Currently it is possible to set up your merchant tent. Get your vendors, set your advertising. Dress the vendors and then surrender all merchant skills and business skills without any effect. You are then able to run your merchant enterprise without any merchant skills until you need to change some aspect of your shop. Many merchants feel this is unfair to them and allows people to use those skills for other crafting professions or combat professions which is against the spirit of the skill point system. 

The Global Map is littered with vendors which are empty.  This makes finding things a difficult and frustrating journey to one empty vendor after another. It lessens the impact of advertising since people no longer trust that the global map listing means anything.  There is considerable debate on the full implementation of this issue since it is justly pointed out that making the item count simply be greater than 1 will allow people to use high priced items they know won’t sell (99999999 chance cubes) to keep their vendors on the map.  How to address that isn’t universally agreed upon but it is universal that no one wants empty vendors to show up on the map. We suggest that the vendor simply remove the registration when it is empty forcing the Merchant to re-register it when he refills the vendor. 

Cooperative Merchant shops suffer from the extremely limited control the owner of the structure has on the vendors inside. Short of removing all items and destroying the structure the owner of a “Mall” has no method for evicting a vendor.  This is a problem on a number of fronts but the two most common are vendors that are abandoned by their Merchants and are taking up floor space that could be better used by another vendor or disputes between the Mall owner and the Merchant running the vendor (refusal to pay agreed rent for the space etc).  The structure owner needs a method for evicting the vendor while mitigating against griefing.  The suggestion is to allow structure owners to issue an eviction notice to a vendor which will be served in one week from the time it is served.  This will give the Merchant owner of the vendor a week to clear his merchandise out and remove the vendor himself.  Suggest a method for rescinding the eviction as well in case an amicable resolution is worked out between the two parties.  

The Vendor interface is clunky and inefficient.  The search features need to be enhanced to allow more robust searching, the offers and stock room interfaces need fewer clicks and batch processing support to allow large scale sales and re-pricing efforts to be done with a minimum number of clicks.  The offers system itself needs to be enhanced as well giving the supplier more slots to offer merchandise and more information to be captured (Suggested Retail Price etc)

Wholesale purchases for Retail sales is only one method of merchant-supplier collaboration.  Another is consignment sales. Consignment sales is defined, for the purpose of this feature request, as items purchased by the merchant with little or no up front cost with the understanding that a split of the sales revenue will take place upon the sale of the merchandise.  This relationship is desirable because it removes the financial burden

Both for customer orders, PA or Factional specials etc the vendors should be able to allow a merchant to place an item up for sale that can only be purchased by the indicated party or group. (e.g. guld:WAH, faction:Imperial, Chataka)

The current method for creating a vendor is cumbersome when your goal is to create a vendor with a specific look.  You essentially have to create vendors over and over until you randomly get one that you can live with.  Merchants would like the ability to have their NPC vendors Imaged Designed to customize their appearance.  We believe that Image Designers are ideal for this job and would support a /consent system that allowed a vendor to be altered by an Image Designer.

The global map advertising is a great tool for getting people into your shop to browse your wares however many merchants would like a global item listing that could be searchable and would allow them to compete with the bazaar for sales.  One method would have a “premium  auction” feature in Merchant that would allow merchants to place items (for a fee) into the global listings that would be in a separate tab on the bazaar terminals. This would be searchable and show the item details and the price listed. Purchasing the item could still be handled at the local vendor, this method would be an advertising method and not a sales method.

The merchant tent is a wonderful structure that indicates the high likelihood that there is a merchant vendor inside. The tent however lends itself to smaller operations or specific types of markets.  New structures like a small store front shop and a larger Mall like structure would enhance the merchant ability to have identifiable structures that indicate merchant vendors inside.

The addition of the mailsave command has made creating offline sales data easier, however the game still needs in game support for basic sales reporting.  This feature would enhance the ability of merchants to manage their vendors and maintain relationships with their suppliers.

continued...

