You're not going to get much sympathy from fellow shop owners. If you're undercutting somebody else's prices and hurting their business, them buying all your stock and putting it on their own vendors is just good business.
I'll give you an example: I was selling ingots in Luna. 799 gp per ingot for valorite, the lowest in town by 1 gp. Everybody who mines will know that it's a pain in the neck finding valorite sites these days. It's worth that much for the time and trouble mining the ore. Then somebody opened a shop selling val ingots for 350 per ingot. They also sold regular iron ingots at 7 per, when the going rate was 15. He was selling 10K shadow ingots for 200k, when the going price was 1 million gp. Of course I bought every ingot in the whole shop. He restocked, and I did it again. Rinse and repeat every day for 2 weeks, until the number of ingots for sale had dwindled from 10,000 of each ingot per day to 50. I won't have to go mining for 3 or 4 months, but it accomplished 2 goals: I got a lot of stock for less than I considered my time and effort to be worth, and my competitor didn't take all of my customers.
Another example: I was selling PoF for 150k per bottle. I was doing the few PoF deeds I got thru the system, but I was buying most of the PoF from a BOD guy with several accounts full of crafters; I was paying 100k per bottle. Another seller opened up a shop next to mine selling it for 50k per bottle. He got mad when I bought all 120 bottles off his vendor and put them on my vendor at my regular price. I guess he had expected dozens of customers to drop by and buy 1 or 2 PoF at a time so he could build his business. It just doesn't work that way. If I hadn't bought him out, any of a dozen other people who either use or sell massive amounts of PoF would have.
If somebody opens a shop and it's selling the same items you are at a lot less than the current market price, and you want to stay in business yourself, you have 3 choices:
1. Ignore them and hope they will go away. This really does work sometimes; they might figure out that they aren't making any gold selling items for a lot less than the market rate, and they will either close or raise their prices to the market rate after they have built their customer base at your expense.
2. Cut your prices to their level. This usually doesn't work for long. If something costs 350k to make, and your competitor is selling it for 300k, you're losing money every time you sell an item. You wince when a potential customer drops by, and that isn't good.
3. Buy out the competitor. If they are selling something for less than you can make it for, it just makes good business sense to buy them out. If it costs them less to make an item than it costs you, they're still making a profit, so they will be ok with being a wholesaler. If they were losing money on the item, you will only get that great deal a few times before they pack up and call it quits. Enjoy the bargain while it lasts.
Either way, it's nothing personal. It's just business. There is no harassment when somebody buys you out. Either raise your prices to the market rate, or just be happy that you have a great customer who buys you out every day.
