I currently offer a shop inventory service and a shop search service on Calypso. My long term goal is to make these both fully interplanetary, and someone suggested I try Arkadia because of the high involvement of shop owners. (Also, it looks like fun ). This thread is an attempt to gauge Arkadians' interest in these services, so please let me know what you think. Note: the links are provided to give an idea of what's offered - there may be differences in options for Ark, and quite certainly in pricing.
I would be interested in participating in the inventory service. I saw that chili had advertised via entropedia which I thought was very smart but it looked like a lot of work to keep up to date. If I could get a reasonably priced service to do that then I seriously consider it. My only concern is the interval between inventory updates. I get a reasonable amount of turnover at my shops and while the specific items on sale tend to stay the same, the price varies depending on my evaluation of the market at the time I restock and I also do a price adjustment most weekends on most items that have been in stock for a couple of weeks or more. So I would be concerned that the listed prices in your inventory service may be up to 2 weeks out of date. I would be more interested in looking at a service with weekly updates on an agreed schedule. Regards, KikkiJikki
Yay feedback! That certainly makes sense, and really, all shops are going to be different in terms of turnover rate. I need to re-write the thread to allow for that. My only worry on agreeing to a weekly long-ish term setup is that my internet access isn't necessarily solid right now, and I don't want to promise something that I can't carry through on. (For example, next week I'm off on international travel for a month, and they've promised good internet, but...) However, if you're willing to give it a try, that'd be awesome! The more shops that are listed, the more people will get used to checking there to find items. On a side note, I'll be making an entropedia entry for each shop on Ark anyway, so shop owners can use them if they feel like it.
Good to see there's interest Since I pulled most of those numbers out of a hat, I'm open to suggestions. Prices on Ark will already be substantially lower than Caly, since it has 3 locations and 31 active shops (from K-max's list), compared to Caly's 11 locations and ~170 active shops. It might also be a good idea to separate item searches (finder's fee?) and material searches (a percentage of the MU?).
I've been thinking about your business model here. It makes sense of course to do it the way you're doing it, but I'm wondering if a different structure might be better... more down the Google/Facebook business model kind of path.... If it's a list that nobody looks at because it's only got three shop owners on it, then the value to those three shop owners is probably quite minimal and therefore they'll probably not feel good about paying for it. Unhappy customers is not good, and they'll eventually leave. On the other hand, if the service was free, reliable and kept up to date, then every shop owner would probably want to take part in it, and you'd potentially have a really good quality product that is a valued reference point, thus commanding many eyeballs. Which would be great except that you'd still need to make some money to cover your labour costs. If it commands lots of eyeballs, then the website itself would be valuable real estate, which gives the potential for income via advertising. Shop owners in such a situation might be prepared to pay more for their listing to be in bold, or have extra features like a picture or something. They might also be prepared to pay for advertising space on the site. I think going down that path would be more of a risk for you, but possibly has a greater chance of success too. If the only risk is the time you put in to make it happen, then maybe it would still be worth it. GL!
As a long term plan, this would be pretty awesome. I can't manage it right now, and I'd want to make sure I wasn't stepping on anybody's toes with it (don't want to overlap with EntropiaBay, for example), but it's a goal. One problem would be the massive amount of time required to list every shop weekly or even biweekly. There are 200 active shops on only two of the planets, somewhere between 20 and 150 items in each shop, and travel time of 1.5 hours each way (until I manage to nab a quad, in which case it'd be less). Restricting it to only the truly active shops might help, but it would take a decent amount of planning/scheduling. For sure - and this is why I don't offer to list on EB anymore. The point of the Entropedia listing isn't a giant table of all items in all shops (actually, something in the query to construct that table seems to be broken right now anyway). What I see as the more important part is that when you enter an item in a shop, it automatically lists that shop on the item's page as having the item. For example, here is the page on explosive projectiles. The second table lists two shops - Exo Express and Gloryhound G&M - that have them. People might not look up common materials that often, but they do check stats on weapons, tools, etc., and as these listings become more common (hopefully ), they should start checking specifically for the location information. (Note: in support of Kikki's point on old entries, Exo Express doesn't even exist anymore - I need to clean that up)
