Personal merchant

Description

Personal merchants only sell items that the owner gives them. You cannot sell any items to him/her, only buy from them. The owner of the merchant sets the price that the merchant sells it for. The merchant also takes a small cut (10%) of any money taken from a sale. You can buy a personal merchant contract from a trader for 10 silver coins.

Management

To manage your personal merchant locate in your inventory personal merchant contract and right click->manage. You must, then, name your merchant and select its gender. Now the way the definition for placing is phrased oddly. What it means is that no other creatures may be on the tile you are trying to plant the merchant on, it does not mean that no other creatures can be in the building. They may not be in the same building as traders
To add items to the merchant simply open a trade window and offer the items and the trader will automatically trade. Same for withdrawing items, if the trader has money he will give that to you as well.
After placing the merchant you can manage it and you will be presented with the following screen. The price modifier will take the Get Price and multiply it by X number(1.4 by default). When dismissing make sure you take all your items out and money before dismissing.
To change prices you can either locate the item in your inventory then right click->Price->Set Price or you can change it by giving the item to the merchant and then managing the contract. If your merchant is in a very busy place the latter isn't a good idea as it may be bought before you change the price. To be safe simply change the prices through the inventory. Alternatively, begin a Trade session (transfer items to/from the merchant beforehand if needed) and leave the Trade session open until you have set all your prices.

Additional information

• Items held by a Merchant can be Examined, by anyone, via the Trade window.
• You can also do Get Price etc in the Trade window. This will show you the Set Price of the item, if it was set.
• Although a Merchant must be placed inside a building, if the building they're in rots away they will still be able to trade and be managed.
• If the name you pick is too long, a random name will be picked for you.
• You can use the Trade window to 'lock' the Merchant while you review prices in the Manage Prices window.
• You cannot put items inside containers on to a Merchant. The container must be emptied before the Merchant will accept it.
• The inventory limit for a Merchant seems to be about 50-55 items?
• Simply removing items from the Merchant resets the 'Last Sold' timer (a bug?). So in practice it's not hard to stop the Merchant from packing his/her bags because he hasn't sold anything. Just visit once a month and remove an item, then replace it.
• Putting large numbers of low-value items on a Merchant is hardly worth the effort as you have to set the price on each one individually, even if they are all identical.
• The "Manage Prices" window is slightly better than Set Price, but not much.
• Dismissing merchants (to store them or move them around) seems to have no penalty as long as you remove items and money from them first.
• Selling a merchant contract to another player is not difficult. Just dismiss the merchant and Trade the contract to another player. Again there is no penalty as long as you remember to remove the money and items before dismissing them.

To Investigate:

• Not sure if you can Trade a merchant contract without dismissing the merchant first.
• "Local Prices?". No idea what this means. In the Release Notes for 20040718 it is contrasted with "global prices" and local is supposedly better. But this was before the major changes implemented in the 200509xx release. Can't find any reference in the forums.

See Also

• List of Markets and Merchants
• Merchant Prices

Wish List

• As suggested above, the price and item management for merchants is very tedious
• It would be nice to have a "dump merchant" console command similar to the "dump skills" command, that would write a text file with the details and prices of all the items for sale.
• It would probably be ok to allow "dump merchant [NAME]" as well, since all this information is available for public inspection by anyone.
• And in turn that suggests "dump trader [NAME]".
• But maybe these last to options give too much information about market prices?
• A "write merchant" command (to read an edited "dump merchant" file and update the merchant would be very useful
• The ~50 item inventory limit, and the 10s contract fee, both discourage sellers of low priced goods from getting in to the marketplace. But perhaps this is intentional?