Merchant stall roleplay

[zerotje]

I notice most people are not engaging in actual roleplay when it comes to engaging a merchant. It feels unnecessarily robotic and gamey on the part of the customers. It's not just about game stats, I'm sure your characters also have preferences regarding fashion, flavor, jewelry, how fancy or prestigious something is and whatever else. And it'd be nice if people attempted to haggle more (it's a bazaar) and strike up conversation. I'm sure I personally could do more to make it engaging and I shall aspire to do so, but I'm a little worried about how lackluster / low motivation the roleplay is on the customers end of things. This is a RP server and the merchant isn't a NPC with a inventory tab, it's another player to play the game with.

Anyway I don't mean to rant it'd be good to read some opinions, tips, tricks, self-reflections. Discuss! :D

[One_With_Nature]

Some people just want to look at what you have a leave. That's always going to happen. Engaging people and creating an engaging situation really falls on the merchant. It is after all something you have decided to pursue as a major part of your character. I personally liked to use merchanting to get into politics, influence people by discussing their views with them, getting peoples views on current events, trying to steer people towards things, using trade to leverage people to do things I wanted, encouraging people to sell things they hadn't considered selling, having a niche that makes people want to come to you (I basically bought everything and offered bounties on things like cigarettes etc making people keep coming back to me regularly which strikes up longer relations with people), strike trade deals with other players, get them to bring their wares to you instead of selling them themselves, pay people to collect things for you. Merchanting is only what you make of it and it will all be on you as the merchant to create interesting scenarios, but just because you open a stall don't expect people to strike up anything engaging most people will just want to browse and move along.