Retail Management Course

Overview

THIS GUIDE IS STILL UNDER CONSTRUCTION !!Please bear with me whilst i add content, it may appear, get removed, edited, or otherwise do strange things in the process…It also means that game testing at times means incorrect information displayed until the guide is fully completedwe are all learning together…Note:This Guide is being created using data, screenshots from the single store mode only. So some aspects of the career mode are not talked about in this guide.

Store Setup…

When setting up your store the cities demographics is the first most vital piece of information you should consider, followed by what type of articles we wish to sell…

• “city size” is going to determine the amount of overall visitors
• “city wealth” is going to drastically increase the amount of rich people coming to your stores
• “fashion sense” will increase the amount of fashionable people but without changing the cities wealth ratio so drastically.

The game basically has three types of spenders, who have varying levels of focus when it comes to pricetags, so we can change the demographics accordingly.

example:

When selecting bare in mind, that any item with a luxury rating is harder to sell, and also is more suited to richer demographics. Likewise items without luxury ratings are going to sell to all groups easier because they are essentials by comparison.

Luxury Items ~ Based on current game content:

In my view if your store is going to sell every type of article in the game i would aim to have a 100% balanced demographic. Repeat clicking on the toggle buttons for each setting will make slight changes to the demographic until you reach a perfectly balanced group.

Each new store requires the following before it can be opened for business:

Delivery Units (vs) Storage Units:

Delivery units are used by the delivery guy each morning, Any articles ordered will be delivered to these units. The delivery company will not use (storage units) those are seperate used by your staff instead. After articles have been delivered, you unpack them into storage units.

From there… either yourself or the staff can move the unpacked articles from the storage units to the display units by simply clicking on them.

Display Units

There are a few types of stocking systems on the display units,

At first these things seem confusing, but the key piece of information is that when you drag articles into a units inventory slots it does NOT put them on display, instead it simply puts a autofil order in place…

As customers purchase items that you no longer wish to be automatically restocked you must remove the autofill manually, same applies once you have removed articles from racks…

Standard Type:

• Manage all Spots: allows you to toggle between auto refill/manual modes. Manual Mode will show the maximum inventory slots for the display unit, but again just means your manually placing refill orders of different types of articles as appose to all slots being told to stock the exact same article.
• Handle all Spots: displays the rails articles, so that they can be seen/purchased by customers. You can also do this by just walking upto the unit and selecting the fill article button as long as the slots have a placeholder for the autofill mechanic
• Remove Autofill: this removes the thumbnail of articles (not the article itself) in effect cancelling the order for your restocking staff to continue replenishing this unit
• Pack Article: removes all articles from the rack (does not remove the autofill instruction) again this can be also achieved by just walking upto the rack.

As previously mentioned there are a few other designs on display units, some have shelves, and are stocked via different looking buttons. they also add additional buttons allowing you to alter the shelf height but the above explanation is enough to eliminate most of the stuff that confuses most players, myself included, and several youtubers.

if display units have no auto fill placeholder then staff cant shelf-stack articles in stock…

Your staff will not stock new items into display units of their own back, you must place them in as autofill orders or manually stock them yourself. the coding on the auto-refill is what your staff use when working as restockers

Customer Expectations…

When a customer walks into your store, he/she will have expectations the most visual to you is the type of item they are looking for and its displayed above their heads the very moment they walk through the entrance…

click image to enlarge…

Apart from also belonging to a particular class in society, They will also have in mind:

• Budget
• QDL Rating (brand name)
• Service Expectancy

click image to enlarge…

Other things that you might not have expected like your opening hours. You can view when each type of person go shopping via the office computer in the “flow analysis” under the “customers” application.

And also the stores reputation…
(Which can be viewed via the UI under “stats/info” “city info” “customer reputation”

Your reputation is different for each section of society, so if your stock is mainly high ticket items aimed for the big spenders, you will have many complaints from the farming segment that they could not find what they was looking for.

You can view your customer reports via the office computer under the “customers” application.

