Weaponsmith Archive
Thread: How to Build A Successful Weapons Business
I am a retired weaponsmith who ran a very successful business. I am in senior-level executive technology sales in real life, so building businesses and dealing with people is second nature to me. I retired because I simply got tired of it and have too many responsibilites running a 140 person guild and a tier 5 city to give it the time and attention weaponsmithing calls for.
RESOURCES
First off, rersources are your enemy and resource dealers are your friend. YOU MUST KNOW EVERY RESOURCE DEALER ON YOUR SERVER. You must assume every day that none of your resource dealers have a clue what they are doing and need to be told what to mine and where to mine it. Check every planet every day no matter how much of a waste of time it seems and ask all of them to mine everything that is even a hair better than what you have now.
The bad news is that if you are just starting as a weaponsmith, it might take you many months to build your resources stockpile up to compete with the weaponsmiths that have been doing this from the beginning. The core of your weapons is advanced blaster power handlers. You have to make these. If you can't because SOE is so BRUTAL in resource spawns, focus your business on weapons that don't require them and build up your stockpile. I can't speak for all servers on this, but I am sure it is a common problem.
In the beginning, you don't have the luxury of buying speeders by the crate, the finest armor in the galaxy and defenses for your city's faction bases. All of your profits need to go into stockpiling resources that will likely be obsolete in a week when new stuff comes out. You can't take risks with resources. The Plumbum iron that's out right now might be the only stuff to spawn for 2 months or more. Buy all you can, even though it might be replaced by something better in a few days.
CUSTOMER SERVICE
Customer service must be your next priority. Every time you sell a gun to someone new directly and not through your vendor, you should use a macro like this:
/tt Thanks for your business. I am always finding better resources and making better weapons. Add me to your friends list. Refer me to your friends and I will give you a discount on future orders.; /thank;
Sounds corny but if 1% of your customers adds you to their friends list and indeed refers other people to you, you have just started an avalanche that will build a gigantic business.
They bought off your vendor? Send them an email with your waypoint thanking them and again, asking them to refer their friends to you.
Here's the downside:
Most people are jerks. They cry about price, quality, are insulting, rude, selfish and no nothing about the weapons they fire. You MUST be thicked skinned. If you are really good with people, you can turn them from jerks to disciples. How? You have to spend the time to tell them what the deal is with weapons. Answer their stupid questions, explain why resources are such a nightmare. No, not all people are jerks and know nothing about weapons. The ones that do know their stuff don't need to ask questions and will just ask you where your vendor is. Forward them your waypoint in an email you have already written that sits on the top of your inbox all the time. ALYWAYS remind them to refer their friends.
ESTABLISHED WEAPONSMITHS
Ok, you have a reasonable pile of resources, make advanced handlersand can compete in almost every category. Sometimes, at least one of your weapons is the best in the galaxy. Now what?
Load your vendors. You don't want to make melee? Fine. You don't like making mines and grenades? Fine. Stock everything else. Keep your vendors loaded all the time. Be known for ALWAYS having everything they would ever want in stock. Believe me, even if you're not the best in the Galaxy, many people will love you because they can rely on you to be stocked. Shopping is a nightmare. Even with speederbikes, people will resent you if they see your vendor on the map and comeall the way out thereto find it empty.
The number one weaponsmith on my server has 2 vendors and each one is 5-8 pages long. He stocks 24 of weapons I NEVER made in 6 months of being a weaponsmith. He is rarely in his shop to provide customer service and yet sells no less than 60% of all weapons in the galaxy. I'm probably going to stop by there tonight top buy a Jawa Ion. I KNOW he will have it.
In the end when weaponsmithing was really getting on my nerves, I stocked like a madman and stayed on with my alt most of the time. My sales were better when I was offline than when I was on.
Custom work should only be for people that want krayt weapons or want a cool name on their gun. Sometimes they want stocks, a scope, no scope, a special low ham gun etc, and you should be available for that, BUT IT SHOULD NOT BE THE CORE OF YOUR BUSINESS. Emails and offers to your vendors is how these things should be handled as often as possible.
Why the lack of customer service? Because at this level of weaponsmithing it is a chore. Hard work. A time suck. At this point, the more you interact with people, the more of a chance you have to interact with an unreasonable jerk that can't be turned into a disciple. This jerk can dedicate his life to telling his friends that your weapons suck and you won't even know it. Having to deal with people like this can wear on you over time no matter how thick skinned you are. People don't need customer service when you are known for always having top quality stuff in stock.
