Quelque Chose
New Eden Roller Disco Supply
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Posted - 2008.05.30 19:09:00 -
[2]
 Originally by: Xin Qian
This'd be a nice in-game feature, but there's no reason it has to be built into the client if CCP are not keen or busy elsewhere.
What about a website (for the ingame browser) for this? You could sign up and set up your store. Your items for sale could be auctions you have created ingame, the website links to them (I know it does items, I assume it'll do auctions). You could also list what you sell and where, put your own images up for advertising etc.
Shouldn't be too hard to write!
That's not as nice for obvious reasons, but it might be a decent first step.
What we'd need:
1. An entrepreneur to run the website. Would probably make him/ her crap for ISK at first, but if it caught on there might be a healthy advertising revenue in it.
2. The site itself. Ideally it would be browsable by region and searchable by product category or the name of the business -- kind of like the Eve Yellow Pages.
3. A decent- sized pool of retailers willing to start the thing up. In order for it to work out you'd need to have enough people selling enough useful stuff that players would be willing to search the site to begin with.
4. Eventually, standards? Something that would really help it to fly would be if there was an ample but finite number of "types" of store you could run, since ease of use is likely to be key here. Choices that are too numerous and too vague wouldn't be much of an improvement over what we have now. Additionally, in order to qualify as a given type your selection would have to meet certain minimum criteria; ie, if your deal was Amarr T1 Cruisers maybe you'd need to stock all models, at minimum all appropriate T1 guns and perhaps some T2 plus tank equipment. Anything else? The point being that if a customer goes to one of these things he/ she needs some reasonable assurance that the required gear would be available within reason.
In short, it'll work if it A. makes gear shopping easier and B. nets a decent profit for retailers -- in spite of possible advertising and logistics costs.
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