's a game.
There are two things that people who sell at 3cr per ressource or whatever don't take into account :
- Getting Master status is costly, very costly. I am pretty sure that, if they both manage to reach master status aund undercut prices, they have at last partially grinded. Grinding means "buying" your progression, in credits. Then there is the cost to purchase and operate a factory. A house (for vendor). Before you can sell master items, there are litteraly hundreds of credits you have to spend. Unless you play the crafting game 100% as intended and sell ALL the things you make, but in that case, you are probably still not master.
So there is an "overhead" cost. You have to remburse it, sooner or later, and it means getting a reasonable margin
- Any new player fresh off the tutorialwith a surveying tool can very easily setup a ressource harvesting business, and sell those items at 5c or 6c to the bazaar (yes those prices are common, at least on kauri, and yes, they DO sell at this price). Why invest 100ish skill credits (plus merchant, surveying ...), why spend dozen of hours, of credits and risk carpal tunnel syndrom, why spend hours, after hours, after hours answering to client's requests, stocking merchants, advertising, creatively design new outfits, when you could do what Joe Newbie do, an just put your Polymer on the commodity bazaar at 5c.
That is why basing tailor's "reasonable" margins considering ressources "cost" 1c, or even 3c is fubar. Because if I can sell those ressources for more, this set the price under which I WONT price my tailor items, and I will make sure to take a reasonable margin after that.
I have seen also the comparison whith architects who price closer to 3c or 4c a ressource. This is different, because they sell, by design, in "bulk" (each "unit", for crafting and selling, is a very large amount of ressource). If tailors were to price at 3c per ressource, they would have to spend dozens and dozensof hours to convert the same amount of ressources (and find the clients for EACH of those small items) into "credits" as an architect will do in 5 mins. The smaller items you make, the more cr per ressource you have to charge to make the same margins overtime.
Exactly THAT is the reason I'm planning a cop out to another profession plus merchant. As soon I find a tailor shop on Eclipse offering stuff for those ridicolous prices, I'll drop tailor and go pure merchant misusing these tailors as factory.
Demand.
It sounds like this Tailor didn't feel she was getting enough business with her *old* (incredibly low) prices, so she decided to drop them to bump it up.
I sell most master level items for 12K, but I had a customer buy two Robes of Honor for 40Kminus the cost of fare to Corellia.
BE enhanced items? I can't keep Medic's +10/+10/+10 Swoop helms in stock for 30K each. A +25/+25/+25 Medic's smock? 60K. People are happy to pay it...
I'm so sure that Nike and Reebok carefuly figure out how much it costs to make a pair of sneakers and then just add a modest profit to it. I would guess the markup from cost is like 500 to 100%.
Once in a blue moon I'll get a price complaint, for example a gentleman recently asked me for a skinsuit for 4K. I said "No way... I will go as low as 10K for it, but no lower". I told him to let me know where he could get it for 4K, but he couldn't remember. Either way, I didn't make the sale, and I'm not sure anyone on Eclipse is selling it for that price.
I think some Tailors are just afraid of having no customers, and so they go bargain basement. With some patience, you can figure out what the market value is, and can charge it. If you want to give stuff away, that's your business.
Personally I have my charges match Nivea's. My reasons are that I don'e want to spend 8-10 hours a day restocking my vendors. I have another character on my server that I use for fighting only and I use her to keep my sanity form all the tells I receive as a Master Tailor. No one knows this character and I will keep it that way. I also don't have my title up. This way I am not hammered into tell hell.
Because I keep my prices on the high end, I can log in and restock in about 2 hours. I have plenty of sales at this rate and I really don't understand this persons prices. Even though I collect my own resources,( I have all large harvesters and 4 factories) I still find myself running out of materials and having to perchase them from a resource dealer. The amount of effort that this player is going to have to put in to keep up with their orders, is going to become more of a job then a game very quickly. When that happens, she will either increase her prices or quit her profession.
I'm going to keep having fun no matter what the other tailors charge. And maybe the tailors who have the insanely low prices are having fun being pulled in a million directions at once from demanding customers and rushing to fill her vendors faster then they are being empty, great! Have a blast. But, I have my IRL job for that kind of stress. This game is my time to relax.
Just my 2 credits. 
"Hmmm, those prices seem to be around what I'd charge for Master Tailor items. She charges less for a few items (like the bikinis) and a little more for a few others (like the flightsuits). Though I'll likely bump my prices a little on bazaar sales."
