Weaponsmith Archive

If you've been a WS (or any serious crafter for that matter) for any appreciable amount of time, sooner or later you're going to run into this situation. I myself have had it happen to me. I pride myself as being one of the WS's on my server that provides quality weapons at reasonable prices. When I found that a certain individual had purchased several ofmy higher end weapons and then marked them up 100-200%, I made it known that I was displeased.

Generally, the arguement is made that "well, I bought them for what you were selling them for, I have every right to do with them as I want. If I can make more money than you can off it, then yeah me!" Generally I agree with this statement, however, like you stated, what happens is that the eventual user of that weapon sees your name as the creator and then wonders why they paid twice the price for a weapon on one vendor when they could have bought it on another for alot less. One sneaky tactic that I could envision, but have yet to see played out ,would be for one crafter (crafter A) to purchase up another's (crafter B) stock and then list it for twice what crafter A has it listed for on his vendor. Soon, crafter B is seen as a price gouger and crafter A is the one everyone comes too, because crafter B is just too "greedy".

So, it's all your call, but that's my general take on item resales. Unless it's something that you two have agreed upon, it's bad practice to sell someone else's stuff at a markup. If you don't like it, talk to the person first, then /shopban. If you see alot of sales to one person and you suspect that person is buying them for the original abuser of your goods /shopban them too. Sooner or later they'll get the idea and find another crafter to bother, or become a crafter themselves.

I've had some similar problems. I'm not too worried about it mainly because people that see my name on the weapon usually do contact me. That gives me the opportunity to deal with them directly and make sure they get weapons for the right prices.

Of course, you could contact the reseller and ask him not to resell your weapons. On the other hand, he may be increasing your sales and certainly is giving you some extra publicity--maybe only a small fraction of his customers feel that he is overcharging.

You always have the option of banning him from entering the building where you have your vendor, but that should only be used as a last resort.

Had this happen to me and banned the reseller instantly

I dont stock my vendors so somebody can empty them in a minut and in the same time screw my costumers over by overcharging.

Resellers goes into the same cathegory as griefers and cheaters in my book (that is of course unless theyve made an arrangement with the crafter)

Also note that I dont really care if people buyout my loot or resource vendor, its when it comes to my crafting that I get really angry as this is where my time and dedication lies

Message Edited by Orew on 06-08-2005 02:50 AM

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GrooperNugent wrote:

I'm pretty sure this has been hashed out before, but I can't find the discussion.

a week or so ago a guildie asked if I had raised my prices, to which I said, "no". Turns out he saw some of my weapons on the Galaxy-wide search being sold by another person. When I went to check out his vendor, I discovered that virtually his entire weapon vendor was my stock, plus 15-20% mark-up.

Now, I am of two thoughts about this:

1) My name is still on the weapon; I've made sales; this is another outlet for my customers to get my weapons; I am getting what I think is a fair price for the weapons....all GOOD

2) I try to have a fully-stocked vendor, but now this guy has a better selection than I do because he buys me out; I've gotten /tells about overpriced weapons and had to explain the situation;decreased traffic into my guild mall; decreased impulse sales on other vendors....generally BAD

Am I being too sensitive and should accept the sales as a good thing? Should I raise my prices to discourage the reselling (I think I am fair in my price scheme)? Should I ask him to discontinue?

Any thoughts?

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This all depends on how badly you want people coming to YOUR shop. If it doesn't matter (ie. you are the only vendor and your sales do not help to support other people in a "mall" environment) then call him up and make a deal at which you supply the weapons directly to him to sell for you. his selection gets better, you don't have to worry about maintaining a vendor, and anyone who complains to you can be told to take it up with him instead of you. if it does matter, then explain the situation to him and see what he says. if he is unswayed and unreasonable then you will have no choice except to ban him from your shop.

Two points to answer here for me:

1. The price is the price - if someone buys your stuff then resells it a higher price - thats just market economy. People have done it to me - i got the price I wanted and was happy.

2. If someone empties your vendor - thats bang out of order in my opinion. BUT - unless you ask them not to do that, who says they are in the wrong. If you ask them and they ignore you - ban em

Oh - and if anyone complains about prices - /addignore is the only option - I dont have time to listen to whingers

All the best

If someone consistantly did this to me, I'd have 2 options I'd think about. Raise prices, which might not be half bad if he can buy mine, mark them up and still sell them. Or ban him from my shop. There might be a middle ground to find if you are interested in that sort of thing as well.

I guess it depends on two things. Do you pride yourself on low prices, and do you want people to come to YOUR shop? Merchants are just doing their jobs if they are finding bargains and are able to sell them marked up. Most of us take up merchant as a means to sell our own weapons. But, the true merchant (without any crafting ability) would scour the galaxy for cheap goods and wholesale relationships and provide a variety of items.

I'd suggest that you take a look at your pricing you may be selling at less thanyour servers currentrate.i understand you want to make weapons affordable for your customers but if you bump your prices a bit it will discorage the reseller.

If your pricing is at a comprable level to other smiths on your server with the same quality then i'd contact the reseller and if he doesn't stop buying you out. then ban him from your shop (if your vendorisin a mall ask the mall manager to ban him at least temporarily). be prepared to ban any alt names he may have also.

If you need to you can bump up your prices significantly and then send an e-mail to your regular customers explaining that in order to keep weapons available for them you have increased prices x amount but will /tip it back to them. You can also have a sign in your shop for this so your prices dont scare away new customers. (don't tip back the discount to the reseller).

/agree

I too don't have too many problems with resellers as long as they play well with others.

A grey area is custom-made weapons that are auctioned in the forums. I have cheap prices for custom weapons when the customer supplies the loot, however, I do request that they don not resell of auction these weapons. Occassionally, I see this stuff auctioned off which impinges on one of my biggest sources of income. I monitor my trade forum closely so that I don't trod on other WSs auctions. This lets me auction off different items than they and, I hope, gets us all a good price for our hard work. However, customers aren't so careful. This can lead to a glut of certain weapons and ruins the prices we can get.

Now, you could argue that they have the loot so they are entitled to reward for selling a great weapon. On the other hand, we have the resources and skills to make the weapons. If all they want the is the money, I would prefer it if they auction the loot and not the weapons: they get plenty of money out of it with hardly any of the expense that we have.

Some people might think I'm greedy because of that attitude, but I reinvest all that money into my company. Most of my customers appreciate this because they get great stuff and great service. And I have fun.

What's not fun is running out of money as a WS. Let's face it, if you have less than 5M in cash, you can't do much. I was nearly bankrupted by the CU and have slowly been fixing that, so customers auctioning off my custom weapons annoys me. In the end, there isn't much I can do about it other than decide not to deal with certain people anymore.

That's my two cents.

I used to stock crates of weapons in 5's, 10's, 15'sand 25's.

That served two purposes:

1. Bulk buyers for slicing would get a price break.


2. Resellers got a price break and I could track them.

Try listing crates and scale the prices based on bulk.....IE buying a crate of 5 is just a little off retail while buying a crate of 25 was about 25% off retail. I would scale the rebates based on the crate size.

• 5 item crate 5% off


• 10 items is 10% off


• etc, etc.