Having recently finished my fourth crafter on three shards, I can build all kinds of stuff. Cook blackrock stew, mine ingots, get lumber, make highest levels of poison, etc. Til now I used my resources to make what I needed or, if extra, as library or museum turn ins for items I wanted.
However, I just placed a small house on atl to open a vendor. My question is, would it be better to sell ingots / boards, use them to do bods and sell those rewards, or use them for cooperative collection rewards and sell those? What do you all think would garner the most customers / highest rate of return? For instance, I'm getting droves of blackrock and gold ingots from blackthorns. Do I try to sell as is, or turn these in for rewards? Appreciate you taking the time to look at this, thanks all!
I had some vendors for a while so I'll try to give you a few tips from the point of view of a resource seller as that's what I specialised in.
First off, you have to sell things that you enjoy taking the time to gather. Whether it's resources, t map stuff. high end items whatever.
If you don't enjoy getting it, then restocking your vendors becomes a grind.
With that in mind, you also need to sell things that people are going to want to buy. Gold ingots are so easy to come by now that not many people would be willing to pay for them when they can rack up a load quickly in Blackthorn dungeon.
Find a niche. I sold stuff mostly, for crafters. Imbuing ingredients and boards, leather, P.o.F. I never tried ingots as all I dug went into P.o.F production. Let me take whetstones as an example of finding a niche. I liked hunting in shame so I was able to get the whetstones by putting in a bit of time. When I got my first one I went onto Atlantic general chat and asked how much they went for. 3 mill plus was the answer. So on my home shard vendor I stuck them on for 1 million and they sold like hot cakes. People with money were prepared to pay rather than go through the rigmarole of getting the whetstone parts,and no one else on Drach sold them so I had found a niche. Even on a quiet shard, I felt 1 million was a fair price for the time it took me to get them, which brings me onto my next point.
Pricing. I left for a while just as Vendor search went live so I am not sure how resellers have affected the market. ie people who buy up all the supply of an item then sell it for a much higher price.
However as a general rule, sell low and fair and you will get a good reputation.
Restocking. If you put all your stock on a vendor at once and it goes, you are forced to either go out and restock there and then, or have empty vendors which lets customers down. If you can visit your shop daily, then drip feed the stock onto the vendors. Not only does it save on fees but results in more happy customers, rather than that one guy who came by at the right time buying all your stock and the next ten visitors getting nothing.
Layout. Make sure all your wares are laid out neatly so people aren't rummaging through a thousand bags to find one thing. Use deco examples (priced a bit higher) to show what is in which bag.
Also your vendor can have a name and shop name. I didn't want a vendor called "Leet Stuff" so I gave each vendor a name and then the shop name was the goods they carried. I also dressed them up to look like npc shopkeepers, eg my fletcher had a bow in his hands etc. A wee touch of class in the aesthetics really gives the customers a better perception of the place.
Advertising. Again this was before vendor search but you can never advertise enough. I would rune drop everywhere, even champ spawns and whatever the flavour of the month dungeon was. I would also leave a hatchet with an ad inscribed on it and sometimes some of my homebrew. This was all colour coded. A sickly bright green hatchet, rune and bottle would mean it was my place the ad was for.
Make it a nice place to visit. My vendors were at my tavern. So you could get free drink and listen to my drunken ravings when you visited. It is a good thing for customers to know their supplier. I also had crystal portals and teleport pad to the central teleport pad on Drachenfels. (Thanks Knuckleheads!). I had a freebie vendor too. I gave away stuff as often as I could. Not rubbish but things from idocs I would never need and old veteran rewards and the like. Sometimes I would put something valuable in just to keep the people interested.
Feedback. As well as trying to be around your shop, leave a noticeboard and mailbox so customers can interact with you.
Well I don't know if any of this actually answers your question but I hope it is of some help. Good luck.
