Overview
This guide will help you fix the three problems of : Not enough: Goods, Buyers, Customers. It will first explain to you why and how these problems start and develop as well as what you need to do to fix them and then prevent them from happening again. There are several solution and also several causes of the problem involving many game mechanics ranging from traffic, zoning, import/export and district polices.
Not enough… problem explanation
This must be the most searched topic about cities skylines after traffic. And even after so many years, it is still giving headaches to mayors of virtual cities. I am writing about:
1. Not enough Goods to sell,
2. Not enough Buyers for products, and
3. Not enough Customers
I am going to write this out, but there will be a video attached, how I prevent this problem in my cities and how you can fix this problem, and all the related problems coming from it, like truck traffic, not enough buyers for goods, building abandonment and so on.
All three have the same root cause, which is Goods that Commercial buildings sell, Generic Industry makes and which can be imported from the region. Furthermore, core of the problem is the industry and goods. And the fact that the game developers never explained or fixed the overlays to give players the full picture of how industry works to create and deliver it’s goods. Which leads players to make cities that have no industry producing goods, or they do, but they kick the industry to far corners of the map because of the pollution. Which prevents delivery of goods on time to commercial buildings.
Note 1. You can import Goods form the region, but it will always lead to the Not enough Goods problem eventually. You can prolong the onset of this problem with cargo trains and ships but traffic jams will be your eternal companion who will keep messing up your delivery schedules.
To make things more confusing the Generic industry, the one that produces Goods, will give you a warning popup that names: products, while that is what it uses to make Goods. It doesn’t actually have a problem with products because it sells Goods and not products, and it has a lack of buyers, which are the buildings in the Commercial zones which sell Goods to Cims.
Video explanation, for text explanation keep on reading, there is a secondary problem explanation and solution bellow.
Solving the causes of these problems
Trucks take goods from generic industry or import it from the region, marked as pink in the outside connections overview, to commercial buildings which then sell these goods. If commercial buildings not get enough goods, they give the “Not enough goods to sell” warning. If commercial buildings don’t get the goods in a fixed amount of time, after this warning they go out of business and abandon the building. How to fix this problem? Get the goods to the commercial buildings by trucks. From the a generic industry building, highway, train station or harbor. Problem solved, right? Usually not. Why?
You make a cargo train station, hundreds of trucks keep spawning at it, you make a harbor, same thing happens, your highways are packed full of pink trucks bringing goods to your city. You traffic grinds to a halt, trucks start to despawn and commercial buildings don’t get their goods. The problem just keeps getting worse. Why? Because you made a city that doesn’t produce it’s own goods. It is forced to import them. And that creates lots and lots of extra traffic. Or, you made a city that does produce goods, but in industry districts that are far removed from commercial buildings so you can prevent pollution from poisoning your citizens, in residential zones, that live close to your commercial zones. This just crates more problems with traffic and ends with “Not enough goods to sell”. It’s not that they aren’t made, the goods, it’s that they can’t get to where they are needed.
You first have to understand the industry production chain, which is actually problematic because the developers forgot, for years now, to add RAW items, to the overlay. You can see them in the ground, but not in the all important import / export overlay. Trucks carry raw ore, oil, wood etc. But the overplay shows just the PRODUCTS and GOODS. Not the RAW items. Confusing players who have product producing oil, forestry etc. industries in their cities. What you need to know is that buildings that extract ore, oil, cut down trees, also produce trucks, but those trucks are not separate, but fall under the products category of the overlay. But. these are not products that go into generic industry to be made into goods. They go into product specific specialized industry buildings to be made into products, because they are RAW items. Then those buildings send out trucks with actual products towards generic industry buildings that produce the actual goods, which are then sent out, from these generic industry buildings, in trucks, to commercial buildings.
In cities that have this full chain, traffic happens inside the city, and inside the industry zones, with only the goods transported to commercial zones. Any RAW items, resources you may call them, that are missing are imported from the region by highway, train or boat but ultimately transported by trucks. Which creates addition traffic.
Traffic, traffic, traffic. It always comes back to traffic. So how do you actually make a city that doesn’t buckle under this traffic strain from trucks transporting Raw items, products and goods? You incorporate industry and commercial zones into your residential zones. Yes, there is sound pollution, yes, there is ground pollution, but you can mitigate both by offices, trees, and layered zoning.
Only by building producers and users of goods, right next to each other, do you eliminate lengthy trucks rides of your goods. This reduces traffic volume, while making sure that commercial buildings are getting their goods on time. If you also produce oil, ore, forest etc. products locally you additionally reduce traffic coming in from the region and trains and the boats. And if you even have RAW items, resource, production/extraction locally, you reduce the traffic from trucks even more, clearing the streets and highways of massive numbers of trucks that take very long rides.
To summarize, no industry means no goods produces locally. Importing creates traffic, high traffic slows everything down, making commercial buildings lack goods to sell, which makes them go out of business. Producing the whole chain locally, RAW>PRODUCT>GOODS reduces traffic. Setting up generic industry close to commercial buildings reduces travel time for trucks transporting goods, preventing commercial buildings from not having enough goods to sell.
My other guides if you are interested:
[link]
Temporary fast solution using district policies
You can fix all three problems, and increase your profits, by using two district policies. First is Big Business Benefactor which makes Commercial buildings sell more goods, solves the Not enough Buyers for products part of the problem and increases tax profits form C zones, while the Industrial Space Planing makes I zones make a lot more goods(double amounts) for sale to C zones, which solves the Not enough Goods part of the problem and also increases tax profits, just from I zones.
Note 2. Using these two district policies requires you to wait a while for ingame time to take it’s course and the numbers for Goods to change. Don’t ever do it city wide, or on many districts at the same time. Change one district which has lot’s of I or C buildings and then wait and watch the taxes page and outside connection overview pie charts for imports and exports.
Both district policies spend a certain amount of money for each building under their effect but their increased profits more then make up for this cost.
Video explanation:
Note 3. It doesn’t mater to the C zones which I zones create double the amount of Goods in your city. They don’t even have to be close to each other. As long as you produce more Goods locally, the city wide supply of goods will be available to C zones which will stop giving warnings about Not enough goods to sell.
Now finally, the most confusing part of the problem, Not enough Customers poup. It would make sense that the cause of the problem is not enough Cims, customers, visiting the C zone building, but that is just a manifestation of the not enough goods problem. You will almost never see, unless half of your city died, the Not enough Customers poup in C zone building because there is an actual lack of Cims to shop. The real problem is the fact that the new C zone buildings aren’t supplied by Goods right after they are built. Which is when you mostly see this popup.
This is why when you use the two previously mentioned district policies C zone buildings will get their goods faster and you will see fewer Not enough Customers poups. In other words, if you cities population is alive and well, you don’t have to do anything about this warning popup. It goes away, once Goods arrive.
Note 4. If you overdo it with too many I zones under Industrial Space Planing you will be right back where you started with the Not enough Buyers for products warning popup.
Thank you for reading or watching, I hope I was clear and to the point, and that this will help you in making great cities.