This actually seems like a really nice idea to get people exploring housing neighborhoods. I've had limited experience with player housing (EQ1, Lotro), and while it was fun to buy a house and decorate it initially, the neighborhoods always seemed really deserted.
If we had shops inside houses in PG rather than the current keep area, this actually would allow us to have more sellers too, and the shop rental prices could be lowered since we aren't competing for a fixed amount of vendor stalls anymore. I've been thinking about Citan's original post on this where he said something to the effect that the stalls allow people to enjoy playing shopkeepers. I think this is true to a certain extent - I love being able to pick a name and decorations and message. But inevitably I run into the problem where due to the increasing daily rental costs, I just can't keep the shop running profitably. If I decide to sell low-profit items for a reasonable price, I run into that no profit problem much sooner. At that point, I can of course dump spare cash into keeping my shopkeeper game going and making sure nobody else steals my NPC shopkeeper but it seems a bit silly to spend lots of money in order to run a store.
So, what I think could be fun:
- Create a central search function that shows which items are being sold where, but not their price. So, price-conscious players can visit all the vendors to compare prices, while other players might just want to head to the nearest vendor, and nobody is going to waste their time looking for an item that isn't on sale anywhere.
- Allow shops in player housing in addition to the keep area. The keep area could still be used by players without a house.
- Lower the daily store rental cost, and maybe just keep it as a flat fee rather than increasing per day or make the cost increase much more gradual.
- Add a sales tax, so that players selling expensive items will pay more money and players selling less expensive (or no) items will pay less. The current system doesn't really encourage playing around with items if you aren't sure they will sell or if the items don't have a large profit margin. Replacing a large rental fee with a small rental fee + tax on items sold may encourage more diversity in what's being sold.
On a totally unrelated note, do people still buy things from the Consignment tab? I've pretty much stopped checking them since the vendor stalls came out...