Why do I have much less market share than competitor?

[xuxin1458]

I studied your game further and found that the amount of sales of refrigerators in each store are in the same range same compared between your company and your competitors, around $250,000 per month.

It seems that the numbers of retail stores that you and your competitors have play a big role in the market shares. I would suggest that you increase the number of stores selling the same product to match your competitors'. If it is not possible to do so in this game due to insufficient real estate space available, you may start a new game and do a test on this.

My suggestion is to increase the price elasticity of the Operations Director. Currently, the Operations Director's price is based on brand and quality. If someone participates in competition, the Operations Director will not reduce the price accordingly, but will maintain the price to a certain extent according to the evaluation. My suggestion is to reduce the flexibility of the price set by the Operations Director. For example, if the other party engages in a price war with me, my Operations Director will also lower the price until they occupy most of the market (without losing money)

[Way2co0l]

So I'm not sure if it's better to post under a similar topic or to start my own but I basically have the same question and I'm trying to make sense of it. I'm trying to capture market share with my banks and yet seem to be losing ground despite having higher service quality, branding, and better interest rates. I have just as many bank locations as any of my competitors do and feels like I should be able to gain ground in this fight rather than on the losing end where I've dropped from 14% share down to 10% in the last year or so. I know there's a fair bit of competition and I'm not expecting to dominate the area, but I do think it's fair to expect that I'd be competitive here. I'm really not sure why I'm not. Am I missing something obvious here?

Market Share.png (64.78 KiB) Viewed 3019 times

[David]

I loaded the latest savegame you provided and let it run without doing anything.

Its market share increased from 11% to 22%, as you can see in the attached screenshot.

I counted that you have 6 retail stores selling refrigerators and there are a total of 20 retail stores selling refrigerators.

6/20 = 30%.

It seems that the main reason why you are not getting 30% market share is because the competitor stores' customer traffic indices are higher than your stores'.

I also attached the save game after my run so that you can load and test it.

[bycomet]

I also attached the save game after my run so that you can load and test it.

Wierd. I put it into \My Games\Capitalism Lab\SAVE, but can't find it on the load game list. Is it because I have only base game while you have DLC?

But I agree with you that traffic index can lead to the difference in market share. In late game, the scarcest resource is high-traffic-index land, which makes it difficult to dominate all procuct markets.

[David]

Wierd. I put it into \My Games\Capitalism Lab\SAVE, but can't find it on the load game list. Is it because I have only base game while you have DLC?

Not sure why. Since I saved your game, it also doesn't have DLCs. You may just run the save game you provided to me until 2086 without doing anything and you will get the same result.

[Way2co0l]

Anyone know why my banks are struggling for market share? Do I need to start a new post for it?

[whiskiz]

looks like you had super low foot traffic score, i usually go 30 to 40 bare minimum and it usually raises as the neighbourhood gets developed, sometimes up to over 100 but very least 60+

could also be the competitor(s) specialty store demand bonus and/or more foot traffic score with many more stores

i always thought more stores does/should mean more market share, and there are TONS of stores selling that stuff lol, like 3 of your stores to competitors 11 in that image alone, and that's just that one page that appears to be highly scrollable. insane you're even trying to compete in that product market with it being so saturated haha

i thought if it gets to that point then you're supposed to move on to other markets, that the market is just too saturated like you sometimes find in real life, or force your competitors out by dropping price which is super unprofitable (for all involved) for awhile and probably no longer possible at that point - or boosting overall rating and gaining big market share asap so its not profitable enough for them to try and break in, in the first place. in future. one of the perks of building tall instead of wide

you have the best product by a bit, but in a couple mom and pop stores - while say competing against Apple in a big city with a store on every corner, no wonder they had alot more market share

[steveguo1984]

I did some of my own research on store placement , traffic index and pricing. Here may help you
1. Price can not be too high, regardless how good overall score your product is.
2. If your product have better score, and price is not too high, customers will ultimately go to your shop.
3. The difference of the score and traffic index will impact the speed of customer moving from existing store to another, and customer will of course prioritise the store have better traffic index.