Hi Ayane,
I believe you're on my server in Keren as well.It sounds like youare planning on charging LESS than1525 on the flightsuits?Isn't that...a little crazy? We spend a long time becoming master tailors; it's an elite profession. A full composite armor goes for 250k+, good weapons for 18k+. I really believe we need to respect our profession more. Chargingless than 2000 per master itemdevalues the profession in my opinion.
I guess there's nothing the rest of the tailors on our server can do if you start putting up flightsuits on the bazaar for under 2k. But please consider the effect it has on what you're saying about master tailored clothing. It would devalue our profession.
I became a master Tailor about 3 weeks ago. I used to sell the master tailor items for over 10K a piece, but after awhile I lowered my prices to around 7 to 8 thousand a piece. One of the reasons is I stopped mining most of my resources. This allowed for more time to actually craft items. I also found people willing to sell Resources for less then 3 credits Per Units.Another reason was I started to run out of things to buy.I have 2 houses, 2 Factories, and some of the best weapons on the planet. I still have 300K sitting in the bank and I expect to have another 50K when I get home tonight.I am working to the point where I only have Master level items in my vendors.
Anyone who is selling Master level items for less then 3K must have no life. They would have to spend 6 hours just crafting to keep up with demand.
Scungellia Karnophage
Master Tailor and Waste Management Consultant
Two Great locations on Naboo
Bria Galaxy
Kjeld1 wrote:
- Getting Master status is costly, very costly. I am pretty sure that, if they both manage to reach master status aund undercut prices, they have at last partially grinded. Grinding means "buying" your progression, in credits. Then there is the cost to purchase and operate a factory. A house (for vendor). Before you can sell master items, there are litteraly hundreds of credits you have to spend. Unless you play the crafting game 100% as intended and sell ALL the things you make, but in that case, you are probably still not master.
How is it costly exactly?
The cost to buy houses, factories, etc and even training (if you can't find someone to train you) are a one-time expense. Something I call startup expenses. That comes out of your profit, since there is no way to calculate a 'cost-per-item' for that. Raising your prices because you're impatient isn't fair business in my mind.
And what even worse is that you're charging your grinding costs to your customers. That you grind to get where you are (and thus get an edge on the competition, boosing your sales to begin with) is your choice. If you make the choice to make items without getting credits in return you'll have to cover your own cost in some way, either by taking it out of your profit or by getting the income to pay for your own ribbed shirts somewhere else. Doing it any other way is misguided at best, but I'd sooner call it dishonest.
Kjeld1 wrote:
- Any new player fresh off the tutorialwith a surveying tool can very easily setup a ressource harvesting business, and sell those items at 5c or 6c to the bazaar (yes those prices are common, at least on kauri, and yes, they DO sell at this price). Why invest 100ish skill credits (plus merchant, surveying ...), why spend dozen of hours, of credits and risk carpal tunnel syndrom, why spend hours, after hours, after hours answering to client's requests, stocking merchants, advertising, creatively design new outfits, when you could do what Joe Newbie do, an just put your Polymer on the commodity bazaar at 5c.
That is why basing tailor's "reasonable" margins considering ressources "cost" 1c, or even 3c is fubar. Because if I can sell those ressources for more, this set the price under which I WONT price my tailor items, and I will make sure to take a reasonable margin after that.
First, why don't you go sell resources then? It's, I think, the easiest way to make money in this game. Costs you 0.65cr per unit and sell back at 5cr? That's 670% profit!! And it saves you all that 'effort' to actually make the clothing items. And the effort to get up a complicated tree. Just survey 4 and you're home free. Take some fighting or dancing skills on the side and I'll sell you the clothes you need at a reasonable price.
And second, I think those resource prices are rediculously high too, can't understand that people are willing to pay that. Don't people realize how cheap it is to get the resources? Any resources that I sell (if I do, since most I stockpile for personal use) I sell at most at 3cr each. And even there I feel dirty for making a 360% profit. Usually it's more like 2cr.
But charge whatever you want. I'm having fun and am doing pretty well for myself. You're the ones who seem to have the sweat in your hands for those 'frightingly low' clothing prices. 
- A. Kimusume
Ayane, may I ask how much you have in the bank?
There's a difference between making a profit and being "rich". I know Tailors who have over 3M in the bank, and one who actually sold some credits on Ebay for RL dollars.