Customer Service in the Neopian Shops by erunyauve |  |
The markets of Neopia are a good model of an idealised capitalist economy.
By idealised I mean that no one can corner the market on a given commodity,
and the price set by competing vendors for an item is available to anyone willing
to carefully use the Shop Wizard, except when handicapped by a faerie quest,
and price is a function of scarcity. A certain amount of demand pressure is
placed on the market by the Faerieland Employment Agency, which requires multiples
of random items, and the various find-the-ingredient games in the Haunted Wood,
Mystery Island and, with the addition of the Dark Faerie Quest, in Faerieland
NeoPets thoughtfully provides competition to player-owned shops in the form
of the High Street shops, the Auction and the Island Trading Post.
What does all this mean for the shopkeepers of Neopia? It means that customer
satisfaction is the only edge one shop has over another. It affects us in the
way we acquire our merchandise, the way we price it, and the manner in which
we design our shops, because all of them have to be tailored to our customers.
A customer's first concern is the price of the item. Shop owners pretty much
know their selling price before they buy their stock. Eyeshadow that sold for
15 NP today may go for 20 NP tomorrow, but no one will give 200 NP for it. The
question is where a shopkeeper can get stuff cheap enough to resell at an attractive
price. There's no profit in the overpriced merchandise from the High Street
shops. The auctions will be bid up to par in the last few seconds, so no margin
is to be found there, either. The trading post seems to be haunted by wishful
thinkers who believe someone will offer them multiple codestones for 10 NP worth
of junk. Isolated bargains can be found there, but it's a lot of work. These
are not sources of merchandise. These are competitors.
So where does one get stuff to sell for a price that won't cause a customer
to burst out laughing? For starters, one can play certain games. The most obvious
one is Dice-A-Roo, which will return far more food for ten plays than those
ten plays cost in Neopoints. Scorchy Slots coughs up faeries and map pieces
every so often, and one does find codestones "on the floor" while playing some
older NeoPets games. At the low end, a poor Neopian can raise a certain amount
of capital by hitting the money tree and the auctioning the proceeds.
That's still the hard way to acquire merchandise, though. The easy way is
to use the Shop Wizard to hunt for bargains in other shops. How do these bargains
arise? Some are operator errors, when a shop owner misread the Wiz before setting
his own price, or made a mistake keying it in. Some are artifacts of the Wizard.
We all know that it's necessary to use the Wizard several times in succession
to find the lowest price, since it "searches a different section of the marketplace"
each time. If an item chanced not to come up in several searches, like items
priced just above it may have been bought out, leaving a decent profit margin.
Then, of course, there are the Newbies who haven't yet learned to use the
Wizard, and the altruists who are trying to do poor Neopians a favour. This
last won't work because there is no means to qualify their buyers as, for instance,
the Soup Faerie does. Until NeoPets sets aside a special section of the marketplace
usable only by players with less than, say, 1,000 NP, the charity shops are
fighting a losing battle. Those of us out to make a profit have to buy their
stuff out in self defence, to keep them from dragging down the overall price.
All this has an effect on how we price our own stuff, too. The most common
way to set a price seems to be to use the Shop Wizard several times, and then
go a bit under the lowest price found. There is a more subtle consideration,
though, which is an influence of the auction. Items likely to sell for less
than 50 NP in a shop may do considerably better at auction, where someone on
a faerie quest can't afford to lose that purple eye shadow, because they're
out of business until they get one. There doesn't seem to be any reason to sell
anything in a shop for 1 NP, because it'll go at auction for a minimum of 2 NP;
the base price (1 NP) plus the first bid at the minimum increment (another 1 NP).
Junk like this is chump change, anyway. A newbie may deal in it for a while
to build enough cash to stock the good stuff, but after that point, it doesn't
make much sense to sell lipstick in a shop.
Neopian market conditions should also affect the design of our shops. Consider
our typical buyer. Is he out for a day with his friends, browsing from one shop
to the next? He is not. He has four minutes to find seven like items for the
Employment Agency. He came in through the Shop Wizard. He does not care what
is in the shop, other than the single item he needs.
Our buyer doesn't want to wait while seventy-five item icons load on an enormous
shop Web page. The sale is not facilitated by pictures of pets, guild banners
or audio files that load automatically before any merchandise displays. The
buyer doesn't want to see a fancy background, particularly if it makes the text
illegible, since he's scanning for his item long before all the NeoPets icons
have loaded. He certainly doesn't want to see an endless series of graphics
saying "This image hosted by Angelfire," or any other free host, almost none
of which allow pages not on their servers to link to the files they store. And
our customer thinks there is a very hot place in the afterlife for anyone who
offers an item at an extremely low price and then changes its link to point
to something other than the sales script. Our shops should be designed to let
buyers get in and get out, with no inconveniences and certainly no tricks.
NeoPets is not faultless in this. The ideal shop would use text links, not
icons, and the shop owner would be able to specify the order in which items
appear and use a certain number of in-line CSS tags to arrange things into "departments".
It's true that some Neopians don't know enough about Web design to do this,
but some don't know HTML at all, and that doesn't stop NeoPets from offering
customisation options for those who do. It's not too much to ask that at the
next upgrade, changes be made to allow us to design the best shops possible.
In the meantime, if we want to turn a profit, we have to do our part: buy
merchandise at a reasonable price, set a selling price that appeals to the buyer,
and advertise it on a small shop page designed for the convenience of our customer.
If we do this, the buyers will do the rest. |
