Some retailing tips for a newbie?

Post here if you have any strategy tips to share
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Njeroe
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Some retailing tips for a newbie?

Post by Njeroe »

I tried searching on the forum but I can't seem to get any results (too many common words), I purchased the game + 2 DLC's a few days ago but I'm really struggling. I'm focusing on Retail and trying to dominate the market however the AI competitors seem to do much better and expanding in every product category while I just manage to focus on one (I chose the category where I have expertise in) without losing to much money. I played a lot of Capitalism II when I was younger and didn't even know half as much as I do know and sort of frustating to be playing for several hours and just starting to make money on 81% difficulty.

I focus on three products in the Computer category: Printers, Desktop Computer and Notebook Computer. Printers and Desktop Computers I have the highest tech in, I use range brand which is at 100 in all 4 cities but still I only get ~50% market share and my biggest competitor selling products on a loss to keep up with my overall rating (100-130). Notebook Computers are a monopoly and the biggest earner, before I researched this I was just breaking even and there was no way to expand because I maximized my loans and had no cash almost.

Overview of what I make now:
products.PNG
products.PNG (20.23 KiB) Viewed 7193 times
Currently I am profiting around $30M and have $16M in cash. Am I doing something obviously wrong or should I be more patient?

The AI I am competing against and I guess all other players is the green one (Ion Industries) below. As you can see he is dominating the retail sector and is currently at 59%.
competitors.PNG
competitors.PNG (162.33 KiB) Viewed 7191 times
Abrutalism
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Re: Some retailing tips for a newbie?

Post by Abrutalism »

Usually i start a subsidiary for just retailing what i produce and use range branding for this corp.
and later after boosting the revenue of the retail corp by selling at low cost what i produce, with this way you can sell few year later the sub corp and upgrade your price for bringing the profit to the parent corp.
with this way i can make billion in few year
i hope that can help you
Spac3y
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Re: Some retailing tips for a newbie?

Post by Spac3y »

Its all in the R&D and brand. The more it increases (and is better than an AI`s) the more you can hike the price up.

Do you have enough production to satisfy a store ? Do you have enough stores soaking up all your excess capacity if you have it (like say 4-5 stores in each city ?)
Abrutalism
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Re: Some retailing tips for a newbie?

Post by Abrutalism »

Spac3y wrote:Its all in the R&D and brand. The more it increases (and is better than an AI`s) the more you can hike the price up.

Do you have enough production to satisfy a store ? Do you have enough stores soaking up all your excess capacity if you have it (like say 4-5 stores in each city ?)

yeah i forgot the main point r&d
sorry ;)
Njeroe
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Re: Some retailing tips for a newbie?

Post by Njeroe »

Thank you for your answers, for example in the save I was talking about I had expertise in computer products and my tech for desktop computers was 800 but still never got more then 50% market share because the AI competitor seems to be building way faster and can eventually afford to sell at a loss to keep their market share. Example: I sold for around 700 dollars they for around 200 dollars production/transportation costs were around 300-400 depending on the city location. I tried building more stores but they wouldn't utilize the sales units so I guess the market was saturated. All product ratings for myself and the competitors were above 100, I would usually have 130-140 rating and the AI 110-120.

My problem mainly is no matter the diffuculty rating the AI just can keep borrowing money and doubling their revenue each year whilst I have to keep manually adjusting all my stores which just takes up so much time. There's no way I can keep ahead I guess I'll try to use more subsidiaries in the future that seemed to help.
bdubbs
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Re: Some retailing tips for a newbie?

Post by bdubbs »

Njeroe wrote:Thank you for your answers, for example in the save I was talking about I had expertise in computer products and my tech for desktop computers was 800 but still never got more then 50% market share because the AI competitor seems to be building way faster and can eventually afford to sell at a loss to keep their market share. Example: I sold for around 700 dollars they for around 200 dollars production/transportation costs were around 300-400 depending on the city location. I tried building more stores but they wouldn't utilize the sales units so I guess the market was saturated. All product ratings for myself and the competitors were above 100, I would usually have 130-140 rating and the AI 110-120.

My problem mainly is no matter the diffuculty rating the AI just can keep borrowing money and doubling their revenue each year whilst I have to keep manually adjusting all my stores which just takes up so much time. There's no way I can keep ahead I guess I'll try to use more subsidiaries in the future that seemed to help.
Computers are usually pretty low in the necessity index, and depending on how low that index is for your game there may simply be more supply than there is demand for the products. If you haven't already you should look into creating your own semi products. CPU's, electronic components, and plastic can all be made in house and with proper R&D can give you a significant quality advantage / generate profits of their own as you sell them to your own factories.

