Weaponsmith Archive

Advertising....and Patience

If you don't advertise...noone knows you exist....and your competition sure as hell doesn't care about yelling like an idiot to get people to come to their stores.

Want to keep your business low key....advertise to your ingame friends list, take down names on the front doors ofnearby player structures...send mail personally to them....at least you can advertise you are close....and they are people you have a connection with sometimes.

Many of the suggestions here are excellent. Another thing that helps is setting up one stop shopping.

I had developed a loyal customer base by selling excellent weapons at very good prices. I even traveled around to every master WS vendor I could find and cataloged their weapon stats and prices to make sure I was competative in quality/price. Things were good but not great.

Since I made master merchant to get all the vendors I could, I decided to play the role and created a mall. I set up a very attractive shop, decorations, pictures on the wall, etc. and invited all other crafters in my city to place a vendor free. I give them admin rights long enough to place his/her vendor and then remove them (I learned a hard lesson about leaving everyone admin but that's another sad story). I have a main weapons vendor, melee vendor, and sliced vendor. There are currently around 15 vendors in our mall with everything from armor, to tailor, to BE creatures, med supplies, resources, you name it. We don't have a chef in our guild so I made a food buff vendor and traveled around to chef vendors to stock it up (think of it as a 7-11, more expensive but hey, it's convienent and open 24 hours LOL). Everybody get's good business since most people will check out other vendors even if they only came to buy one thing. One big thing though. NEVER, NEVER, NEVER have an empty vendor.

And of course there is the patience thing. There are many great weaponsmiths on my server. Great weapons and great prices will attract customers. Great customer service will keep them coming back.

Good luck and may the schwartz be with you.

Greets ...

As I just told another poster.

Mall ... Bazaar.

Player City doesn't mean anything ... Established Mall with Traffic means everything. If there is no buying traffic, then you are not going to get much business from "walk in's".

Bazaar is where you will start to build your customer base ... and it's best if you have a vendor near one of the major cities where your stuff will show up on the bazaar!!

I keep dl44's, dh17's, DLT20's and scoutson all my vendors ... one of the vendors is right outside of coronet ... since the price is 5k for those they show upon the vendor. I used to put "advertising" in the text of those weapons so they knew where to find me.

Also ... and this is key ... take 1 of each of your high end weapons ... trot over to the bazaar and put it up for AUCTION.

You might only get 6k for something you should get 10k or 15k for ... but it will sit on the bazaar for 7 days and give you free advertising!!!

It should take you a couple of months before you are selling 5-10 weapons day-in-day-out with spikes in the 20's-40's if you get a smuggler customer :-). I am at 120ish pre day right now with spikes up to 200. Just tough it out ...