I would recommend maybe a signed book since these are limited to the numbers you personally signed and cannot be duplicated by players. I would use such a service for a guarantied supply of wheat as it is a tedious job to do and most shops are not often stocked with the amount I need.
Thank you for the tip! Also, I think wheat is a very common one. I would consider adding it to multiple CSA's. I am curious, do you use it for breeding or cooking? and what other supplies do you use along with them? (i.e. carrots, seeds and apples, or eggs, milk and sugar?)
Bulk suppliers fail cause they try and do to much and can't keep up with orders. Turning their "fun" business to real work. Stone is also something that everyone needs and no one cares to make themselves.
I use wheat to bread cows/mooshrooms and then kill them for leather and meat. I'm also a hoarder for those. Use to have like 6 DCs of Cow eggs which made 15-20 DC of assorted meat and leather from it.
Oh, yeah I can see how that would happen. One of the most important parts to making this program work, I think, will be limiting the number of available memberships based on overstock and having strong business partners with productive operations. Again, thanks for all of your feedback, all advise and experience is helpful!
Nobody will buy your carrots or seeds or apples or eggs or milk or sugar. Carrots, are easy to mass produce, and they have very few uses except as food (where there are far better alternatives and everyone has an overambundance to begin with), golden carrot (need a lot more gold than carrot), carrot with stick (mostly for entertainment)... So really why would anyone buy that? Seeds, again easy to mass produce. Anyone who has a wheat farm quickly has more than they need. The only use is breeding chickens, and planting yet more wheat. Way more supply than demand. Apples, have an interesting market dynamic with highly variant prices, but generally, higher supply than demand. Still, the only way to make these is to cut oak wood, which is a high demand product. The way to think of apples is just a little perk to wood production. Eggs, free at various places, cheap other places. Very few uses other than making chickens and various types of food, which are, again, very overambundant. Sugar, probably the worst product to sell. The only market is really horses, and the product is basically worthless because sugar cane is free at various public sugar cane utilities. Instead, imagine yourself sitting there for hours with a sore back chopping away at tree after tree to fill a chest, get paid, and onto the next chest. Now imagine you have an endless supply of orders. Your friend tells you he has a new girlfriend, your other friend invites you over to play your favourite game, and here you are sitting inside in the basement drooling over some silly game for virtual currency. Pretty quickly, you're going to go do something else. And then, when you come back, even more orders. And you've completed none of them. Yep, that's what a supply business is and why they always seem to fail. People get upset because they pay money for goods and then the players they ordered from don't deliver and have already spent the money, and staff don't have time to chase these people down. I always order the maximum from every supply business I can as soon as I can, and sometimes I'm lucky enough to get it. But I will never pay until I know the goods are produced. Even if I have enough of the item or double what I need, I still order more because I know that I'll be out in the future and every commodity goes on periods of high supply and high demand. Best to order while the supply is highest. While I'm sure there's some merit to getting payment or commitment upfront, I think a far better alternative is to produce high demand goods and then distribute them out for cheap. For example, if you have someone who feels like sitting around for about 10 hours nonstop cutting logs then just sell the logs in a nice shop. The next week, if you find someone who wants to sit at a stone quarry or generator for hours on end, then you can sell tons of cobblestone or stone. The week afterward, if you find someone who wants to wander around the nether for hours and hopefully not die, you can stock a ton of quartz. Keep in mind that 60-70% of people who tell you they'll do something wont, so probably aim for 4-5 deals per week and just have a backlog of them ready to go for the next weeks so you can always have a great deal each week to announce. If you launch it at the same time you should get a following of people racing for your shop at that time. I would never pay up front for some promise of goods unless I know they exist already, and if I'm going to buy a farm I'd probably just buy them all, no point in splitting because I'll do better reselling some of them.
Azoundria, while you make a lot of good points there (and I mean a lot) much of it doesn't apply to the specific operation I'm thinking of running. Still I do appreciate your advice and will factor it into any future business decisions I make. To clear a few things up for any potential buyers, though: I do not use employees, as I don't want to deal with the employment hassles listed above. I have one business partner and otherwise I only deal with bulk suppliers and such, which I have back-up's back-ups for… although honestly I do 95% of all my own farming, gathering and the like. And, again, my memberships will be limited to my stock on hand, and purchased month to month. If I run out of an item that I can no longer get, I will change the membership package, or reduce the number of available packages the following month. In this way, if I buy out on the first day on the month, that is a GREAT thing, not a stressful, work-inducing one. And as to the supply and demand issues: My shop will be where I sell my high demand items, and as you are correct in saying, things such as eggs and seeds are more or less by-products of making these items. In this endeavor however, my audience isn't the frugal, efficiency driven Minecrafter, it is the convenience and time-limited one. A chest containing wheat, seed, and carrots for example, is not for planting; it would be a breeder's package. So that people who want to mass breed pigs and chickens wouldn't have to farm or search for their main work supplies; they can spend their time breeding animals. The same idea applies to the sugar & eggs, that would be for baking. Supply and demand is the driving force in economy, but marketing plays a huge role in how consumers view what they are buying, and where the value lies within in. I am curious to hear other peoples take on the value of the CSA idea.
I don't have time to mass produce anything but I want everything in bulk. If the prices are right for my own benefit or profit I'll be in on it no problem. I have rupees to kill but my time is valuable.
Yes, and that is the customer base I will be targeting. I wish I could snap my fingers and have it up and running. I will make sure to bump the thread when it is!
I think this is a really cool idea! it would be particularly hard to navigate though if it was facebook, maybe like a tumblr page?
