I've basically stopped caring much about my store, as big as I've improved it to. I sell things so fast on B2B that it's not even funny. Yes, you can sell 4x as fast in your market by dropping your price 50%. You can also sell almost instantly in B2B, almost any quantity of almost any good, by dropping your price 10%.
So, what you're saying is that stores are generally useless when there is such a high demand for products and raw materials on the B2B market, and that people should drop their prices by around 10-50% to benefit from this? Does this include low-quality goods or is it just high quality goods?
Because if low-quality goods are included I probably could sell the q10 cocoa beans and q7 cocoa powder and make some money, especially since no one is selling cocoa powder.
See, here's the thing. You know all the advice we give to newbies? "Fill up EVERY slot in your store, even if you have to buy things at just a little under their sale price to do it"? The result of this advice is that the world's newbies are like one big, huge, gigantic store, ready to hoover up
all the things. All together they can move a massive volume, way more than you can, so they are willing to accept not-very-low prices. If there's something you can make that a newbie might sell (not airplanes), isn't on B2B, and it isn't importable, find a price that you think a newbie would buy it for. Find a price that YOU would buy it for, if you were a newbie. They'll take it off your hands. The only thing you have to worry about is being undercut...that is very dangerous when there's nothing else of that item on the B2B market, because there is no comparison point and B2B prices are not always logical. So I advise aiming low at first and working your way up with smallish quantities, until people start undercutting you. They will eventually sell out, people will buy your junk, and then you can aim a little lower than the guy who stole your buyers...Eh. Anyway, the market is all about volume, just make sure you always sell for lower than average store price, eyeball-adjusted for quality. If you want to play the volume game, especially with low qual products, your target audience is newbies who will sell it on the spot instead of producing with it.
Smart players with lots of money to burn will go for high-qual ingredients that are early in the supply chain, so if your stuff is low qual, you can price for newbies all up and down the chain. Also, q5 is not all that bad for a newbie; they won't be making pies with your pumpkins so they don't care so much.
Zero quality will certainly get you buyers, as long as you price it low. (Newbies can sometimes overestimate the importance of quality, so Q0 looks awful to them. They only have the import market to go off of.) Higher quality is a great way to distinguish yourself; if someone else is selling Q0 for ten bucks, and you can sell Q10 for ten bucks, guess who gets the sales? Prices can be really wild sometimes, too... for example, I sell my vanilla extract for like $95 (I think it goes for like $110 on the market? Maybe I'm misremembering), and there's some guys who are selling higher-Q for like $140. Their products are just sitting there, not moving. Mine is always eaten up within 8 hours, no matter how much I sell...but then, I price it so that I think I can sell it sometime in 8 hours. I could lower it to sell within five minutes if I wanted. Raising it by very much more might never get me a sale, because someone could perpetually undercut me. (Finding someone with an absurdly high price, and aiming a little bit under them, is also a good way to make people think you are cheaper than you are~)
But yeah. Stores are good for stuff that you can't move regularly on the B2B market. If you can't win a price war, put it in your store. But like...if I put a million vanilla extract for half-price in my store, it would move pretty quick, but it's still a million units. It would take weeks! If I put a million units of vanilla extract for half-price on B2B, seriously everyone with a grocery store or an ice cream factory or whatever would dogpile it in a snap, and then they would each individually put it up for 90% of average price in their store, where it would sell over the course of a few days...because the collective newbie stores in the world can move a Really Big Volume. They get their profit, and I get my money right this instant, plant a larger farm, rinse repeat.