11 Game Play Send Email on Offer to Vendor

Currently merchants get email when they purchase and item. When an item is purchased from them but not when they are offered an item.  This seems to be counter intuitive. The offer must  be acted upon within a certain time frame or it is automatically rejected.  An email needs to be generated when an offer is made to the vendor.

12 Bug  Vendors not appearing on Map after Server Reset

When the server is reset all advertising is removed from the global map.  A vendor registers itself with the global map the first time it is loaded.  The problem is that it requires someone to go into the room where the vendor is located first.  This creates a Catch 22 situation. You can’t advertise globally until someone wanders by and loads your advertising which isn’t likely to happen if there is no way for someone to realize you have a vendor in the first place.  Some method to return vendors to the map automatically needs to be put in place.

13 Bug  Planetary and Overhead Map Vendor Name Overlap

The number of vendor on the global map (and over head map) has increased to the point that the names often overlap and are unreadable.  (the same is true of city names) This needs to be cleaned up somehow so that labels on the map don’t overlap and are readable to the players.

14 New Feature Per Unit Crate/Resource Crate Sales

Resources and to a lesser extent created items in a factory crate can be sold more efficiently if they don’t have to be divided up and removed from the crates.  This would allow someone to buy 1 or more Units at a set per unit price without having the merchant determine the specific number of units that can be bought.  If I have a 100k Crate of Iron for sale at 5 Credits Per unit the buyer should be able to buy 1 to 100k of those units at 5 credits per.  The same should be true of a factory crate of T21 Rifles {Heave Damage Edition}.  This would be more efficient for the merchant, the buyer, and perhaps the item database.

15 New Feature Background Music in Shops

Atmosphere is important to many merchants and the idea of music playing in the background while people shop is very appealing.  One idea that has been presented is a craftable item by Musicians which would play a selected background piece and need to be replaced from time to time or upgraded to another music selection.

16 Bug  Vendor Count Corruption when Vendor is deleted

When a vendor is deleted by means other than “Remove Vendor” (e.g. deleting the structure) the number of vendors a merchant has in place sometimes isn’t updated correctly.  This causes the merchant to have to wait for a CSR to manually fix the count before they can get back to their business.

17 Game Play Stop Vendor Rotating during Ad bark

You have removed the rotate commands from the vendor menu but the vendor still rotates himself when ad barking to someone outside the room. This causes the vendor to end up facing the wall. We request that the rotation during ad barking be disabled.

18 Game Play Allow Protocol Droid to Ad Bark

The Protocol Droid granted at master is unable to ad bark.  It is understood that most of the droids would be unable to do this in an understandable language it doesn’t seem to make sense for the protocol droid to be similarly limited. Protocol droids exist to speak. To translate, to communicate. The fact that the droid that is the major reward for attaining Master Merchant is mute is a severe letdown.  Please allow the protocol droid to ad bark.

I agree, 1 - 3 isn't going to make the Merchant class more enjoyable if you're a Merchant already.  Only #2 would make the game better for anyone as it'll help get rid of the dead vendors.

Stock room  time for unsold item should last longer than 7 days and there should be an easier way to resell all of the unsold items at the same price without having to click about 300 times. I vote for that as #1. This shouldn't be a job, it should be a game.

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=merchant&message.id=25698

The Vendor interface is clunky and inefficient. The search features need to be enhanced to allow more robust searching, the offers and stock room interfaces need fewer clicks and batch processing support to allow large scale sales and re-pricing efforts to be done with a minimum number of clicks. The offers system itself needs to be enhanced as well giving the supplier more slots to offer merchandise and more information to be captured (Suggested Retail Price etc)

Brilliant list! The best pick of new ideas and old bugs that have been overlooked by many.

I'd love to see an "unpurchaseable" TEXT item that's placed at the top of vendor listings. This could be a welcome message, a price list etc.

Also I'd love to see a "save waypoint" option for adverts on the Bazaar. The disconnection between sellers and buyers is unforgivable at present, a shop owner pretty much relies on repeat sales or random "walk by" sales. There's no easy way for a BUYER to find a seller

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Pappi wrote:
great list

only thing I would add is a resale option in stockroom for previous listing price. Tailors have been looking forward to this option for ages

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The deadline for submitting this list was Friday the 9th so I have sumbitted this list.  The lists are not static however and if a bigger issue comes up or more design becomes available we can probably update our list without too much fuss, but it is vital that we don't let the devs sit around without a list. The risk that some other profession will get our 5 minutes of attention is too great.

