It's been an year and you guys still haven't improve it.
Why do I have to travel to the seller's city to buy something? It seemed extremely redundant! Why can't I just buy something straight out of the shelf?
Everytime I tried to buy something, it's either already sold or some random llama messed it up, this was deeply frustrating one year ago and it is even worse now.
Come on, EA, hire some real programmers.
Well they already just did introduced a new way to get items, and that's speed-up tokens. You'll be able to produce commercial items 2/4/12x faster than usual. You can't get these speed-up tokens until you're at least level 24 though.
There are some items which are supposed to be harder to get, such as storage/land expansion. Tips for getting these: Have lots of friends, especially higher level like myself (all my land/storage is maxed). Quite often i'm adding those to my trade depot and I don't advertise until i'm full (plenty of time for friends to visit and buy first).
You're not supposed to be able to expand so fast, but ultimately it's best to concentrate on storage expansion first.
The biggest tip I can give you for shopping on GTHQ: use a fast device, like an iPhone6 or iPad Air2. The load time is so much faster than old devices, so you have a much higher chance of getting items before others do.
You can also connect to facebook and see more friends from there too.
For GameCenter, you load the app from the iPad and add the ID.
There's a thread on this forum, I believe most of them are GameCenter. I would probably start from the last page (most active) and work back.
http://answers.ea.com/t5/SimCity-BuildIt-General/Looking-for-neighbours/td-p/4212875
I also added more people who were advertising from the Facebook page:
