Library: Guide to Succesful Merchanting

FOREWORD This book teaches the basics of making a career as a merchant. First word of warning is that even if merchants make money relatively well, they don't necessarily make it fast. Second, merchants earn no exp without MiP, since they don't fight or heal others. Anyway, if you just want to make money and want to do it with minimum risk, your choice of career is a merchant. Following is almost all I know about it, and you'll come to notice that there's much more to learn, both for you and me. BECOMING A MERCHANT To start with, you'll need at least 3M experience to get the required levels and basic percentages in the important skills and spells. Then when you reinc, you should choose civilized as your background. It is possible to be of religious background, but then you need a lot more exp if you want to get decent %s in bargain. It will also help if you have some cash to begin with. 200k is enough for starters. Best races for merchanting are ones with above average wisdom and intelligence. More important than that, it should have a high experience rate. Sprites and hobbits are propably the most suited for this. I chose drow purely because they have a high score at magic missile and a decent basic sp regen rate. When you reinc, first concentrate getting 10 free levels (i.e. advancing to level 25) and spending seven levels in Master Merchants guild, which is located in the same block with the armorer's shop and the weaponsmith. From the 'Entrance to many boutiques' go up and you arrive in the guild. When you have done that, raise your bargain % to 60 or more. If you're also very rich, go to the hospital and raise your charisma by 10 or more points with plastic surgery. Then, go to the Travelling Shopkeeper Consortium and spend the last three levels and raise shopkeeping % to at least 30. Now, spend the rest of the exp accordingly to how much you have left. If you have shitloads of it (tens of millions or more), start concentrating on the Money is Power spell. To be effective with it, you need Knowledge of Metamorphosis, which you cannot acquire before you are on a higher level. The % in MiP spell itself should be at least 100 and cast transformation & cast generic near 100%. This way, you'll get some 1:4-6 ratio with the spell and people will start using your services. This means that soon you'll be swimming in money. On the other hand, if you have only a little of exp left, you should try to get at least these percentages: Bargain 70%, Exchange Money 70% and Shopkeeping 30%. Very useful spells and skills include Cast Generic (of course), Identify, Remote Banking, Appraise and Floating Disc. WAYS OF EARNING MONEY The best of them are definitely money exchanges and MiPs. With these, you can easily expect to earn some 50-500k per day. Unfortunately they require that you are there when these services are needed. If you've got the best MiP in the game, you can ask a 10% fee for casting the spell. Money exchange produces less, because it's wanted less and you can't expect a bigger fee than 5-7% for that. The next fastest way is also the easiest. Buy a cart from the shopkeeper consortium and fill it with items. Below, there's a whole chapter of the arts of shopkeeping with a cart. The last way is to use your bargain skill to buy chests and other expensive items for other players. With 70% bargain and a charisma of 80 you get 23-25% off the nominal price at best. It seems that the maximum discount gets higher very slowly from these scores. For example, a 110% bargain and charisma of 100 produce only about 28% discount at maximum. The trick is to determine the approximate maximum discount and calculate the best price for an item beforehand. Then you only got to withdraw enough money to just and just buy the item with your max discount and keep on buying until you get it. CART SHOPKEEPING Acquiring a cart is easy. You just go to the guild and buy one, preferrably with one or two extra slots. Then comes the hard part. First of all, the location is very important, since if nobody finds your cart, no one will ever buy from it. Clearly the best places are on or near the route from the church to the bank If possible, near the ends. Shopkeepers commonly follow the "one cart per room" rule, but there's nothing to prevent you from putting your cart into a room that already contains someone's cart. This tends to make things a bit complicated and earn you eternal contempt amongst the other merchants so it's not recommended. Even the best location won't help if your cart has nothing to sell. Acquiring items can be done several ways. The most common, at least for newbie merchants is to buy items from the sales channel. If you do this, try to concentrate on smashing sale prices (50% or more off the average price) or at least below average prices. Also remember that you cannot assign a price higher than 2000 x your level to an item in cart, so don't buy too expensive items or you'll have to sell them on sales (not a bad option if you happen to get a 100k item for 10k). Another option of getting items is to buy them from shops. Checking regularly in all the four shops can be very fruitful. Sunmaces, JetBlacks, Supple Maroon Trousers and many more valuable items are sometimes sold in shops for various reasons. The prices are often a fraction of the price you can get from them. A rare instance is that if you have a higher level friend or many of them, you can make a deal that they get you useful items for sale and you pay either a fixed price for them or a commission of the selling price. It is rumored that some merchants might even make a deal with a thief, but this has been unconfirmed so far. Now you have a cart full of items and everything is well? Wrong! The pricing in carts is very important. Generally speaking, you can ask about 50% more than the average sales channel price for the item, but several factors determine how fast you can sell it: The competition is cruel, and a good merchant is always on his/her toes about the other merchant carts' prices. If your price is the lowest in town, people will most propably buy from you first. The supply of the particular item is even more important. If the sales channel is littered with Hammers of Might selling for 10k apiece, don't expect to sell too many of them for 15k apiece from your cart. If your cart isn't full yet, let the item be there and wait that it becomes more scarce. Alternatively, if your cart is full, store the item in your chest to wait for better times. In a diire need of cash or if you can't store more items, lower the price A few more tips when using carts: See that the stats for the items are complete and correct. If you're not sure of a stat, confirm it or label it by the lowest possible bonus. This way, if someone buys the item, he won't be disappointed as he/she notices that the stats you informed were higher than the actual bonuses. For unidentified items, it's best to tell what the item is, since not all newbies know that durandium mace is actually a Sunmace or an adamantium hammer is a Hammer of Might, and it's most often the newbies that buy the most things from your cart. If your cart is emptied, it can be pushed back to the guild by another player (and it goes there automatically next boot). If this happens, you'll have to recover it from there. The cart storage room is 2 n from the cart shop. In the room are hundreds of carts but just type 'cart follow on' and you have retrieved your cart. Some merchants prevent the cart from emptying by putting a worthless item for sale with a high price. This is fine as long as you have room in your cart. WHAT ELSE DOES A MERCHANT NEED? So, being a merchant is easy huh? Partially true, but in order to be succesful, you have to know the selling prices of items, which propably won't be achieved with too little game experience. An experienced merchant friend is useful, because he can often tell you a good price for a particular item. Also, recognizing useful items amongst all the junk in shops is essential, so that you can pick the pearls from the ocean. In addition to all above, you need a little arrogance, a bit of unresistable charisma and a touch of luck to flourish and prosper. I wish good fortune to all would-be-merchants and hope that this book will give you valuable information about the tricks of the trade. - Finaldey Keeneye the Newbie Merchant

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Library: Guide to Succesful Merchanting