For those of you who don't agree with portions of the list I am sorry but I have tried to reflect the overall opinion of the forum as best I could.  No objective person reading these forums could help but put the Merchant Skill point issue at the top of this list.  It was almost unanimously listed as the top issue in the top issue thread. There have been easily two dozen or more threads about it on this forum over the past few months and every one had strong support for the issue.  I realize there is a well articulated arguement against it and that there are a number of you who don't agree but even if I completely disagreed with the idea  I would have to objectively state that it was the #1 issue.  Beyond the placement of the #1 items 3-5 are all very widely requested changes. I didn't spend a great deal worrying about which should be 2 vs 5 as I believe all of the Top 5 are important issues that need to be addresses in some fashion or the other.   After 5 I have listed all of the other top suggestions and issues that I could find any kind of broad based support for.  This doesn't mean that they are the only ideas or that there aren't some other ideas out there that are very good. 

well the "dead" vendor issue  - like i said - only effects a handful of people...i just dont think it is of general concern to most of us...i think that is better handled through customer service...especially to prevent people from getting griefed some how.

that being said.....

do these dead vendors initiate?...i mean at some point maintance has to run out and they will take damage.....do they stop working or continue to work forever?...

if that is the case then i am not going to keep paying maintance

The "dead" vendors stop functioning eventually when the maintenance runs out and the condition gets to 0% but they don't vanish from the world. (I can only assume this was changed becasue bugs were causing them to vanish inconsistantly and CS was being flooded with demands for reimbursement)

It is more than a handful of people that it affects however. There have been many posts about it here and I have had PM's about it as well. Anyone who has ever allowed someone to run a vendor in their home or shop has had the potential to have this issue. 

The owner of a multi vendor mall or shop should have the ability to evict someone. How else is he going to work out any kind of control over his business? Suppose he has the best location on Naboo..hundreds of visitors each day. He decides to rent out space to other merchants.  They decide not to pay him.  He can lock them out of his house but he can't keep their vendors from continuing to benefit from the arrangement that no longer exists.  Eventually the vendors will be empty and dead sitting in a space in the mall giving the location a bad reputation for having empty vendors.  There is a potential for grief of course and that has to be considered as well.

Message Edited by Naufragus on 04-10-2004 10:46 PM

number one is plain garbage. i am here to have fun, spending the time to get a vendor and then lose the skills is fine to me. merchants who keep the skills have advantages. but for me to totally gimp my character just to keep merchant skills ruins my game play. if that ends up being changed i'll just move on to warcraft or some other game on the horizon, its a game breaker

To me, item #3 is very important.  I do run a mega mall, and with 20-30 people's vendors in there at some point they don't get stocked anymore and just take up space, or the people leave the game - but their vendors don't. 

I'd like to see that one kept in the list for sure, but that's just my humble opinion... 

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DocSavag wrote:

Below is the listing I have at this point. Please give me your feedback on the list. Absent serious objection this is the list I am going to forward to the Dev team as our priorities for this quarter.  The top 5 are very important as those are considered the top of our list.   Below that the items are not necessarily in exact order of importance but I have tried to gauge the amount of support those ideas have in the community.  This list is taken from the Top Issues List, the Issues List, the Bug List and my summary of other requests and discussions that have taken place.  It isn't every idea that has been presented but it is, I think, the majority of the suggestions and issues that have a broad based support among merchants in the forum.

9 New Feature New Structures (Malls and Shops)

The merchant tent is a wonderful structure that indicates the high likelihood that there is a merchant vendor inside. The tent however lends itself to smaller operations or specific types of markets.  New structures like a small store front shop and a larger Mall like structure would enhance the merchant ability to have identifiable structures that indicate merchant vendors inside.

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Just thought I would mention it....