Which basically means your articles attribute bars and price all have to be perfect in conjunction with their segment. these are as follows:

note: Always account for brands, so in the case of farmer notes, you want the cheapest quality brand with the cheapest pricetag.

View at any time from the office computer…

the minigame when interacting with customers plays a part in service expectancy, you are better at this than any staff you can hire, but fully trained sales staff will always be the best second best option at your disposal.

So if your engaged with a customer on a high luxury item the minigame requires more time to complete, because the bars have to be higher.

getting that happiness and need up real high (in conjunction with article attributes) is your customer service at play. But likewise trying to sell the same computer to a farmer is just not going to work out, The price focus for them means no amount of effort on the mini game will result in sale.

click image to enlarge…

to get the need high by default…

• use marketing to target both the celebrity and the item
• ensure your reputation for that sector is solid

basically you can increase a customers need for your product, or their happiness levels

You can pay attention to the comments being made by your client, for example if they say something like “not in a million years” you can at this stage opt to click every article you sell in order and see if that changes (but this takes far too much time) so with regards to this comment end the conversation, take a gamble by all means whack up the happy rating a tad,

but dont hold any hope… better just end it !!

likewise if it says “that sounds interesting”, add some need, and then make em happier. interesting is not i really need that.

perhaps it already says “i really need that” then forget putting any effort into need, because they already need/want it, so just up the happy ratings..

the higher both need/happiness bars are the more chance of a sale being made, this does NOT mean you will make a sale, just increases the chances of it happening. because of all the other factors like brands, QDL Ratings, Demographics, etc

but it appears the lower classes need less time spent on this minigame… so…

This is still a work in progress but to save time when engaged with customers in the minigame the markers show how high you need the bars, but please be advised this takes a lot of testing and im always watching it…

right now its just a reference to get you started, and…
is divided between the 3types of spenders:

you call tell which segment a customers sits in at the top of the minigame window to help you decide better how much effort to place into the game during a sale.

Quality, Fashion & Luxury…

In the office there is a whiteboard showing the representation of these attributes, alongside a overall chart showing the wealth and needs of the different classes of people within the city…

click image to enlarge…

The richer the person the higher the green bar on articles has to be, and the better the brand name

The more fashion conscious requires higher blue bars

This rating shows how “needed” or how “luxurious” items are. However brand name determines the difference. in otherwords high purple bar means “exclusive/luxury item”

Each game generated has a number of citizens, all with different product requirements and budgets, we can view them all via the “City Information” and looking at the following chart

click image to enlarge…

In our example store (we are only selling computers) which means we are only offering computers, peripherals and monitors. There are other items too like VRkits, but they all fall under the above.

But they are all luxury based products, because people need food/clothing more than computers making them harder to sell to most groups.

Example: (based on default currency)
The price range for just “computers” is 1,050.00-4,670.00
so i have come up with more precise price ranges for “low” “medium” and “high” wages…

so lets throw all this information into a new chart…

1. Firstly lets understand properly what the above chart now shows, its shows my WIP figures for each type of earner (low,med,high) my guess at their min/max budgets.
2. It also shows how high the blue/green bars have to be for each type of person. The darker the colour coded box around them, the higher the products rating bars have to be…
3. and it also shows a purple shape working on the assumption richer/fashionable people care more about exclusive rare items

and we can check that, on the office computer under “customers” & “city analysis” followed by selecting Celebrity(orange).

click image to enlarge…

From this we can see they care not about what it costs them, they demand both quality/fashion (green/blue bars) but they also demand excellent service. Service basically means all the conditions have to be met…

This includes brand names:
The green bar on your products (quality) applies to the product quality, and brand name its stands to reason that its obvious that the higher the green bar the better the quality of the brand

that is how you decipher what brand names belong to each type of spender…

Every category of product will have various brand names / vendors. it will mostly run alongside the height of the green bar and since celebritys demand higher green bars, you will probably naturally select the correct brand name.

Because obviously the rule of thumb is richer=higher green bars !!
higher green bars = more quality brands…