Customers

What are Customers?
Customers are your primary source of income; they purchase goods that your team of workers have produced. Knowing your customers is critical to making suggestions and any hope of profit wtwo craftsworkers.

Types of customers
Different customers will buy different items (see the item acceptance matrix). For example, a spellcaster class customer will not want to buy a sword, nor will a heavily armored warrior buy a magical robe. Varying customers will have different offers and be open to or accept different suggestions. All customers accept all consumables and accessories, but you'll have much more chance to make a sale if you know what each customer likes (bards and singing axes like musical instruments, for instance).

Although technically not buyers, certain other NPCs (Non Player Characters) that are willing to trade are sometimes considered customers - they may offer raw trade goods to sell (common or rare), or processed goods (like weapons and armor).

Interacting with Customers
Purchasing customers will appear in your store from the main door and will walk towards the counter, where a question mark (?) will appear over their head indicating they are ready to trade (Note, not all visitors are "customers" attempting to buy something - others will walk around browsing, and others may offer their adventurer services or quests).

Once they're clicked upon, a dialogue will appear with flavor text that will describe their offer on an item and their price. There are metrics - profit and market price - that compare it to the production price and the "accepted" street price. The Profit* shows how much money you'd make if you accept the offer (note that only the materials will be taken into account, time involved crafting won't), and Market describes an arbitrarily set "fair price" - this affects how successful you will be when you haggle. Technically there is no market price or trading that players can purchase from - the Market metric describes what NPCs would accept on the street. You can manipulate this price with the Mercantile skill or various improvements and haggle the price up for selling and down for buying with the Silver Tongue skill.

You may interact with the offer in several ways - accept the offer, decline, suggest (see items acceptance by customer class), haggle or wait.


 * This does not exist any more so you're just going to have to estimate if an offer is worth taking or if you should refuse, manipulate etc.

Letting Customers Wait
Sometimes you find yourself in a situation that your crafter is creating the item (or something comparable) which a customer wants to have. You have the option to let them wait for the product to finish. The customers, however, are very limited in the maximum time they want to wait for an item. From observation, the wait time appears to differ between customer classes. For example, I wanted a Musketeer to wait for a sword to finish being crafted and it took two hours to finish it. The customer seemed perfectly happy to wait for the two hours. However, a Barbarian needed the same amount of waiting time for a helmet that was still being crafted, and the Barbarian began to get angry and I could only just get the item to them in time. Letting them wait any longer makes the client leave angrily, losing a possibility to sell something to them.

Browsing Customers
Many customers do not know what they exactly want, so they will walk into your shop looking for the items they might like, but these customers do not buy anything.

It is believed these customers return the next day to buy an item displayed on one of your racks.

Other people believe they come looking for a particular item, and come back the next day to buy it, provided you had it the day they came looking for it.