Little buisiness and hobbies - a bit disappointed

Ziafar​, how have you priced your items for sale at your shop? When my sim first opened her Cafe, Pottery & Gym shop, I had set it so people paid to enter, but had set the price for the pottery at a 50% markup. While she was getting customers through the door, that majority of them only wanted to use the gym equipment, so actual pottery sales was really low. Once I set the markup to the lowest point, then I started actually selling lots of pottery, along with having many repeat customers for the gym.  

My only issue with B&H is that you can't stock the shelves with a 'master object', so that once an item sells, it is automatically replaced. (Yeah, I would much rather my sim could be lazy that way.) 🙃

Unfortunately, I'm more than a little disappointed with Business & Hobbies.😤  It's totally broken for me.😭      I don't have a super advance computer, just a basic Acer with Windows 11 Desktop PC.  Also, I only play vanilla.

I’m playing a sweet shop at the moment and in the last couple of sim days it’s just taken off.  It’s the Candy Labs shop that I think came with the pack.  I’ve got a coffee bar as well as counters selling lollipops etc, but to start with customers just bought stuff from the coffee bar and weren’t interested in the actual sweets. That was pretty disappointing — especially when all the food started to go off and I had to throw it away! I didn’t make much money!

So I decided to sell off at clearance price all the sweets that had about a day left before going off. Suddenly all the customers got interested in the sweets! I sold almost everything, and for the first time made more money from selling sweets than from selling items from the coffee bar! I then made more sweets and sold them cheaply too, and got more sales and more happy customers — which meant my business started to get a better reputation, which meant more people came, and I could gradually increase my prices and still sell plenty of sweets. I hired my first employee today. I couldn’t afford it before, but now I can and I really need the extra help because one sim can’t handle everything alone any more, and there is no shortage of customers! And I haven’t even thought yet about offering classes or mentoring etc.

Thank you to all of you for your feedback.😊

I see that I am not alone in my disappointment.  But you also give me a few ideas.

I do not have the B&H pack;  I do know in my game that using the signs to increase customers and using social lot traits helps.  I use the party place trait with businesses.  For me it does help with successful interations in all the businesses I have created.   All of my sims that own a buisness also have a "home" lot but they all can live at the "business" lot they own as well.  

Yeah, I've had the same sort of experience and it is disappointing. I thought maybe I was doing something wrong with the customers hardly buying any products...

How I miss the glorious days of TS2 OFB, which was perfect for me in every way. Having the cashier 'skill', customers queueing at the till to buy (and dropping their shopping bags in frustration at the long wait lol), restocking and sales 'skills'. It was so awesome. I may have to reinstall that game, just to enjoy a home business.

So far I've run a Tattoo Parlour and an art shop selling paintings and pottery, a flower shop and a farm store. I'm just developing a sweets and cake store at the moment.

The Tattoo Parlour has a residence attached where my Sim actually lives and the others have apartments or private offices where my Sims stay over when working. I spent a good while running the Tattoo Parlour and found it worked well. It has a coffee bar with hired staff and a cleaner. My Sim is the only one that is doing the tattoos. I haven't run any classes so far in any of them. My biggest issue has been staff not doing what they should do, especially the cleaner. My Sim always ends up doing the washing up somehow and clearing up food. It gets a lot of traffic and it's been very successful. Without the coffee bar it was just Sims all queued up indoors and outdoors not doing much, it needed that second activity because there was nothing else to do there and it's been a good earner too.

Visiting the Small Business lots as a customer I'm seeing plenty of other customers. I've set some of the lot activities as social and I haven't limited the age range of targeted customers. I've also set the lot traits as Convivial to create a good sociable atmosphere.