Someone is going to say they are on all the time, have no alt to hide with and deal with people so well that they are in a utopia. LIES. There is no right thing to say to the wrong person. This is a fact of life whether you are selling to vicious fortune 500 attorney or an angry 12 year old kid who's parents split up a year ago.
Be there via email. Get your regulars accustomed to it and when they refer people to you, make sure those people get their orders quickly. Now you have someone that is happy they referred someone to you and someone else that is happy they were referred and will refer people themselves.
One of the worst weaponsmiths on my server must not be very good with people. He got a pretty bad reputation for being a jerk pretty quickly and really isn't that bad of a guy. He was always well stocked and spent a lot of time in his shop. The wrong customer can cost you millions in sales.
PRICING
Rule number one in sales is to never sell on price. So many people make this mistake. You sell a laser rifle for 8k and I sell it for 12k. Who do you think will sell more. This is SWG not Walmart. Perception is everything and there really is no means of flooding the market with advertising to create that perception. Every non-weaponsmith that reads this will say 8k all day. The fact of the matter is, if you have something to be proud of like a killer mall, great stats on your weapons, great customer service or some hot dancer wiggling in front of your vendor, you can afford to set a strong price.
The number one weaponsmith on my server is by far the highest priced smith in my galaxy. His laser carbines were onlya hair better than the number two smith, but sells it for 8k more. Would you pay an extra 8K? Maybe not, but I would. I want the best there is and so do most people. 8k is a small price to pay to stay at the cutting edge. Ok, krayt weapons are the cutting edge, but my point still stands. "Hey everybody, number 2 is 40% cheaper than number one, but not quite as good". Do you really think this is going to cause a stampede into number 2's shop? No.
Argue all you want, but buying market share by selling on price doesn't work in this game.
OTHER TIPS
Make what others won't when trying to build your business. Most smiths hate making melee,mines and grenades and ALL smiths hate making rocket launchers. Be known for being someone people can count on for these harder to find items.
Make real good friends with master smugglers. Always have someone available to slice half of your weapons. That's right I said half. 60% of my sales were sliced weapons that I kept in a vendor labeled "Sliced". All of my other vendors were labled unsliced. Very few weaponsmiths do this and it makes me crazy.
If you're really lucky, you will make friends with a smuggler that will hang out in your shop and slice all day. Why do this when you have sliced weapons in your vendor? Don't ask me. All I know is my smuggler had a line out the door all day long and I had hundreds of sliced weapons in my sliced vendor.
Build a mall if you're up to the challenge. Insist that your other crafters are masters, always make the best stuff possible and always be stocked. People are furious over empty vendors. People also hate ad barking. Every time one of my merchants set up ad barking, I'd get flooded with tells of people complaining about it. Then again, I have always been a magnet for the worst customers in the galaxy. The traffic of the others in your mall will translate into traffic for you.
I also suggest getting reasonable levels in merchant and placing no less than 4 vendors. Advertise on the global map but stay in stock.
Don't try to be a dual crafting smith. Adding droid engineer, for example, to your arsenal is only adding another 20 rare resources to your list of stuff you have a hard time getting in the first place.
Also don't try to be some kind of great fighter. I admire weaponsmiths that grind combat professions to understand the weapons they sell, but at the end of the day you need to be dedicated to this trade or you will find yourself wasting a lot of time. You want to hunt and raid with your guild? That's cool, but you don't need to be a master rifleman to have fun on a hunt or even to kill 100 people on a raid.
An a final note to you newer weaponsmiths, don't let the resource problems discourage you. Right now, a brand new weaponsmith with 3 million creidts they just bought off ebay has no chance of competing with the top weaponsmiths in the game. But Sony can only be so vicious for so long. I am sure things will change as their economy is in peril because of their neglegence to give new guys a shot. They took handlers out of fwgs, but made it impossible for a new smith to make advanced handlers.
Just hang in there. Eventually you will have everything you need if you stay on top of the resource game.
I just wanted to comment with my opinion on a few things.
Firstly, having 5-8 pages worth of junk on vendors. Don't do it. There's something wrong with your business if you have that much overstock.