So I suggest you try
1. lower your price, to 10-20 higher to the initial price ( the default value when you onboard the product and ensure you gave a 5-10 advantage of final score
2. build store at high traffic index area, don't need to add more store of current ones is not 100% busy.
3. Give it a bit time

[nosedigger]

A lot of good answers and tips, but I would like to try to give some in-depth information.

So, we have 3 factors: price, quality, brand that each product has. Although, every product has different composition of these factors for overall quality, not all of them are equal, especially when starting the new game.

1. Price - the easiest factor to manipulate, making it the most powerful tool at the start of each game. How can be impacted ? By lowering Transportation fee, by building initial production buildings close to the stores. Example:
One of my favorite and bulletproof strategies is to start with Livestock products, create farms one block away from Megastore and cut the transportation fee to several cents per dollar. With this fee I'm able to heavily undercut any Average price in the city, hence making my 30 quality, no brand, meat unavoidable
NOTE: If our price is too low or much higher, it will affect Average price too. So if Average price is 2$ and we are selling for 1$, in few months, Average price will come down, effectively lowering our Overall score

2. Quality - Training or Research are impacting this factor, and for both it takes time and money. However, we need production to actually have products to sell, so it's second important factor for me. As the quality goes up, the price can be increased, but note that also Average quality will increase.
NOTE: Farms are superior to Research/Factories, because their quality only goes up via training and not down, but Production quality depends on Technology, which is scaled by Leading one, and if not Research properly, can fall behind. Important thing to know is that Quality should follow Average quality in context, there is no point in spending too much on Research, if there is no AI competition for that product. Excess quality would only up city's Average, and we are competing against ourselves.

3. Brand/Marketing - this is the least important factor, since Quality and Low price from cutting transport fee, can be good competition. Again, there is no point in overdoing it, since if there is no AI competition, the level of 25 is more than enough. This is also made easy by Internet advertising in Digital DLC, where one unit in one city, will affect Brand in each city

With these explained, the only thing left is Traffic Index (TI). It is important for covering the City, as other players pointed, and stores in high TI will sell quicker.
I never placed stores under 30 TI, but recently I realized that I do not need to do this, and save money for better things.
So, the difference between store in 12, 30 and 60 TI, is not important if there is no competition for that product in the City. The only difference will be in how many months you will overtake the market. But if there is direct AI competition, then yes this is really important. Depending on your financial position and the goal, you can either set shops in already high TI zones, or create your own and develop them overtime.

Finally, the clear answer for anybody asking "Why is my market share so low?" or "Why is AI beating me in this market?" is - PRICE DUMPING.
Tactics used in real life mainly for breaking in new markets, that have already established competition.
How it's done ?
1. Be sure that you are making 100s of millions each year, and have money for a war
2. Buy a lot land in city with lowest average salary for large factories and warehouses.
3. Create 2 large factories for the product, 1 large warehouse and vertically integrate every semi-product that you can. Build them all next to each other, effectively lowering Transportation fee. Link factories in Warehouse and level all factory prices not to make profit - the Price will be in the stores
4. Create 1 store in each city, with 3 Purchasing Units each connected to 2 Sales. Do not intermix them! (intermixing might see like a good solution, but keeping them separate will grow them better with training) and max the Training
5. PRICE DUMP ACROSS THE WORLD - undercut AI or Average city price, whichever is lower, by a heavy margin.
6. Destroy the competition and set the prices back to normal

At one point, you and AI will be in a deadlock over market share, so keep prices low or keep undercutting until the enemy is gone, and you devour all of the market share.

Why is this costly, but effective tactics in Cap Lab ?
Even with Massive fortune, Very aggressive, Tech start, the AI companies will not branch out that much to other products. I agree as someone wrote above, the point in Capitalism is to constantly expand into new markets, since each of the existing ones will get saturated at some point, or end in Share wars, one thing that AI do not do too often. So by having stable share in dozen product markets, the base for any war is there, against AI that usually stick to few products.