EVE General Discussion

Let's make a coffee shop in space.

I'm a retail therapist. When dealing with customers I want their cash, in return they get an emotional connection and some sort of merchandise they didn't really need.

I prefer to do this as quickly as possible, because I'm only good at short term relationships. Customers like it that way though, because their time is fleeting.

What's always made me wonder though is how virtual shops are built as vending machines.

Sure, places like this lovely forum are called shop fronts, and efforts are made to fill them full of locked threads and moved threads in order to make them appear tidy.

But you can't actually buy anything here. So it's not really a shop front is it?

And in the old Roman sense of the word "forum" it's not really a forum. Sure we can advertise stuff here, but that's mainly player to player scams, not CCP trying to make an honest dollar.

One would think that selling virtual goods would be easy. There is no transport cost. There is no need for staff to be highly groomed, they can sit there in underwear and sell stuff.

But still, there is no shop front.

There is player support, but that's only for when things go wrong.

If you took some money into player support and told them you wanted to spend a hundred dollars, they wouldn't know what to do with you, except point you to the automated vending machine. Or possibly the EVE shop for T-shirts. And maybe tell you about special offers some time in a vague future, that usually ties in with when US holidays occur.

The best part of a shop front is that customers can ask you for stuff, and you get to know what to stock.

Vending machines don't do that.

Mind you shop owners can fail to do that too.

I believe the confusion likely comes from a simple idea. This isn't the store front. The Eve Online store page is the store front. This is not a place for selling merchandise, it helps lubricate the selling of Eve Online itself. It serves the same function as TV screens at McDonalds. Do you have to pay for them? No. Are they the main entertainment? No. But if you're bored, feel free to watch. They enrich the experience of going or doing something without being monetized, helping to aid in the selling of the real product, an Eve Online subscription. Friendships are formed, people entertained, and consequently, subscriptions sold, without a single product available for purchase.