Which reminds me, and this is the actual last thing before I go to bed. Is it general consensus is that if there is a surplus of a certain product you are trying to move off the shelves that you should either lower the prices or have a sale? Because I'm seeing if that works for my farmer's market with maybe ten of my products that weren't selling too well by reducing the prices by 10%.
I would ask this question first: why are you trying to move the product off the shelves? Do you need an influx in capital?
Dropping your price by 10% (assuming everything else stays constant) will cause a 23.457% increase in sales.
Having said that, there is a most-profit-per-tick equilibrium. It is twice the cost of the product to buy/produce. Whenever you deviate from that, you cut into your profits per tick. I can't think of a good reason to ever charge *less* than twice the cost of a good... I guess if you wanted to flood the market with the good to reduce the profit of others. But the reason you'd charge *more* than twice the cost of the good would be when your production can't keep up with your sales.
When you're in that latter case, where you're making a product or buying from the B2B marketplace (and it's a product with not effectively-infinite availability), you have the most choices to make about price point, but the fundamental rule of "minimum 2x cost" still holds.
I tried charging 2x the cost, but my profits weren't increasing fast enough. Nothing was selling for the most part, save for maybe a case of apples or a case of bacon. I then tried charging b+2q%, where b is the base price of an item and q is the quality of the item itself. That worked a little better, but for whatever reason it just wasn't cutting it in most cases. Some products were selling too fast, while other products were selling too slow.
That's when I decided to go with what I normally do with my play-style for when I play a merchant and under-cut everyone else by selling my wares at below the average price. I'm now making around $30,000 to $60,000 a tick on average, and hit $2,000,000 this morning when I woke up and checked my balances and such. I think that's pretty good, to be honest.
Either way, I'm having fun, and that's usually why I play games. I have fun picking what to produce. I have fun picking what to research. I even have fun spending a couple hours or so stocking my farmer's market. And I'm usually pretty happy when someone buys my excess cocoa beans on the B2B market.
I just put up a hundred thousand of them for $2.50 each, so I'm going to see if that works. If that's the case then I should be able to build that second agricultural research and development center and start researching sugar cane. I want to make my own sugar for when I make those chocolate truffles later.
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Topic: Economies of Scale *Free Browser Game* (Read 323996 times)