I go to an Architect vendor who has like, 600 items on one vendor. It drives me nuts, because alphabetizing doesn't properly work with that many items. So I have to go through each and every individual page hoping he has *one* Heavy Mineral Harvester somewhere in there. It's an extreme inconvenience to your customers. The first thing I think of when I come to a shop that has overstock is, "This person must not be getting many sales."
Don't stock more guns than you'll sell. Make as many as you want, but keep the rest in crates in your basement. When you run low on stock, pull out those crates and restock. You should aim for 1 page listings. If you've got more than 2 pages of listings, you need to start separating your vendors by weapon-type. No Weaponsmith is going to sell more than 400 items in 24 hours, so there's no reason you should have more than 100 guns on four different vendors.
Also, some customers are braindead. They play SWG, walk, talk and breathe as braindead people. These braindead people do not understand "Next 100 items". It will annoy you to no end when you receive the "HURR WHERES UR GUNS I NEED A LASER" message and you have to tell them, for the umpteenth time, "Click the Next Items button."
If you have vendors for each individual weapon-type ("Pistols" "Rifles" "Melee" etc), make one main vendor, "Joe's Weapon Shop". Only register that vendor, that way you won't have 4 vendors overlapping on your overlay map when potential customers drive through your neighborhood. Use this "Joe's Weapon Shop" vendor to stock important notes, like return policies, while placing your weapons on your weapon-type vendors.
Making sure you go out of your way to prevent inconveniences to your customers will give you the benefit of receiving far fewer tells from the braindead.
It can't be emphasized enough to never make more than 10 weapons of a particular type, unless it happens to be a fast mover like republic blasters. Better resources are always popping and weapons can go obsolete pretty fast.
You also must minimize your dependence on resource sellers. For one, they usually don't know what you'll need or what resources happen to be prized by weaponsmiths. It's also a huge drain on cash reserves since you'll tend to overbuy. Save your cash for the long-extinct stuff you'll need to compete with the established weaponsmiths. Constant surveying is a habit you need to develop. In my experience(I'm currentlyone of my server's best weaponsmiths but it took months to build up my resource reserves to compete), "uber" resources seem to pop every 2-3 months, so patience is a virtue. I've been using resource sellers more and more lately, because I now have alotof cash on hand from being an established smith, but it wasn't this way for me early on. I surveyed and harvested my butt off after completing master weaponsmith. I still get most of my resources from harvesting, because it's the only reliable way of getting it. My rule of thumb is, ittakes less than 3 days to get master weaponsmith....but it takes more than 3 MONTHS to master weaponsmith.
Sellto maximize profit.Profit isn't merely what you make after breaking even, butriding the edges of your customers' wallets finding the highest price they're willing topay. Hustling, wheeling, and dealingin SWG is a source of endless enjoyment. I've run my business through many "undersellers" who hadthe best weapons at the time, and I believemost have retired. Maybe they got sick of the chore, ormaybe they ran out of their best resources trying to keep up with demand. Let's say I've got 50k of a certain resource that allows to make the best weapon of a certain kind. The other smiths who had this resource areno longer activeor have retired...so I willraise prices to simply curve demand and make this resource last me longer.
Charge "through the roof" for Krayt weapons. It makes youFAR FARmore profit than selling regular guns, and in the end, it helps the game and market out by stratifying the range of available weapons out there and preserving an "uber" status which other players will strive for.
Greed is Good. What's the point of staying a weaponsmith or any other crafter if you price so low that runninga fewmissions will easily pay for it? You also have a responsibility of creating content in this player-driven economic game. If you can craft some really kicka** weapons, don't make them too easily obtainable.
And finally, get yourself an alt account. More lots, and something else to do.
Use the same parts in everything. Make 1k schematics of scopes, power handlers, barrels, and whatever else.Produce one or two hundred at a time so you're not stuck with loads of obsolete parts if a better material shifts in. This is much easier than doing everythingas you need it andhaving to do new schematics for each crate of guns.
If you make things that use lots of power handlers (T21, DXR6/DX2, jawa ion, etc) you should make several power handler schematics and try to balance usage across them to minimize how often you have to remake all your schematics.
If you do this, then you can make 1k schematics for all your guns (even though you'll never actually get 1k out of them) and restockveryeasilywhen your vendors are empty.
I have to say my stuff rarely went obsolete. When my laser carbine improved by one point I would pull it, get it sliced an put it in the sliced vendor. If it was a huge improvement like the first time decent link-steel came out on my server, I wqould just junk the old ones.