Try spreading your retail stores across the city, if you build them on top of each other that wont help. If you are selling at a significantly better "overall" deal in your retail stores than the AI you should have a significantly larger chunk of the market share. If you're forcing the AI to sell at a loss and have most of the market share they should eventually exit the market as long as you can outlast them which will allow you to raise your price, but if you raise it too high they will eventually reenter the market.

Something else I just considered is if you're not backward integrated (manufacturing your own component goods) your factory production might be constrained by one of your components. If that were the case your factory will still show demand greater than supply for computers, but the factory will not be producing anywhere near as many computers as it potentially could.

To diagnose this problem go into your factories and check your purchasing units. If demand is maxed out for any of them / supply is showing lower than demand your problem is most likely that your factory is not producing as many units as it could / should be. This used to be a big problem for me, where I would have a superior product or pricing and lose market share to the competition because I didn't have enough supply at my retailers. To solve it I'd try to build more factories, which only made the problem worse. If this is the case for you then you need to find a new supplier for the good that is constrained, which most likely means make it yourself.

Another tip is to check how many AI are also retailing computers and how many are also manufacturing computers. If there's only one competing manufacturer but several companies retailing for them you could consider turning off internal sales. You will not be able to maximize your retailing profits, but you will at least be able to fix the retail price for computers across the cities for the stores that order from you.

The earlier you can achieve market dominance of your product in the game the better. Personally my strategy with computers is to R&D each product for 2 years / research notebook computers at the very start of the game and set up seaport retailers to generate early profits. If you introduce a high quality / well branded product to the market early you will be able to price gouge for a while and take over most of the market share before the next competitor hits the market. If you make enough money doing this you can simply buy out the first company who tries to compete with you in computers and prevent them from manufacturing that product class. Or if that's not an option you can lower your price to a point where they can't get a decent market share and you can force them to exit the market early. If you go into the corporate details screen and find another company with an expertise in computers you can buy some of their stock early and get it for cheap.

Either way I think its best to expand into 2-4 product classes early (preferably with overlap of component goods / raw materials) and retail from the seaport so if you do have to engage in price wars you have other profits to sustain you in the interim. Your expertise will be your bread and butter, and you will be unable to beat the AI R&D of products that are off-expertise for you that another company does have as an expertise but that doesn't mean there aren't still ways to compete. You can match or come close to their quality if you have better component goods / raw materials (AI typically ignores most component R&D) or be able to manufacture your goods more cheaply by being more efficient than the AI and thus be able to compete with an inferior product at a lower price point. I like to do this with beds and leather wallets, they only use 1 raw material (timber / leather respectively) and ovr quality is highly determined from raw material quality. If beds and wallets are not offered by the seaport they can make a killing early on even with low quality, and even as the AI eventually manufactures these products at superior quality due to R&D you can still retain a decent market share and make slim profit margins if you lower your prices at the factory and retailer, or by simply having your retail stores more tactically placed so that they have better foot traffic.

Just remember that there's a difference between market share and profit. Early in the game, especially if you have low starting capital you want to be a profit maximizer, and it may be in your best interest to let an AI take the majority of the market share and avoid a price war as long as your making money. If you're turning profits and the AI isn't then what you're doing is sustainable and what they're doing isn't. Diversify your holdings so that you have income streams from several places, you don't want all your eggs in one basket. Once you make enough money (or if you use high starting capital) I'd strongly recommend real estate. Their profits aren't great but they can be enough to support other costs and can be used to boost foot traffic at your retailers which is key. The faster you can get up and running and earlier you can reinvest those profits the bigger your advantage will be. If you make enough money early you can buy up all the best land near the CBD and force other companies to build their stores in places with lower foot traffic.

If you start a game with several seaports then I'd recommend starting off the game with well placed discount mega stores, these can turn profits very fast, especially if you can get 1 or 2 discount megas operating in several different cities. Enough for you to build apartments around them which will up their foot traffic and provide new (albeit small) profit streams as they fill up. From here you can expand in livestock (can be tough to generate profits early, but typically very useful after they develop) or manufacturing a product that nobody else is currently selling, preferably one that is highly dependent on price and whose quality is at least 40% determined by the quality of its raw materials, and most importantly whose raw materials are sold by a seaport.

Avoid products highly dependent on brand since your products are going to be low quality. Beds and leather wallets are best imo, leather wallets in particular have low freight so you can have one large factory selling to several cities if you want. Food / Beverages / Snacks are also good. They have high freight but when your raw materials eventually get disrupted at the seaport you can produce your raw materials at a farm and eventually have 100 quality raw materials (for the most part). Livestock products are nice because their quality is entirely determined off how how fast your farms train up (farms train slower if they are not fully utilized). Jewelry is typically one of the lowest on the demand index, but if you have a high population, high real wage rate city you can make a lot of money off those since they are largely dependent on raw materials and have very low freight costs associated with them. If you don't choose to move deeper into these product classes later then eventually you won't really be able to compete anymore. After several years have gone by that doesn't really matter though imo, you can repurpose the factories or just close them down. Their purpose is to boost profits early and if done right they will pay off the cost of the factory fairly quickly.

