Tailor Archive
Thread: Lower prices mean higher revenue!
Clothing is a luxury item.
It serves no real purpose.
Players will happily wear armor to dress functions and strip down to their BVDs to get wounds and BF healed quickly (I know I'm a master dancer too).
I became a tailor because I hated the stuff I started with and couldn’t find anything reasonably priced that I liked to replace it, so I made my own.
If we want clothing to become more important to players, make it cheap enough that it is an impulse purchase for even the newest player. When newbie’s hit the bazaar after their first couple of missions we want them to say "I'll buy this gun, ooh and this cool shirt too!"
Since it most clothing serves no useful purpose in the game and can still be worn even when it has fully deteriorated, we need to make it so that players consider new clothing an inexpensive impulse buy for wearing around town. All of the clothes horses I know (and in some cases, have created) have no problem destroying clothing in their inventory to make room for more. They are usually rich from resource mining or get their clothing for free from me. I'm sure all you other tailors have seen that when you give stuff to friends. (If you don’t give stuff to friends, you should start. call it market research or advertising and a cost of doing business). That's the reaction we want from customers.
From the moment you open up your crafting tool, you commit credits that you have to inventory. The goal is to sell inventory and turn those credits into more credits. Specialization is what makes that possible. We have chosen a profession that is more about what players want instead of perceive as a need. If people can’t meet their needs they will not fulfill their desires.
Entertainers perceive clothing as a need; they buy it so they can make more money in tips. That is why entertainer clothing sells so much better than other clothing. Of course, entertainers are the most under appreciated profession in the game so they don’t transfer their revenue very easily and quite often get other professions to supplement their income, or take up tailoring so they can get exactly what they want without having to search, wait or spend as much.
Bio clothes are more useful to the population but are still limited because people would prefer armor protection to the enhancements provided by bio clothes.
Food has a use, it provides enhancement to stats and skills so that is still a more marketable profession than tailor.
Since people don’t have to cover up any real nudity and can always wear “cool and useful” armor, clothing is the candy isle of the SWG crafted items. We must sell it as such. Keep prices down, especially on items that take high skill (such as metal bikinis). Provide an abundance of low cost “Disposable” clothing items that will keep newbie and expert alike buying to update their look.
Deuce,
I think it's pretty arrogent of you to come here and tell us all how we should run our businesses. No offense, but from your register date here it appears to me that you are a noob. My advice to you is to read and learn from others who have played a lot more than you. Lower prices mean higher revenues? no they don't. My sales have always been mainly constrained only by the amount of time that I want to put in, and I've never been hurting for business, and I sell pretty much any clothing I make pretty rappidly. Lower prices would simply mean lower revenues for me.
I agree with Arthur. I've been playing a tailor since beta, and I did not grind my way up split-yer-lickety to get master just so I could break a million one month after launch (anyone remember when the first swoop helms appeared? Ya know, the 10-20k ones?). It took me 5+ months to get to Master, and I was flat broke and grinding artisan missions, not selling oodles of clothes nor making oodles of money. It was all I could do to afford a wind harvester and one each chem and mineral just to have enough resources to finish slowly working my way to master tailor. Then master merchant. Then a marathon of artisan missions to make the 120k it took to buy my large house. Only THEN did I make enough money to break even, and it was quite a while before I could say I was in the black with some to spare.
I spend an inordinate amount of time harvesting resources, running factories, stocking vendors, and paying many people to help me keep it all running. I run my business based on operation costs. Not what some brand spanking new tailor THINKS sounds more reasonable. Run your business for 6 months as a dedicated tailor, then come tell me you didn't have to do other things in game to make enough money to support your tailoring hobby and all the freebies you give your friends.
I have never had anyone complain about prices except newbs. And that's only because they have yet to have a clue what it does take to BE a tailor or to do the profession over the long haul, nor have they yet discovered how easy it is to make enough cash to buy clothes at any price range.
Any gunbunny that can and will spend 400k to 1.5 million on ONE suit of comp armor, oh and a full SET of various guns to go with it, AND a spare comp in the bank... can most certainly afford a 1k pair of pants. So you give away your clothes as you see fit, but do not think anyone else is going to toe your line just because YOU think what we do is of no value. 
Message Edited by Mystyrys on 03-14-2004 08:41 PM
Edit: Grrr. I shouldn't type when I'm mad.
Message Edited by Mystyrys on 03-14-2004 08:42 PM
so what if his register date is 2 months ago? what right is it of yours to call him a noob and disqualify his theories just cause you been registered since august? **edit** is that?
i have always run a vendor cheaper then the competition.... i will find myself with a loyal customer base who in the long run makes me just as wealthy as if i were to sell a high priced item in twice the amount of time... its all about about others business philosophy.. not what date they registered on the boards...
forums are a place to share ideas, communicate thoughts... resorting to unnessacary flames surely shows who the true noobs are...
DeuceX wrote:Clothing is a luxury item.
Bio clothes are more useful to the population but are still limited because people would prefer armor protection to the enhancements provided by bio clothes.
