Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Running a successful bot



There are only a few big bots in the Magic Online market. What is one supposed to do in order to run a successful business and have a lot of customers? I will discuss here some of the key factors that lead to a successful bot:

1-    Inventory: having a large collection is probably the most important factor. Your bot has to host almost all the cards in Magic Online. Since this is impossible, I use the empirical law “at least 40.000 cards, with at least 4.000 rares/mythics”. It’s better if you deal also with foil cards, but this is not mandatory. You can buy collections from eBay for very discounted prices: this helps a lot at the beginning.

2-    Prices: prices have to be low, but not too low. On average they have to be below the market,  but some “slightly more expensive cards” are ok. Customers won’t jump from one bot to another bot just to save 0.05 tixs, since this is extremely time expensive. When I shop to build my deck, I always visit the same bots.

3-    Chain: more than one bot is mandatory. A chain should comprise at least 4/6 bots, named in a consistent way (cccbot1,ccbot2,cccbot3) and with shared credit.

4-    Customer care: always give your email address in the greeting message: “If you have problem, feel free to write at ccc@ccc.com”. This protects customers and give them the possibility to contact you in case of issues (and hence shop again in your chain)

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