10 was never enough for me. I sold more than 10 a day of almost every weapon I stocked. Atthat level, dependancy on resource dealers is inevitable.
I have wated millions on resources that became obsolete. If I hadn't I would have found myself short many times. The change in commando schematics was tragic for me. Anyone want to buy some thoranium steel? (j/k).
On the other hand, ostrine carbonate ore has been a nightmare on my server. I horded it. When it disappeared in a few days, everyone was left wanting.
1) So two accounts is basically mandatory? Even at my low skill I'm pressed for lots (2 for power, 2 for the shop, 4 sitting on a nice 89% conc of grinding metal, 2 for stuff that I just can't pass up). Anyone think it's possible to pull off a decent WS without 20 lots?
2) You all seem to assume that the grind is trivial and the resources are the problem. That's true for holocrafters or established players, but not for new chars. I've started over as a WS on a new server and just getting enough material to grind out a box a day is an issue
In order to get any kind of speed it requires alot of survey missions (which require a combat profession) and alot of resource buying. If you don't have a million credits to work with expect the grind to take some weeks, not days. Any tips on resource use for a truely new weaponsmith? Should you bother stockpiling when it'll be 4 weeks before you need it? Buy power or use a lot or two to get your own?3) and a comment for truely new WSs...
New weapon crafters shouldn't underestimate the power of the marksman/brawler market. Set up a shop early. You'll need 55k merchant xp for when you hit master anyway, and getting used to the vendor and house thing is important. Then start stocking all the lowbie weapons in the bazaar in the three main cities on you planet with a comment in the sale about your vendor (interplanetary travel? not just for stocking you can't afford that yet, bring stuff along to put up for sale when you go to buy resources). Use the best resources you can grab/buy and fully experiment the weapons. Even lowbies appreciate a 32-60/3.3 CDEF. Also send an email to folks that buy your weapons letting them know that your vendor is up and when they need the next weapon in the series, it will be there.
I've found I could make a nice living selling metal staves, heavy axes, vibroknucklers, CDEFs, curved swords and other artisan/novice WS weapons that masters don't generally like wasting time on. Plus I've got a core of customers that already know me and like my style.
Hopefully I can keep up with their combat levelling
ALWAYS put the stats of you weapons in the name. I consistantly can sell slightly inferior lowbie weapons in the bazaar because mine are clearly labelled "Metal Staff 67-111/5.0" compared to all the "Metal Staff"'s on the bazaar. Players don't have the patience to go through 40 CDEF Pistols and will just buy the nicely labelled one if it fits their needs.
Logix wrote:
Don't stock more guns than you'll sell. Make as many as you want, but keep the rest in crates in your basement. When you run low on stock, pull out those crates and restock. You should aim for 1 page listings. If you've got more than 2 pages of listings, you need to start separating your vendors by weapon-type. No Weaponsmith is going to sell more than 400 items in 24 hours, so there's no reason you should have more than 100 guns on four different vendors.
Actually I'm going to have to disagree here. The problem is that if you carry a large variety of weapons, than your customer needs to remember that sub-categories are their friends. I will get the odd confused email, but understocking so that 1 or 2 customers don't have to use 'next items' or sub categories, is to your detriment if you have a more sophisticated customer base. There are what 40 different gun types? If I only stock 5 - 10 of each that's 400 guns, and yes they all sell particularly in today's holo environment.
If you think convincing people to use Next Page is hard, try to get them to understand that crates of Munitions (or anything for that matter) doesn't fall under Thrown Weapons, Heavy Weapons or any of those other categories. They're under Misc. | Factory Crates
So many people told me they came to my vendor only to find it empty. Once I explained it, I'd get a simple "Doh!"
PadawanChong wrote:If you think convincing people to use Next Page is hard, try to get them to understand that crates of Munitions (or anything for that matter) doesn't fall under Thrown Weapons, Heavy Weapons or any of those other categories. They're under Misc. | Factory Crates
So many people told me they came to my vendor only to find it empty. Once I explained it, I'd get a simple "Doh!"
BINGO!! Big key point IMO..I learned this early..you put more than 100 items on any vendor...asking for trouble..Instead have several vendors...I have 4 in my main shop. And just keep the weapons on hand in crates ready to stock...don't throw them all on your vendor.