You can place your bio-enhancements in shirts that can be worn with armor. This makes BE clothing very valuable to the whole population, in my view.
-Smerdyakov
Master tailor/Master heavy swordsman
DeuceX wrote:
Clothing is a luxury item.
The "true" tailors in this game (instead of the ones who are tailors on the way to becoming jedi) are still not very common and I think that most of the established tailors set their prices so that they have a comfortable workload, not to make the most profit. If I had really low prices, I would probably make a lot of money, but I would also have to restock hundreds of items a day and all my playing time would be in my shop instead of visiting friends and other things I like to do.
Werdup,
Anybody is free to express any opinions they want in here. I certainly enjoy hearing from lots of different people. But you don't come into a forum as a new member, and start telling everyone else what they're doing wrong and how poorly they are running their SWG businesses, and how limited the appeal of their products are. That's a no-brainer, that should be common sense, and in fact it's trolling. Expect flameage, 'nuff said.
But aside from the etoquitte issue, his thesis is just plain wrong. Any tailor could tell you that. I've made millions on tailoring, I've done the wandering tailor thing, I've worked the starports and the cantinas, I've ran a big mall, and I've done custom order business. I can tell you from experience that the "charge less, make more money" idea is dead wrong. When people can make 100k in a night running missions with only moderately high combat skills, when they routinely pay hundreds of k for armor, for a crate of food, for a special weapon, and for clothing skill tapes, when they pay over 100k fora pet or a crate of pet stims or a harvester, and when other artisans can generate hundred of k, even millions in a matter of days, a customer doesn't even distinguish between something priced at 500 vs 2k credits, or 3k vs 5k or whatever. It's simply insignificant. And as I've noted, pricing things too low on the bazar, makes your items look like "cheap" and undesirable, often actually hurting your sales in my experience. Put a pair of slacks on the bazar for 100cr, and if it's the only one there you will be very very lucky to sell it (people will think it's some artisan-level garbage). Price it at 3k in a busy city and you'll probably not even make it back to the starport before it's sold.
The other issue is respect. A tailor works just as hard to get to the top of that tree as any other artisan class (roughly). If a tailor gets no respect (like the original poster obviously shows tailors no respect), and feels that he/she has to discount their products in a "fire sale" just to make ends meat, guess what, nobody is going to want to be a tailor. But fortunately for us, that's just not the case. I can walk into a crowd, know that I have a product that is in demand, price it so that it's worth my time to make it, and at the end of the day have plenty of credits to buy whatever I want in the game.
Now, that said, with the lack of things to spend on, there's really not much point in trying to maximize your sales to the nth degree either. All that does is generate ill will. What is the difference between 10M and 20M from a tailors perspective? And we've all run across new players and treated them differently. From the weaponsmith that hands a new player a free gun, to a tailor that offers them a free pair of thin striped pants and a shirt so that they don't look like a noob, that's a nice thing to do for someone, and you'll have a loyal customer and perhaps even a friend to boot.
Message Edited by ArthurDentOnBria on 03-15-2004 10:43 AM
Theres a HUGE demand for clothing out there (least on Corbantis anyway) I was so busy last night i had a notepad by my PC writing down an order list of people to deal with and asking people to e-mail me there orders if possible.
So busy that I used up 5-6 crates of synth trim and 2 crates of fasteners (I carry 5 bots around 2 for crates 3 for samples of popular items in popular colours) in an hour just doing custom orders and wound up having to run to the bazaar and buy more to save me travelling back home to Rori and delaying people who were waiting.
Just try wearing a Master Tailor tag around Theed or Coronet for a while and see how many tells you get asking for stuff. The point being I 'm not the most expensive tailor on my server (or cheapest) but I shifted over 150k in the space of 2 hours last night (and thats fairly common). In many cases people were tipping mea LOT more than I was asking of them just for taking time to help them out. I know a most of the guys and girls I dealt with last night would have paid a LOT more ifI'd asked moreto get their orders.
People who say tailors need to lower there prices are outta there minds!, if prices were lower I wouldn't be able to wear my tag anymore because I'd go crazy trying to deal with the orders. (On Corbantis) Theres more than enough demand out there for me to TRIPLE my prices and still be up to my eyeballs in work.
Hmmm, I don't see how you can consider our prices high. If you go to a mission terminal and spend 15 minutes doing a few destroy missions, you will have enough money to afford a new set of clothes. Should our clothing be priced so that you can buy a full set of clothing from character generation? No, not really. Clothing is a luxury for the beginning character, but it is style to someone that has spent time and effort working to advance.
If you could go to a vending machine and simply grab the clothing/colours/style you wanted, or choose them at the character generation phase, then we would not be around. We spend time and effort putting these clothes on the market for you, and I choose to be a wandering tailor and make clothes for people as I travel. Anytime I am at starports, med centers, cantinas or large gathering areas )my friends refer to them as my lag-zones due to clothing requests) I will usually be stopped and asked for specific items.
Asking us for cheap clothes is akin to begging. You have a set of clothes from character generation.
Message Edited by RandDarkstar on 03-15-2004 11:00 AM