Pricing strategies comparison + some ideas

[Aldury]

I have a lot to write about, so let's start from the beginning, shall we?

Introduction

I am operating V0.1.2.4 of the game.
I decided I wanted to settle (just for my personal knowledge and peace of mind) how pricing affects revenue and customer count. I saw that Dragonfly made a guide about this topic and I consider that as an inspiration. (His guide here:

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https://steamcommunity.com/app/2670630/discussions/0/4289188948006243424/).

Building on his guide I also wanted to put numbers on the variability that I was feeling regarding the income and whether or not the pricing had anything to do with it. Since now the client count is affected by the store level I do believe that doing this test on my 56 store level game would not be representative since I would level up during the 15 days testing which would affect customer count and therefore income.
So I deleted my old game with a lot of suffering.
I started 15 new games and tested the results of 3 strategies: +10% market price, market price, -10% market price. Got results for each strategy by playing 5 first days.
And so, I made a spreadsheet (I used Google spreadsheets since it’s free).

Procedure

(in case anyone wanted to replicate)

• DISCLAIMER: as of V0.1.2.4 starting a new game DELETES THE PREVIOUS ONE. So if you have a previous game and don’t want to lose it STOP RIGHT HERE.
  
• Start new game.
  
• Get $750 loan.
  
• Buy 24 units (not boxes, but units) of each good to be sure that no product is depleted by the end of the day.
  
• A 10 product delivery and a 4 product delivery should be enough. Their costs are considered in the “expenses” tab at the end of the day.
  
• Do yourself a favor and learn how to code some simple spreadsheet formulas like the ones I used. e.g. type in a cell a product’s market price and in the next type “=Round(-cell with market price-*1,1;1) That way you would obtain the extra 10% added to the market price and this number will be rounded (up or down, that depends on whether the next decimal is above or over 5) on the first decimal. So to say, the cereal Chokipic market price is $5.98 and I typed it on cell F5, so now with the formula I just gave you would be as follow =Round(F5*1,1;1) and you should obtain a final price of $6.60. Once you have this formula, type in the rest of the market prices and just drag the cell with your formula to be applied to the other market prices automatically. YOU. ARE. VERY. WELCOME.
  
• Play the game for the first day.
  
• Tip: in order to not waste any customers, you need to wait a little past 9pm because of the way the customer spawns works in the game. After 9 pm won’t spawn new customers BUT customers that spawned before 9pm and are heading to your store will be lost if you don’t wait for them to arrive. So wait like 20-30 s. after 9pm so you don’t miss on those late night buyers.
  
• Get to the end of the day screen and type the data obtained wherever you want.
  
• Exit the game.
  
• Start a new game.
  
• Repeat for X days with each pricing strategy.

I observed that the starting cost is the same in all day 1 (which made my life a lot easier tbh)

Results

I hope you understand a little of Spanish because, as I said, this spreadsheet was meant for personal use when I started (so I obviously wrote it in my mother tongue). You may argue that I could just translate it, literally would take me 30s. and here we have two possible answers on why I don’t do it: a) I am too lazy and b) this may encourage some of you to learn some Spanish. Pick any, you can’t go wrong on this one.

So, here is the data:

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https://imgur.com/tIxIkbG

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https://imgur.com/tIxIkbG

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https://imgur.com/0wmeIcM

Discussion

So, with results in sight, we can affirm that the strategy on pricing won’t affect the customer count nor the store points generated, but it will affect the income generated by sales and the amount of money each client will spend in our store.
You can also observe that the variability of the game is really high, ranging from $262,3 to $181,2 income with the same setting, prices and store level…

Conclusion

So guys, we can say that we need to get that +10% or we will be missing a fair amount of money. Sure, that will mean that some people will find our products too expensive and even though that happened, look at the numbers, it is totally worth it. As Dragonfly concluded in his report, a 10% extra is the best strategy and 20% would be too much (I take his word there as I did not make any test with that pricing).

Limitations

My test is limited by the little amount of customers in that particular stage of the game. Higher customer counts would give more reliable data, but as I mentioned before, level upgrades will also alter the results so, I don’t have a better test framework to develop a theory than this one at the very day 1.

Ideas and suggestions for our beloved developer

• An on/off button for workers, especially restockers. I find it a little strange having to dismiss restockers every time I want to do changes on shelves since these M.F. would continuously replenish the s**t out everything if I am not fast enough to do the changes I want to do. So please add the option “Take a break bro”, so they don’t work MORE than we need them to.
  
• A level system for employees so they could work faster or restock 2 boxes at a time
  
• A more detailed economics of the game. Maybe add a tablet (?) in which we can access all the options we already got on the PC anywhere and more detailed.
  
• Sales! 2nd unit at 75% price! 3x2 in all pasta! Anything that would attract more customers like IRL.
  
• A record of previous days data (income, expenses etc.) I am a little tired of having to take screenshots to know if today was better or worse than yesterday.
  
• Delivery zone and delivery guys. PLEASE. ASAP. AGAIN PLEASE.
  
• Deliveries above the 10 product count.
  
• Marketing campaigns to increase customer count.
  
• Expansion opportunities, more stores, online store, competitors (and possibility to buy their stores to get rid of them). I would love to see that guy with 50 bucks in his pocket create a f**cking empire in several cities and countries.
  
• Self-service checkouts
  
• More detailed information about the topics covered in this post. Whether the price affects the customer count or the average money that the customer will spend.
  
• Keep up the good job. You made a game that exceeded all my expectations given the topic it is about and I think that a good portion of your public feel that way. You have a lot of room for improvement. Listen to the community, we are many, but amongst all these comments there are always some good ideas.