While I understand the reason for this thread, what is happening here is no different to what goes on in RL.
I can walk into a shop offering an item for sale, buy it, and list it on Ebay with a starting price slightly above what I paid for it, and you can bet some one will buy it, as they will assume that the Ebay (Auction) price is going to be the best deal, and so won't actually check to see if it is.
There will always be (in EU and in RL) people who buy stuff in the expectation that they can sell it on at a higher price.
I can see no way to prevent it, unless you set your shop price above the current auction price. Of course, if you do this, it's unlikely to sell at all!
When I offer stuff in my booth I set what I think is a fair price considering the current MA reported price, and then it either sells, or it does not. If it does not sell, I have not wasted the auction fee, and if it does sell, I have the same peds i would have had from the auction (give or take a few pecs).
I don't care if it then gets re-sold. It belongs to the buyer now, to do with as they wish.
I am not saying I have the right business approach, but it does not give me an ulcer.
Thanks for being the first to make this point Dorsai. I agree.
Slither, I can see your point. The purpose of your shop is to be able to try and give the poor guy a chance, or in general just offer a good deal, and your genuinely generous approach is eaten up by the greedy guys. IRL you can kick someone out of your shop, but most shops aren't in PVP so our hands are tied.
I guess this issue doesn't irritate us at SFE. We don't try to undersell or oversell. We simply determine our price from how much it actually costs to make the armour. If it's too much it won't sell and we need to think about that. If it's too little it'll sell real quick and then we have a restock problem. Generally, though, we're selling at a price that we think is fair and that we are happy with, and if the same guy wants to come back every 2 hours and buy it then we are HAPPY about that because we get a sale!
While I see your point slither and I think the option should be there, I think the core underlying problem is in fact the hated resellers who take advantage of any way they think they can get a profit. That's a wider societal issues that as someone else said (I'll go back and find him and +rep him), one of the best ways of dealing with it is simply to raise awareness.
Lol how bout a sign out the front of your shop where you list all the people you think are nasty resellers?! rofl!
Interestingly, this kind of behavior was far less common before the auctions were implemented. I don't even know what would solve that problem. You can't ban people from shops, even if they're reseller whores. You can't raise your prices because then you're on par with the auctions, and therefore there's no benefit to you or the customers to buy at your shop.
Our hands are tied!
I'd like to think, though, Coelacanth, as I try to state as often as I see the opportunity, that the way WE run our shop does solve a few of these problems. A lot of shops shut soon after opening because people expect it to be different or don't realise the amount of work that needs to go in to at least break even.
I get flustrated when I want to go BUY a set of L armor only to find 4-5 of the parts available at the time. I thought it might be a good solution if the armor shop owners would put a sign for sale that said something along the lines of:
This sign entitles owner to one full set of "Insert armor name here" at "Insert full tt+price here" upon presentation of sign. Pm "Insert shop owner here" at (insert EF name, msn name, or email, etc etc here) or meet "Insert regular daily-semi daily time when shop owner available in shop here" to redeem. Cost of sign will be deducted from tt+price when returned and redeemed. Alteration of sign (there by altering who uploaded image) will not be valid and/or accepted.
This surely is a hassle and would be much better if MA simply fixed it but it is an option we could use now in game to solve a problem everyone is afflected by.
I would surely use this system if the price on the set was right and it would stop the people who buy up on piece preventing those of us who want the full set from getting it.
Gandolf (and absolutely everyone for that matter), I would dearly love you to do two things:
1. Go to forum.southernfortress.com.au, register and talk to us more about your ideas.
2. Go to our website,
SFE - Southern Fortress Engineering and use the menu on the left to navigate to the Ordering page. While you're at the website, have a look around at what we've written about what we're trying to achieve.
I would like to think that while we don't offer exactly what you're suggesting at the moment, we do currently do three things which help:
a) We are committed to regularly restocking our shop.
b) We stock multiple copies of our more popular armours.
c) If that still doesn't help, you're able to order whatever crafted armour you want from us (from the list of armours we make!) and we arrange for a time and place to meet and trade.
I totally agree with you about the problems presented by the way shops work, and I think their relative unpopularity is partly caused by the owners not having the commitment to run them efficiently.
We are trying to do our part though, on the crafted armour front only, and hope that for any armour we have officially launched and that can therefore be found in our shop, there is a very high chance that when you come back to the shop you will find it there waiting for you, and that if you can't you can order it from us anyway.
I hope that helps!!!
A relatively easy solution to the "combo" sales (f.ex full armor sets) would be if MA just allowed storage boxes to be sold WITH items inside - wouldn't require much change to the code i imagine. The shop owners could then perhaps offer to buy back the storage box (or if a lot of storage boxes were sold this way, the price would probably stabilize so the buyer wouldn't have to worry about selling the box at the same price he bought it).
As for the problem of stackables being bought by resellers, well one could take the view that shops just aren't suitable for selling stackables except in some cases. Shops on the other hand are very suitable for selling clothes, paintings, furniture, face masks(?) and crafted items with stable prices. (i don't have a shop and don't know how well that stuff sells in shops, so that's just from a customer perspective)
Brilliant idea with the boxes! I guess the ultimate solution would be to make such a special uber box available at the TT. Then there'd be no market issue on them. You could include the box value in the sale cost then the buyer could just TT the box and you go buy a new one.