The best product classes for off-expertise manufacturing early game imo are furniture, leather goods, food, snacks, beverages, footwear, jewelry. sport equipment, and tobacco products, you just want to prioritize products that aren't sold at a seaport, but their raw materials are. You also want to check how much the demand is for these products are in each city at the product details screen to make sure there's a high enough demand to make money here. This is less important for products like leather goods and furniture, and more important products like tobacco products and jewelry

Prioritize any products that have raw materials in common with your expertise goods. If one of your expertise products is offered at the seaport you can also do private labeling to build up your brand rating early (strongly recommend range branding). This should help you create pretty solid profits before your R&D finishes on your expertise products.

If you're flush with cash you can buy land in tactical areas. When your R&D pops you should have enough money to pause the game, build factories and retailers and bring your product to market in every city simultaneously. (Beware that certain products like computers may not have much demand in certain low wage cities and you may not want to sell there) After bringing your products to market you want to build your brand in every city and continue raising your price as your brand rating increases. A competitor may be finishing their R&D and coming to market around the same time or shortly after you, but they will likely only being doing so with 1 product in the class which should provide you with 2-3 others that are uncontested and make a ton of money. This should provide you with more than enough money coming in (combined with everything else) to drop your price for that product and try to bully them out of the market without hurting yourself long term.

As the game moves on and you have more flexible reserves of cash you can backward integrate into semi products, R&D semi products, R&D off-expertise products, buy out competitors, etc. As you get behind in R&D for different products look for opportunities to buy tech. If a product has more than 2 companies that have better tech than you then it is very likely that someone will sell you their tech. If a company researches a new product (notebook computer, camera phones) and you offer to buy it immediately before they start producing it there's a good chance they will sell you the tech and you can beat them to market with the product.

TLDR: Your factories are most likely constrained by lack of supply of a raw material or component good imo. The rest of it is mostly beginner strategy / tips
Njeroe
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Re: Some retailing tips for a newbie?

Post by Njeroe »

Thanks for your reply, I tried some different strategies and had better outcomes. Basically being more aggressive is what worked for me trying to get an early advantage and building out different product ranges is what helped. However I still find managing all my firms a lot of work, AI competitors seem to be able to react very quickly to changing conditions where as human players don't have that advantage. That's more of a micro vs macro management issues I guess. Vertical integration is definitely something that helps because you get to set your own prices down the production chain. I haven't spend a lot of time lately playing, but will try to check if my factories are working in optimal circumstances next time.
bdubbs
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Re: Some retailing tips for a newbie?

Post by bdubbs »

Njeroe wrote:Thanks for your reply, I tried some different strategies and had better outcomes. Basically being more aggressive is what worked for me trying to get an early advantage and building out different product ranges is what helped. However I still find managing all my firms a lot of work, AI competitors seem to be able to react very quickly to changing conditions where as human players don't have that advantage. That's more of a micro vs macro management issues I guess. Vertical integration is definitely something that helps because you get to set your own prices down the production chain. I haven't spend a lot of time lately playing, but will try to check if my factories are working in optimal circumstances next time.
Glad you're finding some more success, heavy micro is definitely a necessity for strong early growth imo. The good news is once you have a strong foothold you have more options of how to increase income. You can use subsidiaries, make stock acquisitions, buy out media firms, etc.
Njeroe
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Re: Some retailing tips for a newbie?

Post by Njeroe »

bdubbs wrote:
Njeroe wrote:Thanks for your reply, I tried some different strategies and had better outcomes. Basically being more aggressive is what worked for me trying to get an early advantage and building out different product ranges is what helped. However I still find managing all my firms a lot of work, AI competitors seem to be able to react very quickly to changing conditions where as human players don't have that advantage. That's more of a micro vs macro management issues I guess. Vertical integration is definitely something that helps because you get to set your own prices down the production chain. I haven't spend a lot of time lately playing, but will try to check if my factories are working in optimal circumstances next time.
Glad you're finding some more success, heavy micro is definitely a necessity for strong early growth imo. The good news is once you have a strong foothold you have more options of how to increase income. You can use subsidiaries, make stock acquisitions, buy out media firms, etc.
I usually start out small build out one product group load it of to a subsidiary which manages it further for me the micro is really what bothers me still in this game as I enjoy setting things up but keeping up with pricing is what takes so much effort and I can offload it now. Still I the difficulty rating not very representative to the actual difficulty.
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