Recently, I have heard many people have been changing their shop stock and prices drastically because of one specific shop run by a group of people who I shall not name. This shop is practically ruining the entire economy of all valuable items on the server, and at this point, they're practically a monopoly.

I, as a shop owner myself, have all but lost any major business to my shop, as have other shop owners. This "mega shop" has forced any and all shops to bend to its will or lose massive profit.

I dislike the fact that these people are being permitted to entirely run the server's economy, especially when some of us are striving towards making a town or nation.

This is no exaggeration. Since this store opened, the average price of diamonds on the server has gone from 220 NBz per diamond, to 190 per diamond, and again, all because of this one shop.

As such, I ask that another rule be added to the Marketplace's rules: No double or triple-plot shops. No exceptions. Most players do not have the luxury of having a second partner to make a larger shop with, and therefore have a disadvantage to those who do. I feel like there should be an even-tempered amount of competition between the shops, as it was previously. Previously, almost all shops agreed on the same price, and as such, you could really get what you need for the same price no matter where you went. That is no longer the case, and I wish it to be changed back as soon as possible. Thank you.

I'm not sure if that rule (no double/tripleplots) would prevent a monopoly:
1. You can still fit a lot of chests on one single plot, so they would simply have to switch to a more compact storelayout.
2. They can still build 2 or 3 independent stores next to each other (different onwers and different designs) e.g. one for ores and stones, one for wood and buildingmaterials, one for the rest of the items. They would still have their monopoly, only divided into 3 different stores.

Even a rule that would only allow one shopowner per plot could be circumvented by adding a middleman, making one partner the seller and the other the sole supplier of the items he formerly sold.

There also is another factor that might help these departmentstores. At the beginning of the marketdistrict people went through through all the stores comparing the prices. But now that very many stores always seem to be out of stock with 80% of their product range for more than a week, people mostly stick to those shops they have learned to be reliable. So new shopwoners will face the problem that their shop is hardly noticed as only few customers will still check other stores than their favourites (they won't even notice a new shop). A huge department store will of course be noticed, so it doesn't face this problem.



I only buy from townsfolk (basically Twist, Tidal and Duelcon) where I know that the profits will benefit the town, so I haven't even seen that shop you mean yet. But the problem you are describing sounds like the same as in the real world. Small corner shops are going out of business because they can't withstand the pressure of the big department stores. It is an unfortunate sideeffect of a free economy and the only way to prevent that is a planned economy where every store gets his prices dictated by the admins. Unfortunately that is not really an acceptable solution as it would take away the competition amongst the shopowners and the success of a shop would mostly be decided by personal loyalty of a customer and the location of the store.
Enforcing a planned economy among playershops would also be kind of useless as this is actually already covered by the servershop.
So, the current mixture of a planned economy (the more expensive servershop) and a more competitive (and therefore cheaper and more lucrative) free economy still seems to be the best option.

If I had a shop myself (which I never wanted as it would cost me to much precious building time ) I would see two way to survive this:
"Specialize"
Pick one - three areas of business you really like (e.g. wood and bricks, stones, ores, food, mobparts ...) and specialize on those. With the time you save by not having to gather the other goods anymore you can concentrate on getting way more suplies of these chosen products. If you do it effectively you can then offer lower or equal prices than the department stores and also specialize on being able to very quickly meet even the biggest orders for that product; e.g. being able to supply 10 doublechests of sand almost immediately thanks to a full storage.

"Divide and conquer"
That's basically what these big department stores do, they split the productrange into smaller portions assigning one part to each member who then can concentrate only on that area (basicaly the same as the specialisation mentioned above). If they can do it who says that others can't do the same. Find partners who you can trust, divide the products into shares each one is comfortable with and sell them together.
That doesn't mean you have to share one plot if you don't like that. Instead of a huge department store you can also build it like a retail chain. Split it into several shops, all sharing a quite similar design (the same logo and basic design so the customer immediately feels familiar with it no matter which of the shops he's in), only differing in a small element that shows the shops product specialisation (like using ores, bricks, wood, leafes for the entrance area).


Basically having a successful shop is suppossed to be a challenge and keeping up with a quite dynamic economy isn't everyone taste (and I think it is ok if shops are allowed to fail, it's a game and a learning experience after all; and even towns are not "too big too fail" here). But owning a shop is not the only option to make money (for some it even isn't the best options as there might be other areas more suited to their talents). You can always make a lot of money as a hunter/miner/gatherer that supplies these shops. Or turn towards farming and selling the products to shops like Twisteds produce store.
There are even quite a few possibilities for entrepreneurs out there that have rarely been tried. If you have earned the peoples trust and find a huge group of pvp-players you could even try to arrange pvp-tourney-fights with 10% of the prizemoney going to you; although I doubt you would find enough people to make that really profitable so it's just an example for markets rarely or never tried yet.
As a vip you could even build a sugarplantation or wheatfarm and then hire trusted! people to work there. They can harvest, replant and then sell the harvested goods to your own produce store on the plantation for slightly more than the regular serverstore prize (which is their payment for the job). Then you take the goods to the VIP-chestshop and sell it for the higher price there. The bigger your farm and staff is the higher your profit will be.

Seaside's "Megastore" is a great addition to the market like Duel said, many people gets dragged to the market district cause of it as it do have fairly nice prices, but as many already has said it do have a chance of messing up the economy, but was it really ever a proper economy on this server?

I changed my prices several times cause of people saying this and others saying that, I don't want to lose money on my shop and I still after as long as the market district has existed NEVER lost money on my shop, if you choice to have a shop you do take a large risk as if people mass sell stuff to you well you probably will lose money in one way or another.

I do agree having a 3 plot big shop can be a bit of a "show off" and make other shops lose business, but is that Seasides problem? They are just like other shop owners, they are all after the money and making people get the items they need like wood, seeds, diamonds, gold and so on.

I sold lots of stuff to the Seaside "Megastore" mostly sandstone and I have always made a profit on it and so has Debo, Craft and whoever the other owner is.

Having a shop is not the best way to make money if you don't expect losing money, if you want good money as both Duel and Albatros has said go farm wheat, go strip-mine or cut down trees, approx 10% of my money is money I made from my own shop, the rest is from logs, mining, digging and exp farming at my enderman farm to get enchanted tools to sell :)

That would be cool =D