Promotion / # Customers / Reputation?

[Mister Jofel]

Please help me if my understanding is correct, because that means I don't have to create stores that can fulfill thier maximum capacity, but rather look at the maximum customers it will actually serve (less employees and furniture for max profit). (started thinking about it when doing the lawyer part of the story mode)

From what I understand, the maximum number of customers you get is currently dependent on your Promotion % which consists out of:

• Traffic number (seems to be a fixed percentage)
  
• Marketing number (adds x% to your traffic number) Meaning if your traffic is 20% and marketing number is 100%, your promotion score will be 40%

As can be seen in the BizMan Application

This promotion score is then used in combination with your stores maximum capacity. Using the example above 20% traffic with no marketing means 3 customers max per hour. Adding the 100% marketing will make your store get 6 customers max per hour.
Depending of the day of the week and hour, there is a penalty to the max customers. for example on a Monday between 1 and 5 am you get like only 15% of your max customers.

The staff friendliness, interior of your shop, pricing etc. (customer satisfaction) currently has no effect at all on your max # of customers. It does help with your sales figures however, meaning happy customers are more likely to buy the things your offer in your store (based on the market demand). Meaning the customers you get are actually spending their money.

Does this sound about right? :)

If so, wouldn't it be a good idea to add 'Reputation' to the Promotion score of your shop? That way over time your shop will not only attract people passing by, but also returning loyal customers. The promotion calculation would then be (traffic+reputation)*(1+Marketing %) and with a very good reputation don't even require marketing anymore (besides the normal mouth to mouth). This would make it possible to start up in a very bad location, but still be very successful shop overtime.
Reputation could be added like with a max of 1% per week based on your customer satisfaction.

[Gottkaiser Synter.exe]

That is pretty much how it works and also a good idea at the end

[Marcondy]

+1 on the reputation idea!

[RoofCat]

Also Reputation - hard to gain, easy to lose
Just leaving it here :)

As for the business - check Market insight. You won't sell what isn't popular or on every corner. Also there is no need to create 10 different shops - you can take the best from quite a few and put them together. My latest shop sells cheap and expensive Gifts, expensive Flowers and I just added cheap Jewelry out of curiosity, but it apparently requires top quality cashier and added only 800 a day with 70% cashier one shift. Shop type seemingly doesn't matter much and can be switched any time in Settings.
So around 3 products are optimal. Because the money customers spend is capped anyway by staff and store quality. Not like hard cap, more like rising probability. Just pick the right products. With good margin and popular in district at the time. Change, as market changes every few weeks.

Probably district "demographics" are involved as well. Map setups. Upper class % and stuff.